‘I opened my mastering studio 14 months ago — here’s what I’ve learned’: Kevin TuffyBritish mastering engineer Kevin Tuffy scored big as a resident at London’s Metropolis and Alchemy studios, winning a Grammy and an MPG Mastering Engineer of the Year award. Leaving the commercial studio ecosystem and building a studio from scratch was high stakes — particularly as AI mastering tools are becoming more commonplace.

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But his bold move is paying off. Since relocating to Berlin’s Kreuzberg district in November 2024, Tuffy has mastered a Kylie Minogue number one and has found that his best clients are still returning for his expertise. The studio, situated in a converted coach house, has become “a bit of a community space,” he says, with more in-person mastering sessions than expected, a regular vinyl listening club, and more events to come.
One year in, the engineer has learned that care and attention still beat automation, that clients will follow you across countries if you solve their problems honestly, and that doorless room design borrowed from Steve Albini can solve his low-end challenges better than conventional acoustic treatment. He tells us what else he’s learned since Tuff Mastering began.
Kevin, since opening Tuff Mastering, you’ve worked on a number-one album and a Christmas number one. Is that validating for you and the studio?
Kevin Tuffy: “Definitely. Leaving the big studio ecosystem to set up something independently was always going to be nerve-racking, so being able to shout about the chart successes we’ve had, particularly when the artist is someone as legendary as Kylie Minogue, relatively early into the studio’s lifecycle was important for putting us on the map.
“I opened Tuff Mastering to compete with the very top studios around the world so a couple of early number ones definitely go some way to backing up that mission statement.”
Image: Press
You’ve worked with a ton of iconic artists over the years, and have picked up a few prestigious awards. How did this success lead you to founding Tuff Mastering?
KT: “Honestly, it’s been a succession of happy accidents rather than the culmination of any great plan I had. Obviously, if you work on a great record, people’s ears start to prick up, and maybe some new requests from new artists or labels find their way into your inbox, and that can lead to a bit of a snowball effect. But, for the most part, my client base has grown steadily and organically over many years, and I realised that there was probably enough of a base there for me to sustain something on my own. From there, I needed to work out financing, property… It was a pretty enormous undertaking and, whilst the idea of running my own company was never that high on my agenda, ultimately I’m really picky about how I want my studio to be; I realised that no company was ever going to build it for me and that I was going to have to build it for myself.”
Opening a mastering studio in the 2020s feels like tough business, given how accepted AI mastering tools are. Did that make you nervous at all when opening the studio?
KT: “Mastering, to me, is about care and attention to the tiniest detail and, for the impressive things that AI can do really well, it’s not exactly revered for its accuracy. Even though AI services like LANDR have been around since 2014, they haven’t demonstrated much improvement since they launched, they still can’t identify and remove a click from a mix or even use automation, so they’re still nowhere near to how a human listens to music or the moves a human mastering engineer makes and that’s without even considering that the job is still very much a service industry role that’s about problem solving for clients quickly and efficiently.
“‘If AI does improve to the point that it can replace mastering engineers entirely, then it’ll be able to replace a pretty sizeable majority of the entire workforce, and if that happens, we’ll be looking at such a revolutionary societal restructuring that my mastering studio won’t even feature that high on my list of problems.”
How do you decide what gear goes in the studio? Is there anything you picked up for Tuff Mastering that has made a difference in your work?
KT: “The gear’s a bit of an amalgamation of my favourite equipment I’ve used from the various studios I’ve worked at over the years.
“The ATC150s were Ray Staff’s at Alchemy, then Matt Colton’s, then I inherited them in 2019, and I just totally fell in love with them immediately. I’d worked on some really great loudspeakers before them, but the ATCs are clinical enough to allow me to hear precisely everything going on in a mix down to the tiniest high-frequency transient. But they also still make music sound fun in a way that it’s enjoyable to work on them all day.
“At Metropolis, Pierce Rooms and Alchemy, I was lucky enough to always have a Sontec MES-432 as my main equaliser so when I first moved to Berlin and didn’t have one at my disposal anymore, I quickly realised how dependent I’d become on it in my workflow and how much of a signature part of my sound so that was the first item on the shopping list for outboard. It’s a bit of a hackneyed observation at this point, but I’ve tried lots of the Sontec copies or emulations, and there really is nothing like the real deal. The UnFairchild was a welcome addition for the new studio.
“George ‘Porky’ Peckham cut a lot of my favourite-sounding records from the late 70s to the 2000s through an original Fairchild, so I’d always wanted one in the hope of recapturing a bit of that magic. It’s the most beautiful-sounding valve limiter I’ve ever had in my rack.”
Image: Press
Can you talk me through a specific mastering decision you made in the past year that you’re proud of – not the whole project, just one technical move?
KT: “I don’t really want to snitch on anyone specifically, but I did have a bunch of album mixes that came in sounding absolutely beautiful, except the lead vocal. It was over-de-essed, and you could really hear both lisping and also this strange suck of the compression in the phantom centre whenever the threshold of the vocal de-esser was triggered. I was able to use iZotope’s RX to restore enough amplitude to the transients in the high-mids that I could give the sibilants back their clarity and got it all sounding really natural again, and that was oddly satisfying to do.”
The studio seems like an interesting shape! How did you treat the room, and what considerations did you have to make when designing the studio?
KT: “The room acoustics were probably the aspect of the studio that I lost the most sleep over. I did tons of reading and research, and I have to say a huge thanks to Bazza, my old boss at Alchemy, for his guidance and advice, and my friend Karl, who’s an architect who really helped me out with design choices, too. My studio occupies the top floor of a two-storey converted coach house, so none of the walls are parallel; this structural irregularity means there are no obvious amplified standing waves, which was a great base to work from.
“The first challenge was to reduce the reverberance of the space. This is achieved with a false wall directly behind the listening position that’s filled with rockwool, plus three corner bass traps that hugely reduced the reverb time in the room and kill any nodes in the corners. There are a bunch of a prefab panels and clouds from GIK Acoustics that kill off any first reflections and, finally, I wanted to incorporate something I heard Steve Albini talk about in relation to his Electric Audio Studios in Chicago: I made my studio doorless to allow the big low end that the ATCs generate to travel along the top floor down the stairs and dissipate into the lounge room downstairs. It gives the sound quite a natural and balanced low end.”
How does the relationship with clients change when you have your own business?
KT: “Maybe it’s because I started out independently, then went down the route of being a staff engineer before going independent again, but, honestly, I’ve always tried to maintain the same degree of professionalism in my work throughout my career. Whether working for another studio or now for my own, I’ve always just been myself around clients. The ones that like my way of working and my sense of humour have been coming back (in some cases for over a decade), and they’ve stayed loyal to me through a couple of studio changes and even moving country, so I’ve been incredibly lucky in that regard. Some clients turn into friends in the long run, but I think if you try to do right by people, be constructive when you need to be critical, be diplomatic when you’re giving your opinion, you’ll find some nice people who are fun to work with. That’s really all we can hope for from a career in this industry.”
After a year of Tuff Mastering, what’s the biggest gap between expectation and reality?
KT: “We’ve had loads of in-person sessions recently — it’s been so nice! These started to tail off once COVID-19 hit, and the normalisation of remote sessions was a big factor in my decision to swap London for Berlin in 2022, but the trend has definitely started to reverse recently.
“I’m glad about that, so I’ve tried to make Tuff Mastering not just a mastering studio but also a bit of a community space. We started hosting a record club for listening to classic albums on vinyl once a month towards the end of last year, and that’s been a big hit so far. We’re talking about what other events we might be able to branch out into in the future, too. The human connection is one of my favourite parts of my job.”
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