Taking your Cubase project for mastering.

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chizzbeats

Member
There may be a simple answer for this but I do not know. How do you take your Cubase project to a major studio for mastering. Say I have a song with 10 tracks and some are midi do I need to bounce all the midi tracks down to audio tracks? If thats necessary how do I save the project on a CDROM so I can reopen the project at the mastering studio.
 
chizzbeats said:
There may be a simple answer for this but I do not know. How do you take your Cubase project to a major studio for mastering. Say I have a song with 10 tracks and some are midi do I need to bounce all the midi tracks down to audio tracks? If thats necessary how do I save the project on a CDROM so I can reopen the project at the mastering studio.
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You don't use your actual session for mastering. You don't re-open the project at the mastering house.

You give the mastering engineer your full stereo mix of the song as a WAV or AIFF file.
 
If your mix is already finished, it should be enough to take an exported audio file (.wav) to the mastering studio.
If you still need the single tracks for mixing in the professional studio you should take all tracks of the project with you. In this case you should definitely bounce your midi tracks to audio.
If the studio also uses cubase/nuendo you can use the "save to new folder" option an burn this folder on a cd. If the studio doesn't use these programms you should export all audio tracks of the project as .wav files and burn these on a cd.
 
Cool, thats what I was looking for. I want to get my mix close enough for mastering but I'm sure there might be some tweaking that can be done at the professional studio. So basically export each track to WAV and name it track 1, track 2 etc....and then have them import each track. Seems tedious but hey, gotta do what works. Thanks for the advice.
 
chizzbeats said:
Cool, thats what I was looking for. I want to get my mix close enough for mastering but I'm sure there might be some tweaking that can be done at the professional studio. So basically export each track to WAV and name it track 1, track 2 etc....and then have them import each track. Seems tedious but hey, gotta do what works. Thanks for the advice.
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So, what you are really asking about is mixing then...

There are different kinds of engineers and diffgerent kinds of studios/facilities:

mix engineers/facilities
mastering engineers/facilities
recording engineers/facilities


you cant go to a mastering facility and have them mix your music... it is a completely different process.

You need to figure out exactly what it is you intend to do and what you expect to have done before you arrange to have anything done.

You asked aboput mastering. Mastering ALWAYS deals with ONLY the full final mix of a song.

Mastering is something that is done after your mix is finished (really after your entire album is finished, generally, because it also involves dealing with the tracks in relation to eachother and preparing the m for duplication/manufacturing))
 
While we're at it, make sure you export your mix in 24-bit, with little or no buss processing and *PROPER* mix levels - No clipping, no limiting - Preferably no peak anywhere above -6dBFS or so.
 
While we are on the topic, I just want to thank John Scrip for all his informative posts and help, I seriously learn from every one of your posts.
Master on........
 
There's no "blush" icon here, is there...?

Thank you - Very kind.
 
It's also good to talk to the engineer before you go to a studio. A simple short call can save you a lot of time and money also.

I've given people 24 bit data files before and they've mistakenly told studio managers that they had audio cd's. Mistakes happen and we were able to get past that pretty easily but those things can waste an entire day. A day is a lot when you have deadlines.

Even when going from Cubase to Nuendo I've talked to engineers to iron things out. I actually do omf exports in those cases if they just want the audio files and also because chances are that they'll use different plugs if I have used any.
 
yeah, sleepy is definitely right. Talking to the engineer before visiting a studio is very important to avoid all "these" little problems - especially if the studio isn't just round the corner....
It is also a good way to find out if the engineer "fits" to your music or the sound you want to achieve.
 
Yea I basically worded that wrong. I was more concerned about the final mix rather than the mastering, although I do appreciate the input on that as well. Looks like this shed some light for others as well.
 
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