Purple Mastering

Recent clients : Jerry Joseph, Valerie Day, Tom Grant, Dirty Martini, menomena, Eric Mathews, Little Sue, Rose City Kings

We built a brand new room with super isolated walls, sand filled oak floors, & innovative acoustic treatments.
Its the sweetest mastering & listening room in the northwest!

Hear how good you could sound thru an $11000 GML Mastering Equalizer!...... & $12000 of Manley Tube Pultec Mastering EQ's. In the hands of a good mastering engineer these make an audible difference. It's how we paint with sound.

Everyone loves the musical timbre & accurate sound of the new room. Thanks to extensive trapping & diffusion hidden in the walls, there are no bass buildups & the imaging is great. Its natural wood tones & purple accents make for a comfortable environment to master your album. What sets us apart is we have built an accurate & musical LISTENING environment. And experience from Mastering hundreds of albums,

"It sounds just like it sounded when I brought it in- only better!" 

Often by the time you get done mixing your project you may have listened to it to the point of ear fatigue. It makes sense to enlist a fresh set of highly trained ears in a new environment to evaluate & correct things that you might have overlooked. Mastering should be a part of your musical process. It is the final step in the creative process.

Good mastering can take your album to the next level.

Mastering is the critical step between the final mixes & mass duplication. Equalization & compression are applied to make the music sound bigger, fatter, richer, & smoother, more polished & more COMPETETIVE.

We enhance timbre, smooth out the dynamics from song to song, sequence tracks in your order with proper spacing, fix fades, match song to song levels, maximize loudness, noise shape, & do some additional magic to make your music punchier, clearer and "ready for the world". We send you out with Production Master CD's for you to evaluate at home.

We are happy to do a free evaluation of your master tape.

Our mastering suite is typically booked on an hourly basis and requires advance reservations. Please contact for details, a listen, or information. 503-228-2222

We know the "Zen" of mastering.

Purple Mastering with Engineer included: $100/hour
Master INFO Form (to Fill Out & send with your files)
Some our engineers will do the hourly rate only . You should pick one of the fine upstanding Americans listed below & call them. Addtional or client changes & modifications to packages are quoted at hourly rate.

Try one of our packages:

Band on a Budget Mastering : $299 Flat rate

Purple Mastering Suite
We fix overall tonal balance with sweet sounding Analog & Tube Equalizers
We Remove glitches
Digitally Fade In, Fade Out
Level match from song to song
Sequence selections in any order
Expert Mastering Engineer Included
SuperProof Master Quality CD included.
40 minute maximum album runtime for this package

You can be here attending in Purple, or just drop a CD by & we'll master on our own, or send in files from anywhere on the planet via ftp on our server. We did mastering for a band in Italy. It's easy. Just send it.

We make it sound better. Tighter. Warmer . Call us. 503-228-2222

Master INFO Form (to Fill Out & send with your files)

Indie Band Mastering : $499 Flat rate

Purple Mastering Suite
We add UPC & ISRC codes if needed
We add CD TEXT for each track
We add clarity.
We correct the tonal balance from song to song
with sweet Analog & Tube Equalizers.
We Remove glitches
We Digitally Fade In, Fade Out
Level match from song to song
Sequence selections in any order
Maximum loudness processing if you want a hot CD
Versatile sounding digital & analog dynamic limiters applied.
Expert Mastering Engineer Included & typically takes 4 to 6 hours per album
SuperProof Master CD included.

You can be here attending in Purple, or just drop a CD by & we'll master on our own, or send in files from anywhere on the planet via ftp on our server. We did mastering for a band in Italy. It's easy. Just send it.

We make it sound better. Tighter. Warmer . Balanced. Call us 503-228-2222

Master INFO Form (to Fill Out & send with your files)

The Works Mastering: $799 Flat Rate

Purple Mastering Suite
We add UPC & ISRC codes if needed
We add CD text for each track
We add clarity.
We correct the tonal balance with sweet Digital & Analog & Tube Equalizers.
We Remove glitches .
Digitally Fade In, Fade Out
Level match from song to song
Sequence selections in any order
Versatile sounding digital & analog dynamic limiters applied- Maximum loudness if you want a hot CD We add punch! Or keep it delicate !
Expert Mastering Engineer Included & typically takes 6 to 8 hours per album
SuperProof Master CD included

You can be here attending in Purple, or just drop a CD by & we'll master on our own, or send in files from anywhere on the planet via ftp on our server. We did mastering for a band in Italy. It's easy. Just send it.

We make it sound better. Tighter. Warmer . Balanced.
Gone over with a fine tooth comb. Call us 503-228-2222

Master INFO Form (to Fill Out & send with your files)

Recording an album? Call for friendly advice. Or Email us!
503-228-2222

We are the most experienced Mastering Lab in the Northwest, over 15 years makin' records. We have mastered hundreds of albums in every conceivable genre!

Choose from our experienced Mastering Engineers to fit your style:

Rick McMillen
Rick's accepting clients again after taking the year off.
Rick built the mastering room & its acoustics. He is the owner of SuperDigital. He has engineered albums from smooth jazz king Kenny G to punks Poison Idea. Experienced in London, NYC, & LA studios, Locally he has mixed or mastered music for , F loater, James Angell, Valerie Day & Tom Grant,, megastars The Dandy Warhols, The Hell Yeahs, Michael Allen Harrison, Roger Sause (Shock, Michael w Smith,Kenny G). & Muddy Award Winners the Rose City Kings .He built SuperDigital to be a facility that reflects his interest & passion for music & sound.

