Written by Shan Zhi Liu 01/04/2024
South Bound is not just your average music production, record production, song composition, arrangement, music recording, mix engineering, videography, social media management, and all-round powerhouse. We do mastering too!
One can only blow our own horn for so long so come have a look for yourself!
Our mastering chain is fitted with some heavy lifters of boutique mastering hardware inserts. The GML 8200 MKII is one hell of a parametric EQ, where my personal favourite move is to pin the high frequency band to 26kHz and pin the gain +15dB. It is always a shock to see how much that EQ absolutely only adds towards the sound of something and never distorts crazily unlistenable sounds.
On top of this is the Crane Song STC-8 stereo compressor, one of the cleanest and most solid bus compressors we are fortunate to have our hands on. This handy piece of work would help provide us with a critical layer of headroom and delicious hardware colouration thanks to its 'Ki - Hara sounds' mode switch.
This signal all goes thought this Manley Backbone, a mastering piece of hardware that gives all sorts of control over one's mastering hardware inserts and signal flow. Our favourite for our use cases was only really to have the GML on insert 4, the Crane Song on insert 5, which have the option of being swapped in the signal flow. Other than that, functions like the mix-diff sum and the mix-fade knob were not necessarily needed for the two inserts we wanted to use. (The fade knob is just so satisfying to turn though you have to know to know like, just take my word for it if you don't know I promise)
Our mastering process was not a role taken by any one person, given that all of the mixes were shared evenly to every mix engineers strengths and conveniences. Some engineers mixed three songs, so they would master two songs, and vice-versa.
Everyone would begin with the hardware, where once we tuned them to the perfect sound that we required, we could easily print them into Pro Tools and continue working in-the-box. Every all had many different choices and preferences to their plug-ins, but in this room with UAD Plugins thanks to the Apollo x8, it would have been a missed opportunity not to have taken advantage of some top-of-the-line hardware emulations.
The Thermionics Culture Vulture became a new phenomena of discovery first by Dallas, like where has this piece of harmonic distortion been all this time! Beats me. The bx_digital v3 is also a personal favourite of Amadeus and Julian, as a tricked-out all-round mastering EQ, fit with Mid-Side treatment. And far from that, where would any of us be without Fabfilter am I right or am I right!? (we did not have anything fabfilter in the studio we were in)
With everything here so close to completion, these tracks are continually on the whetstone, grinding and polishing their way down into something that we might probably maybe eventually finally be happy with for an exciting album release! Very soon! Yeah! Stay tuned y'all. As always, we hope you look this kind of format, so please provide any feedback by following us on our website and socials. We love to hear from you all about anything and everything, your support means so much for us.
As always, inviting you down South. 🇦🇺
Comments