A blog about mastering, audio tools, studios and acoustics.
About me
Miguel Pinheiro Marques
My work begins with mastering records and extends into the software I build for doing it. I have been a mastering engineer since 2010 and now work at Knurl Mastering; I also founded Kiln Plugins, where practical problems from sessions become research, tests and, eventually, audio tools. Alongside that work, I take on selected acoustic design projects and continue to teach and write about audio. This site is where I document the mechanisms behind all of it, preferably before memory edits the difficult parts into a much tidier story.
Mastering
Mastering records since 2010
Mastering is my daily work, and has been since 2010. The decisions are technical, but their purpose is musical: level, tone, dynamics, sequencing and delivery only matter because of what they do to the record as a whole.
Over the years I have worked with major and independent labels across many genres, with artists ranging from first releases to established careers, and on records that went on to receive Latin Grammy nominations. I am a founding member of Estúdios Sá da Bandeira, Bender Mastering Studio and Arda Recorders, and later founded Knurl Mastering, where I now work.
A number of Kiln plugins began with the same mildly irritating situation: an existing tool almost solved a problem from a mastering session, but brought an unwanted side effect with it. I founded Kiln Plugins to follow those problems properly, through research, listening tests, measurements and rather more discarded prototypes than the finished interfaces suggest.
The plugins are written in native code on a purpose-built framework, without JUCE or another general-purpose cross-platform wrapper. This is the less convenient route, which is not normally how software companies describe an advantage, but it gives us control over the full path from host automation to sample output. The code is the final stage; the useful part is knowing what it should do.
Other Work
Acoustics, teaching and writing
Alongside mastering and software, I take on selected acoustic design projects, from recording studios and critical listening rooms to acoustic products; past work includes rooms for Panda Bear, Cuca Monga, Miguel Araújo and Moullinex, as well as Arda Recorders, Knurl Mastering and SessionbloX for Sessiondesk. I have also taught audio production at colleges and specialist schools, written for professional audio publications, and am the author of Sistemas e Técnicas de Produção Áudio. These are different applications of the same habit: understand the mechanism, test it, and explain it clearly enough to be useful.
