“Through my reputation as an Independent artist, with studio, label and through my work as a writer for MusicDish magazine in NYC, I get a lot of inquiries from a variety of artists at different levels ranging from RahmLee Davis of Earth, Wind & Fire down to garage bands.

 

     I was contacted over the weekend by an artist named DenRa from Ann Arbor MI. He has been developing his career as a New Age artist over the past few years and had some recordings he had made in his home studio on Garage Band. He had hired a marketing company to promote his music in the digital marketplace, but wanted to have them mastered first, so he contacted me.

 

He sent me an mp3 of the song he wanted to release first called "The Light Within" I listened to the song then converted it to 44.1 and put it up on the studio monitors. I discovered some problems with the track (low levels, right stereo channel overload, no bass response, no EQ or compression and an unbalanced mix). Not the best situation. (Admittedly an amateur engineer.)  I wrote back to him notifying him of these problems and asking him if he wanted re-record his tracks or let me try some mastering tricks to help improve his track. He said he had already paid the marketers and really needed my help. He Paypals the money and I get down to the challenge of this track.

 

I dove into the track and after a few hours of tinkering, I was able to fix most of the flaws in the track through a variety of moves using my mastering suite. Besides EQ, compression, dithering, some soft NY reverb and a seldom used trick called reverse phasing, the song was vastly improved. I bounced it back down to 44.1 and converted it to a high quality mp3 (320kbps) that he can sell online. He was very happy and plans to send additional songs. I told him when he is ready to play live and needs CDs to contact Creative Sound Lab.”  - Stu Shulman