Mastering

A bad master can ruin a great recording.

I’ve lost count of how many albums I’ve been excited about, only to be let down by what I heard. Not the music—the performances were as hoped for—but the sound was lifeless, compressed, or oddly EQ’d: vocals pushed forward like someone shouting in your ear, or bass that sounds like it’s playing through a mattress. 

The issue often comes down to priorities. Mastering engineers are under pressure to make music stand out—on earbuds, in cars, over noisy store speakers. That often means boosting loudness, trimming dynamics, and reshaping tonal balance to grab attention. But what works in a playlist or radio rotation rarely holds up in a revealing two-channel system. It may sound punchy, but it doesn’t sound real.

That’s why I’ve always been a fan of minimalist mastering—like that of our own Gus Skinas—when it’s done well. Keep the dynamics, preserve the space, and let the performance speak. With Octave Records, we put mastering at the end of a transparent chain—never the star of the show, always in service of the music. When done right, you don’t notice the mastering at all.

You just feel the music.

Once you know what to listen for, it’s hard to un-hear mastering flaws. But the good news is, when you do stumble across a beautifully mastered recording, the experience is unforgettable. It’s like stepping into the room with the musicians.