I’ve had many projects over the past decade mastered by Fergal Davis [ fergaldavismastering.com ]. I first met him when I studied in the Sound Training Centre, Temple Bar, where he was one of the lecturers there. At the time he was a Music Technology lecturer, and in our second year he set up his mastering suite and got started in his current career. It has been a pleasure to watch him go from strength to strength, and he has made my mixes sound awesome without fail. The sessions themselves are always an exciting, fun, and relaxed affair, where we can talk about the vision for the finished masters and work to get them there.
Recently he was featured in an article over on the Irish Times, and gave my work a lovely mention. Head on over and have a read here.
Category Archives: mastering
Mastering Avril Whelehan
Last week I was in with the incredibly talented [and incredibly sound] Fergal Davis, a mastering engineer based in Dublin. It is fascinating to watch him at work, I’ve known him for nearly 15 years now(!) and he really is at the top of his game. The techniques he uses are fascinating, particularly the Mid-Side splitting of the mix for varying compression and EQ tasks on the Centre and Edges of the mix respectively.
Fergal was also showing me a very cool dynamic EQ that he uses in a very surgical manner for taming spikes in narrow frequency bands – the Brainworx bx_DynEQ. Definitely on the shopping list.
Of course, the only thing that matters is the finished product and I am really pleased with what we have come away with. I’ll post some snippets this week if I get a chance.
Here is the link to his site:
http://fergaldavismastering.com
And his Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/FergalDavisMastering
Next up: Recording acoustic guitars with Barry from Darken The Distance this week, then mixing some more Fiach tracks. More on those later.
Mastering S.I.L. with Fergal Davis
In with Fergal Davis mastering the new album by the lads from Gorey – really interesting to watch him at work. Feedback on the mixes good so far, and the finished versions are sounding great. For what you would think is a simple process there sure are a lot of channels, outboard and plugins involved!
Very cool how he can do mid/side processing on the mix, allowing different eq and compression for the centre and the sides (L/R) of the mix; a German company called Brainworx make a plugin dedicated to this processing that he is using, and it sounds really great. Of course the gear is only as good as the person using it, and he is obviously well used to the sound of his setup 