Mixing and Mastering for Indie Labels and Managers: How Tapetown Works With Labels

A label placing several records a year needs three things from a mixing and mastering partner that a band placing one record rarely thinks about: a consistent sound across a roster, credits that survive the release, and one contact who plans around release dates rather than around their own calendar. This is how Tapetown works with indie labels and managers, and what we ask of you in return.

One roster, one reference point

When the same engineer mixes a label's releases, the catalogue starts to sound like a catalogue. Not the same mix on every record, but the same judgement about where the voice sits, how much room the drums keep, and how loud is loud enough. For a label that is the difference between a roster and a pile of singles.

At Tapetown that reference point is Rasmus Bredvig, who has recorded and mixed the Tapetown Sessions with Iceage, The Murder Capital, Elias Rønnenfelt, Bambara and Pale Honey, and well over a hundred releases. Gustav Scheel mixes and masters indie, folk and Americana. A label gets one of us as the fixed point for the roster, and the other when a record calls for him.

Credits that survive the release

Most mixing credits disappear within a year. Streaming services do not show who recorded or mixed a record, Discogs only lists what someone has entered, and the band's Bandcamp page changes hands. That is bad for the engineer, and it is bad for the label, because a catalogue with no documented credits is harder to sell on, license or reissue.

We keep two public lists: Records Made at Tapetown, every release recorded, produced or mixed here with the role we played, and the session credits for the live sessions. Every label release we mix goes on the first list, with a link to the label's own page. We also ask labels to put the engineer in the delivery metadata so the credit reaches the services that do display it.

One engineer contact, not a ticket queue

You write to the person who will mix the record, and that person answers. There is no account manager, no form that opens a ticket, and no handover between the person who quoted and the person who works. For a label manager juggling five releases, that saves the week that normally goes on finding out who has the files.

Stems and delivery standards

Labels send us records recorded in many rooms by many people, so we ask for the same package every time. It keeps the roster consistent and it stops the first two days of a mix going on file archaeology.

• Consolidated WAV stems from the same start point, at the session's own sample rate and bit depth, one file per track, named by instrument.

• The band's rough mix, so we hear what they fell in love with before we change anything.

• Two or three reference records and one sentence on what each one is for.

• The release date, the format (streaming, vinyl, both) and who signs off on the mix for the label.

Back comes a full-resolution stereo WAV mix, instrumental and vocal-up versions on request, and, if we master, finished masters per format. Everything is delivered as files you can hand straight to your distributor or cutting engineer.

Attended sessions across time zones

Labels working with Tapetown from the UK, the US or Australia join the mix session remotely and hear changes as they happen. We book attended sessions at hours that work on both sides, which from Denmark means mornings for Australia and afternoons for the Americas. For a manager who has to approve a mix on behalf of a band on tour, one attended hour usually replaces a week of emailed revisions.

Planning turnaround around release dates

A label's calendar runs backwards from the release date: distributor deadlines, vinyl lead times, press and radio servicing. We plan the mix and master into that calendar at the start, not when the first mix is late. Tell us the release date and the format and we work out when stems must arrive and when masters leave. If the label has several releases in a quarter, we block the roster's slots in advance so the sound stays with one engineer and the dates hold.

How quoting works for a label

Professional mixing in Europe is commonly quoted at roughly 400 to 1,200 euro per song, and mastering is quoted on top. We quote each project after hearing the rough mix, because the scope, the number of songs and any studio days change the price. Labels with a run of releases get one quote for the run, which is simpler for everyone's budgeting. Write to us through the contact page with the release list and we come back with a plan.

FAQ

Can the same engineer mix every release on our roster?

Yes. That is the normal arrangement for a label. The fixed engineer keeps the roster's reference point, and brings in a colleague only when a record clearly calls for a different pair of ears.

Do you work with records recorded in other studios?

Most of what we mix was recorded elsewhere. We need consolidated stems, the rough mix and references; the room they were recorded in does not matter.