Erik Ames
Erik knows our system inside & out having worked here for over 10 yearsl. Erik has mastered Hip hop, & pop recently for
Black Tide -KUFO • My Life in Black and White -KUFO • The Dry County Crooks • The Subterrenean Howl
• Depth Charger • Whiskey Puppy • Play>
•Peer Pressure Productions, Hard Times Records, MajrD, Majestyk, Tripleswift, Battleship, Weaklings, Dee Arthur, Hog Whitman, Fred Vogel, Frazier, Lars Started it,, and National Dust Records.

Tony Lash
The ToneMeister started his career as a drummer with Nero's Rome. During which he worked as SuperDigital's first mastering engineer way back in the 80's! Recently Tony has mastered Little Sue, Bella fayes,Vince Caro,Standard, Wet Confeti,Sunset Valley,Go By train, Nordic, Digital knife. People seek him out for his sound. Tony has a league of fans. Tony is into indie rock.

Jeff S. Saltzman
Alternative rock band specialist, Jeff has engineered & mastered projects including Death Cab For Cutie, High Violets,NY Rifles.Dolorean, Jerry Joseph, Ian Moore, Marquis de Suave,The Channel, Trapper, Recall Seven, Menomena, The Minders, Richmond Fontaine. Jeff's serious listening skills will enhance your music.

These experts can do everything to prepare your album for Compact Disc duplication.
If you have music to prepare for an album release, please call us.
We know what sounds good!

Live somewhere else on the planet? Use ftp!
The internet makes it easy!

Email us & we can provide our FTP information so you can send us your files.

(16 or 24 bit AIFF, WAV or Red Book audio.
No mp3 or data compressed files please.)

We've been mastering for OVER 17 years.
Don't leave out this important process!
It WILL make an audible difference!

Mastering Equipment includes • Apogee Converters • GML Analog Parametric EQ •
GML Analog Compressor • Manley Pultec Tube Mastering EQ's •
Manley Pultec Tube Mastering Mid EQ's 
TC Finalizer • Waves Ultramaximizer L2 • All the Plug Ins you can stand •
Genelec Active monitoring •
Otari Sony,& MCI 1/4" & 1/2" analog • Dolby SR & A & a listening room that's incredible.

We can accept masters on 1/4" analog tape with Dolby SR
16 bit audio CD,
24 bit .wav / aiff / SDII files
CD, DVD, hard drive, or ftp to us!

QuestionsQuestionsQuestions

Q: Mastering is such an abused word, what makes you guys different than this other dude who has a computer program?

A: What some advertise as " mastering" isn't really .----A $99 computer plug in is NOT "digital mastering." Any toad with a computer can call it "mastering" Whoa!
Don't have the same guy who mixed the album master it unless you take it to a facility like ours. You need to hear it on a precise set of tools that are different than the studio.
And most importantly don't "master" your album in the studio that mixed it! You will only compound th deficiencies.

It should mean you're getting the full treatment, that is- calling the shots with an engineer carefully applying EQ, Compression, & editing with musically accurate tools in a purpose built listening environment..

We do MASTERING in the traditional sense. It's a combination of art & science.

And it takes the right engineer & the right equipment to make it magic! An experienced engineer with an "ear" is worth the investment!

Q: What is all this gobbldygook I hear that my CD burner isn't good enough?

A: Be aware that typical CD burners in computers can put LOTS of errors on your CD. DO NOT use cheapo or no name CD blanks and do not burn at 1x or use cheap computer CD burners.
If you do, your master can have undetectable or uncorrectable BLER and jitter. These terms mean that your CD may exhibit playback problems. We have seen this happen! You dont want to have this made into lots of high error rate copies!
We can re-clock & re-burn them into Master CD's.

Q: What should I send to my session?

A: A MAC formatted hard drive, a jump drive, CD or DVD of your source files. It’s a good idea to send a back-up as well. We prefer 24 bit 96 k source files as either stereo interleaved aiff or bwav. Since we playback digital files to analog for many of our processes please send as good fidelity as you can record.

Q; What’s an ISRC code?

A: It’s a “digital fingerprint” that’s permanently encoded onto a CD & stands for “International Standard Recording Code” . It’s used as an identifier for royalty collection & rights administration. To apply for your own ISRCs, visit , www.riaa.com, It’s not a necessity to have ISRCs encoded on your master. It’s your choice.

Q: What about text for iTunes?

A: CD text we encode will appear on text-capable CD players, but iTunes etc. requires info to be entered separately by you. With iTunes, song name, artist, genre, album title, etc. is entered in their CDDB database.

Q: Should I do stuff to the mix before I send to you?

A: As a rule make it sound exactly like you want to sound.
Don't Compress or limit the overall mix! We can do a much better job with our specialized tools. If you over compress there's not much we can do to breathe life into it. Leave the dynamic range in so you have no clipping.

Same goes for EQ. Don't over do it!

Don't do the fades either- leave up to us (with your guidance). And make sure there's a couple seconds of dead space before & after your mix just in case there's pop or clicks

Q: I've got an old tape I want to save before it turns to dust, can you master it and archive it onto a CD?

A: We can transfer many formats for restoration or archiving onto 100 year life MAM-A Gold Made in the USA CD's.

 

Hi Rick- I wanted to say thanks for giving me such a great mix on my CD " Live at Biddy McGraws" You really put great finsh on that project.. I'll be sure to bring my next project to you!
Yours, Noah Peterson