Mika Jussila's, my world of music mostly revolves around Finnvox Studios, in the mastering unit in the D-studio. I have over 30 years of work as a mastering engineer behind me. I spent the first 8 years mastering vinyls, also called carving or cutting vinyls. During those 8 years I carved about 2000 LP records and innumerable seven-inch singles and EP's. This was during the 80's, the golden years of Finnish rock music and self-financed activities, so the jobs never lacked interest!
At the beginning of the 90's I became a full-time CD mastering engineer and the work pace just kept escalating. The record company business became more and more serious in Finland and the picture of it as a hobby was long gone. At the end of the decade and the beginning of the new millennium I lived the turbo-loaded era of mastering by doing a whopping 250 albums a year. Things have calmed down a bit since those crazy years, so now I can replace the quantity with quality. In one sense things haven't "calmed down", because an increasing amount of the projects I work with are stylistically more and more heavier music.
I've always kept a precise studio diary, so it's been easy to make a list of all the records I have mastered during my career. My grand total is now over 3600 CD's, not forgetting the 2000 vinyl LP's I already mentioned earlier (they are not listed - yet). This is a world record, I dare say. So I'm a self-proclaimed world record holder until someone proves otherwise (feel free to try!). A couple of years ago someone asked me what metal- and hard rock albums I have mastered and that gave me a spark to start a separate list for only those albums. The list is already over 1300 albums long.
Both of these lists can be found here on my homepage, although I have to admit they aren't perfect. The All Records-list excludes the so-called direct transfers where I haven't had the chance to influence the sound, so I don't count them as mastered. I've done a couple hundred of these, so I have sacrificed about 100 days of work on them anyway. On the Metal-list (Tuskallista) again, the problem was to define if bands are metal or hard rock enough to make the list, but I want to give a big hand to all bands that made it on that list this far.
Getting where I am today has also required good support from all directions. The biggest thanks go to Risto Hemmi, Pauli Saastamoinen, Mikko Karmila, Minkku Peltonen and Spinefarm Records. The rest who deserve thank you's are found on the All Records list.
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