Can a manager attend the mix on behalf of the band?

Yes. Attended remote sessions are part of how we work, and one approving ear from the label or management is often faster than a whole band on a video call.

How do you handle credits for label releases?

Every release we mix goes on our public release-credits list with the role we played and a link to the label's page, and we ask the label to carry the engineer credit in the delivery metadata.

If you run a label or manage artists and want one mixing and mastering partner for the roster, start with how online mixing with Tapetown works, then write to us through the contact page with your release list.

Records Made at Tapetown: Release Credits

Most of what we do never gets a studio credit online. Streaming services do not list engineers, and a lot of the records we worked on only came out digitally. This is the list we keep ourselves: releases recorded, produced or mixed at Tapetown, with what we did on each one. Rasmus Bredvig is the engineer on all of them unless another name is given.

It sits next to our session credits, which cover the live sessions on YouTube. Where a public page states the credit, we link to it. The rest comes from Rasmus, who made the records.

Recorded and mixed at Tapetown

Abdomen, Yes, I Don't Know (2025). Produced, recorded and mixed by Rasmus Bredvig at Tapetown. Stereogum. The single Dazed was also produced by Rasmus. Bandcamp

Sauna Senere, EP (2021) and EP 2 (2023). Every song on both was recorded and mixed at Tapetown.

Twin Dive, Lavish Material (2022). Recorded and mixed. Also the single Joy Will Follow (2019).

Hollow Birds, Murder of Crows (2020). Recorded and mixed by Rasmus Bredvig at Tapetown, mastered by Emil Thomsen at ET Mastering. Bandcamp

Flowers, Doom City (2019, Luik Records and Meduse MagIQ). Recorded and mixed. Bandcamp

why sun, Traffic (2019, 7-inch single). Recorded and mixed.

Catch The Breeze, Glow (2018, Kundalini Records). Recorded at Tapetown, engineered and mixed. Bandcamp

Shocking White, Ghosting (2017, Tapetown Records). Recorded and mixed. Sound of Aarhus

Lessons in Sailing, Tapetown Sessions (EP). Recorded and mixed.

Tin Can Telescope, Born To Rule The Uy Scuti (2015). Produced and mixed, recorded at Tapetown Studio. Discogs

Recorded at Tapetown

Soon, Soon (2022, Subroutine Records). Recorded by Rasmus Bredvig at Tapetown Studio. Discogs

Phosphor Kid, All The Usual Strangers (EP). Recorded.

Catch The Breeze, Into the Wide (2022). Most of the album was recorded live at Tapetown. Mixed by Christian Alex Petersen at Grapehouse Studios. Radar

Tales of Murder and Dust, Fragile Absolutes (2020, HPNG Records). Partly recorded at Tapetown. Destroy//Exist

The Telescopes, Radio Sessions 2016-2019 (2024, Tapete Records). Two tracks recorded at Tapetown in 2017. Discogs

Produced

Cloudwalk, Rise Again; My Sun, My Mind. Produced by Rasmus Bredvig, mixed by Sebastian Wolff. Bandcamp

A Mess, Woman (2021, Puffin Artlab). Produced tracks 1, 2 and 5. Discogs

Love Talk, Her Name Is Jenny (2017). Produced by Rasmus Bredvig at Tapetown. Discogs

Tin Can Telescope, Winding Up The Reeling Sensation (2016). Produced and mixed at Tapetown, with Rasmus producing tracks 4 and 5. Discogs

Moon Loves Honey, Apart (2016). Produced by Nikolai Fuglsang and Rasmus Bredvig. Discogs

John Alcabean, Real Time Fiction (2016, Tapetown Records). Produced by Nikolai Fuglsang and Rasmus Bredvig. Discogs

Mixed

Lukas Vanggaard, Håndspillede Hits and Frisk Prins (both 2020). Mixed. Bandcamp

Bonnie Cried, We Were Lovers (2019, Final 500 Records). Tracks 6 and 7 mixed at Tapetown Studio. Bandcamp

The Survivalists, Breakfast Is A Scam (2017, Tapetown Records). Mixed.

