Skip to main content

What could one expect to pay to have an acoustic CD mastered, lets say 14 tunes, guitar, mandolin and vocals plus bass which would be all sampled sounds.

Topic Tags

Comments

Thomas W. Bethel Mon, 12/15/2003 - 03:39

It all depends on where you go, the rates of the mastering house and how well your songs are recorded.

Most mastering we do takes about .5 to .75 hours per song so multiply .5 times 14 songs and you get 7 hours times the normal hourly rate of our facility and you get your estimate (+/- one hour).

I am assuming that your songs are well recorded and that the mastering engineer will not have to spend a lot of time fixing problems.

Mastering someones songs is very variable. I have done mastering sessions where I had to do very little and 10 songs took about two hours or less. I have also had to do mastering of really bad recordings where the artist did not want to go back and rerecord or remix the songs and it took about 10 hour.

Best bet is to take your stuff to a mastering house and talk to the mastering engineer. We provide a 30 minute window for free at the beginning of the session so we can listen to the music and give a more informed estimate of the time it will take. Without really listening to your material it is hard to give an estimate.

Hope this helps.