Why Book a Listening Session Before Mastering Your New Project

A listening session with your mastering engineer before mastering is a critical step in finishing your project. You can address potential sonic concerns and make sure you and your engineer are on the same creative wavelength. You are welcome to attend your listening session. You and your engineer will listen to your mixes on a calibrated monitor system in an acoustically-tuned room before you decide the mixing is completed. This is an excellent opportunity to reality-check your mixes in a new sonic environment. It’s also a chance to discuss the aesthetics of your project and learn about our workflow.

Airshow’s engineers will listen to the mixes in their studio for such things as bottom end, brightness, vocal, and panning. They have listened to thousands of tracks in their studios and are keenly aware of details that can make the difference between an ordinary and a superlative mix.

Dominick Maita

If you are in the midst of the mixing process, furnish your most complete songs. Bring an audio CD, WAV, or AIFF files of the candidate final mixes. MP3s, AACs, or other formats that have data (lossy) compression are not suitable.

You are welcome to bring a CD or two of music you like to illustrate your creative direction and sound preference, so make sure it’s something comparable in genre and instrumentation.

Even if you won’t be attending your mastering session, and we’ll be mastering from afar, a listening session is still valuable – and is as convenient as uploading tracks to our server. Your Airshow engineer will confer with you by email or phone to be sure you get the benefit of the listening session.

We offer listening sessions free to Airshow clients.