Broken, Eternal Fallout (2013). Mixed and mastered. Discogs

Rasmus Bredvig, earlier and outside the studio

These credits are Rasmus's own. Some are from before Tapetown had its own rooms.

Squaresville, Not If You Were The Last Square On Earth (2011, EP, Birds With Records). Produced, engineered and mixed. Recorded at The Factory Studios and Feedback Recording. Discogs

Squaresville, Hush, Here Comes The Whizbang (2010, 7-inch). Mixed by Rasmus Bredvig and Jesper Jungløw. Bandcamp

Er De Sjældne, Lyserød Lyseblå Beige (2009, Geiger Records). Recorded by Rasmus, who also mixed tracks 7 and 8 and produced track 7.

Captain Casanova, If You Come Around Here (2013, 7-inch, Für Records). Rasmus's own band. He sings and plays guitar.

Why we keep this list

A credit is the only proof a studio has. If nobody writes down who recorded and mixed a record, the work disappears the day the band changes its Bandcamp page. So we write it down here, and we only list what we did.

The list is not complete. If we worked on your record and it is missing, write to us and we will add it. More about who we are on our About page.

A lot of what we mix was recorded somewhere else. If you have a record that needs mixing or mastering, this is how we work.

FAQ

Who is the engineer on these records?

Rasmus Bredvig, founder of Tapetown and our head producer, unless the entry names someone else.

Where were these records made?

At Tapetown in Aarhus. We started in 2011 at the old Feedback studio in Viby, and from 2012 we had our own studios at Lydhavnen. Lydhavnen has since closed; our mix studio in Aarhus is open, we record at our recording studio on Djursland, and our new studio, The Reserve at Friland on Djursland, opens in 2027.

Why are some of these credits missing on Discogs and streaming services?

Streaming services do not show who recorded or mixed a record, and Discogs only lists what someone has submitted. Many of these releases were digital only and nobody entered them.

Does Tapetown mix records that were recorded somewhere else?

Yes. Mixing and mastering are done online, and several records on this list were recorded elsewhere and mixed by us.

Is this list complete?

No. We add releases as we confirm them.

About a Studio: Polar Studios, Stockholm

Polar Studios was the Stockholm recording studio built by ABBA's Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson with their manager Stig Anderson. It opened on 18 May 1978 in a former cinema on Kungsholmen, and in its first two years it produced ABBA's Voulez-Vous, Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door and Genesis's Duke. It closed in 2004. This guide covers the building, the desk, the records made there and the people who made them, and it ends with the thing we think most writing about famous studios gets backwards.

The short version: the most famous object from Polar now sits in a museum, and the most famous ABBA song was recorded three years before that object arrived in Sweden.

Polar Studios at a glance

• Address: Sankt Eriksgatan 58-60, Kungsholmen, Stockholm, in an early 1930s building known locally as Sportpalatset because it had housed a public bath and sports facilities.

• The room: a disused cinema, converted into a studio. Construction started in 1977.

• Opened: 18 May 1978.

• Founders: Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Stig Anderson, owner of the Polar Music label.

• The desk: a 40-channel Harrison 32 Series console, delivered in January 1978 and described by Harrison as the first 32-bus inline desk. It now lives in ABBA The Museum in Stockholm.

• Key records: ABBA's Voulez-Vous, Super Trouper and The Visitors, Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door, Genesis's Duke, Anni-Frid Lyngstad's Something's Going On.

• Closed: the studio left its original home on 1 May 2004, after 26 years, when the building changed hands and the rent went up.

Why ABBA built their own studio

By 1977 ABBA were one of the biggest acts in the world, and they had made every hit so far in rented Stockholm rooms, mainly Metronome and Glen Studios. Building their own place meant no booking calendar, no clock running on someone else's invoice and a room set up exactly the way Benny and Björn worked, which was slowly and obsessively, one layer at a time.

