Tony "Jack the Bear" Mantz

Owner and founder of Jack the Bear's Deluxe Mastering.

Mastering has taken up the majority of his career since starting work in the music business in 1981. He's had a stint at recording and mixing, and a concurrent career in radio on Toronto's CFNY as an announcer, as well as Melbourne's Triple M, but thankfully found mastering as his calling.

Tony's been lucky enough to have travelled extensively around the world, meeting and learning from some of the best in the business, and was trained in the art of vinyl mastering by Rick Essig at Frankford Wayne Mastering Labs, NYC. This was the same studio that that produced the likes of Tom Coyne and Herb Powers.

Tony (Jack to most people) started freelance mastering work in 1990. In 1999 shop was set up at Melbourne's Sing Sing Studios, and after establishing himself as one of the country's most sought after engineers, he made the break in early 2006 to build his dream facility.

Byron Scullin

Byron's career began with a formal musical training at Melbourne University after which he found work as a freelance audio engineer. During his early freelance years Byron worked over a diverse field of projects, from mixing bands in pubs, clubs and at festivals to working on commercial musicals and corporate events. Byron has also worked on community radio projects, television outside broadcasts, and for many independent and commercial theatre and dance productions.

In 1998 Byron began to focus further on audio post-production and commenced his mastering training under Franc Tetaz at Moose Mastering in Richmond. Byron's time at Moose found him becoming acquainted with the techniques for mastering across a broad range of music styles and genres. Byron also assisted in post-production work on a number of album, film and DVD projects completed at Moose. While at Moose Byron also began to write and produce music for theatre and dance productions. Byron has completed many original scores and sound designs for film, television, theatre, dance and installation.

As a mastering engineer, Byron brings all of this musical and technical experience to his work in assisting other artists to get the best possible result from their own projects. While there is a highly technical element to mastering, Byron's approach to any mastering project is fundamentally musical. Tackling each project's unique requirements from this musical basis allows artists to better understand how their music is treated in this final stage of production.

Byron is comfortable with the requirements for mastering many different types of music - from mainstream styles like rock, pop, dance and hip-hop through to acoustic music such as jazz, orchestral, chamber ensemble and folk. New music is also one of Byron's special areas of interest - experimental instrumental and electronic music, from noise music to free improvisation, Byron is sympathetic to the needs of those artists pushing boundaries of what is possible for recorded music. DVD, 5.1 and Hi-Def work is also an area where Byron can make the most of the potential these extended formats offer.

Further details can be found at Byron's home-page www.byronscullin.com or MySpace - www.myspace.com/bjscullin