/ ABOUT
Matt Merty
17 years mastering electronic music. Focus on minimal, tech house, deep house and afro house. Frankfurt-based, working internationally on club, festival and streaming releases.
Why not automated mastering
Automated mastering can be useful for quick demos. My work is different: I make arrangement-aware decisions against your reference, your genre, and the destination of the release.
Sometimes that means louder. Sometimes it means leaving space.
The chain
Fully analog, built piece by piece over the years:
glue and forward motion
- Vertigo VSC-3
- Manley Variable Mu
tonal compression with character
- Tube-Tech SMC 2BM
- Hum Audio LAAL
broad tonal shapes
- Manley Massive Passive
- Dangerous BAX EQ
surgical work where transparency matters
- elysia xmax
- elysia museEQ
- elysia alpha
harmonic density and weight
- Black Box HG-2
- CAG HDE-250A
finishing moves a plugin chain cannot replicate
- Goly CrosscOMPressionEQ
- Rockruepel Sidechain.one Stereo Pair
- Orca Bay
- SPL BiG Studio
analog summing, 32 channels
- Dangerous 2-Bus+
- 32 channels
multi-channel conversion for analog mixing
- Lynx Aurora (n) 24 DIG TB
conversion, calibrated to -18 dBFS
Each unit adds something physical: transformer color, valve compression, transient behaviour. The decisions on top of it are made by someone who knows the genre, the room and the system the track will end up on.
Plugin development
I also build mastering software. Currently ThuMP, a low-end and transient plugin in JUCE and C++. Useful background: I know where algorithms work and where they don't.
How to send work
24-bit WAV or AIFF, 3 to 6 dB headroom on the master bus, no limiter. Send a reference and tell me where the release is going (club, festival, streaming, vinyl). Questions before upload are welcome.