They put it in a cinema, which is a big, high-ceilinged box and a good start for a studio, and built the control room around the new Harrison. The desk was a statement in itself. In 1978 a 32-bus inline console was the newest way to run a big multitrack session, and Polar had one of the first.

Voulez-Vous (1979) was the first ABBA album made mainly at Polar, with only part of the title track's backing recorded in Miami. The sessions ran from March 1978 to March 1979, and six months in, only two songs were finished. Björn and Agnetha's marriage was ending at the time, and the tension in the band slowed things far more than any piece of equipment could speed them up. Super Trouper (1980) and The Visitors (1981) followed. The Visitors was cut on the studio's new 3M digital machine between March and November 1981, which made it one of the first mainstream pop albums recorded and mixed digitally. The final ABBA singles, "The Day Before You Came" and "Under Attack", were recorded there in 1982.

The ABBA sound was made before Polar existed

Most people get this part wrong. "Dancing Queen" was not recorded at Polar. The backing track was cut in August 1975, according to ABBA's own history of the song, and the Arrival album was made at Metronome and Glen Studios between August 1975 and September 1976. "Waterloo", "SOS", "Mamma Mia", "Fernando", "Knowing Me, Knowing You" and "The Name of the Game" all predate the Harrison desk too.

What those records had in common was not a room. It was a person. Michael B. Tretow engineered ABBA's records at Metronome and Glen, and he moved to Polar in 1978, where he later became studio manager. The trick that people now call the ABBA sound was his. He described recording the drums, the bass, the piano, the guitars and the vocals twice, with the tape machine slightly detuned on one pass through varispeed, then pairing the two versions left and right. Played back at normal speed, the pairs differ a little in pitch and tone, and the whole band shimmers.

That approach needs a tape machine with a varispeed control and an engineer who knows what he is listening for. It does not need a particular room, and Tretow brought it with him from rented studios into Polar. Benny Andersson's own tribute to Tretow called him the one who made the records timeless, which is a songwriter crediting an engineer, not a desk.

Led Zeppelin at Polar: In Through the Out Door

In November and December 1978, Led Zeppelin spent three weeks at Polar making what became their last studio album, In Through the Out Door. It is the most unusual record in their catalogue, and the reason is who turned up.

By the band's own accounts, Jimmy Page and John Bonham were frequently absent from the sessions, struggling with heroin and alcohol respectively. John Paul Jones and Robert Plant were there, working. Jones described the band as having split into two camps, with him and Plant in the cleaner one. Jones is a co-writer on six of the seven songs, more than on any other Led Zeppelin album, and "South Bound Saurez" and "All My Love" are the only two original Zeppelin songs Page did not help write.

Jones had just bought a Yamaha GX-1, a huge polyphonic synthesiser, and it is all over the record. That, more than the Stockholm room, is why In Through the Out Door sounds the way it does: a keyboard player with a new instrument and the time to use it, while the guitarist was not around. The album was then mixed at Page's home studio in Plumpton, England. It went to number one in the United States in its second week.

Genesis at Polar: Duke

A year later Genesis came to Stockholm. Duke was recorded at Polar from mid-November to December 1979 and mixed at Maison Rouge in London, then released in 1980. It mixes group-written pieces with songs each member wrote alone, including two by Phil Collins, and it points towards the shorter songs the band would make next.

Collins came back to Polar to produce Anni-Frid Lyngstad's 1982 solo album Something's Going On. She made it in her own band's studio, with a producer from London, and to our ears it sounds closer to a Phil Collins record than an ABBA one. Again, the sound arrived with the person.

After ABBA: the later years

ABBA stopped recording together in 1982, but Polar kept working for another two decades. Later clients included Roxette, Rammstein and the Backstreet Boys.

It closed because of property, not music. The building was sold, the rent rose sharply, and in 2004 Polar left Sankt Eriksgatan. The Harrison desk survived and is now on display at ABBA The Museum in Stockholm. Harrison marked the 20th anniversary of the closure in 2024.

What made Polar records sound the way they did

• Tretow's varispeed doubling on the ABBA records, an engineer's technique rather than a feature of the building.

• Time. Owning the room meant ABBA could spend months on an album without watching a clock. Voulez-Vous took thirteen months and The Visitors eight.

• New instruments and new habits arriving with visitors. Jones's GX-1 on In Through the Out Door, Collins as drummer on Duke and as producer on Something's Going On.

• Finishing elsewhere. Both of the famous visiting records were mixed in England, in rooms their makers already knew.

Our take: you are choosing people, not a room

We run a studio, so we have a stake in rooms mattering, and they do. A good room with a sympathetic acoustic makes some decisions easier, and a bad one fights you all day. We have argued for the room as part of the sound many times on this blog, and we stand by it.

But look at what Polar actually tells you. The most famous ABBA song predates the building. The most famous piece of equipment in the building is now a museum exhibit. The Led Zeppelin album made there sounds the way it does because of which band members showed up and what one of them had just bought. The Genesis album made there was shaped by a band changing direction, not by the desk. Every one of those sounds would have come out of a different room slightly different, and still recognisable.

Studio history gets told through rooms and desks because rooms and desks are easy to photograph. Gear mythology is a substitute for listening, and famous studios are gear mythology at building scale. The honest version is less romantic. A studio is the people in it, the time they have, and the decisions they are willing to commit to. The room is the least portable of those, and the least important.

That matters when you choose where to record or who mixes your record. The question is not which console they have or what was recorded there in 1978. The question is whose ears you are hiring, what they think your kind of music should sound like, and whether they will protect what makes it yours. You cannot rent Tretow by booking the room he worked in.

Nordic studios, and why so few people write about them

Stockholm, Copenhagen and the rest of Scandinavia produced a disproportionate number of the rooms that shaped rock and pop records, and most of their history is written in Swedish or Danish or not at all. We have covered the Danish side in Puk Studios, where Depeche Mode mixed Music for the Masses, and Sweet Silence, where Metallica made Ride the Lightning. If you are thinking about making a record up here yourself, our guide to recording studios in Denmark and planning a destination recording in Scandinavia are the practical versions of this story.

Polar Studios FAQ

What albums were recorded at Polar Studios?

ABBA's Voulez-Vous, Super Trouper and The Visitors, Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door, Genesis's Duke and Anni-Frid Lyngstad's Something's Going On. Later clients included Roxette, Rammstein and the Backstreet Boys.

Was "Dancing Queen" recorded at Polar Studios?

No. "Dancing Queen" was recorded in 1975, and the Arrival album was made at Metronome and Glen Studios in Stockholm. Polar did not open until May 1978.

Where was Polar Studios located?

In a former cinema at Sankt Eriksgatan 58-60 on Kungsholmen in Stockholm, in a 1930s building known as Sportpalatset.

Is Polar Studios still open?

No. Polar left its original building on 1 May 2004 after 26 years. Its Harrison console is on display at ABBA The Museum in Stockholm.

Why did Led Zeppelin record at Polar Studios?

Led Zeppelin recorded In Through the Out Door at Polar over three weeks in November and December 1978, when it was one of the newest and best-equipped studios in Europe. The album was mixed afterwards at Jimmy Page's home studio in England.

Keep reading

• About a Studio: Hansa Studios, Berlin

• About a Studio: Muscle Shoals Sound Studio

• Puk Studios, Denmark's hidden gem

• Recording the DIY punk scene: how those records were made

• Vintage mixing consoles that shaped recording studios

Ready for a mix made by ears rather than a gear list? We mix indie rock, post-punk and shoegaze from Denmark for artists everywhere, and we will tell you honestly what we would keep and what we would change. Send us the rough mix.