Mastering

So why does a release need to be mastered?

It varies. Sequencing and the spacing between songs is definitely part of it. It used to be done on analog tape but now everyone's mixing to DAT and you can't splice DAT. Any crossfades are much easier to do now than with analog.

You had to get three tape decks.

Oh yeah, and you're adding more noise. Now you just click and drag. You can do 100 second crossfades. So there's the sequencing part of it and there's two sonic parts to it. One is that you want it as loud as possible.

What do you mean when you say " loud"?

I'm talking about VU really. VU verses peak. Meters now, like the meters on DAT machines, are closer to peak but they're kind of in the middle--they're really neither. If you have a really good set of meters, like a Durrough, it'll show you both. Zero VU is generally about -14 dB from zero these days. That means that if you're sending a zero tone out of your console it should show up at -14 on your DAT machine. What that implies is that you have -14 dB of headroom for your peaks above your average. VU is like your average volume. Let's say you take Oasis or Cracker or somebody that Bob Ludwig (or somebody like that) has had his hands on. You'll find average VU on the whole record will be +6 with VU peaks that are insane, at +10 or even a little more. If your VU is +14 you're just pegged. It's zero and the needles won't even move. That does exist in certain cases and it's a little bit overboard. You'll actually start distorting some analog stages of your output devices if you overdo it. Compression is the way that you can bring up your VU without getting over. Plus limiting on top of that. So the main thing is you want it loud, so it sounds like everything else on the radio and so you get the most out of whatever gear you're playing it out of. The gain is nice and high so you don't have to crank it up and get a lot of extra hiss in there. The other sonic part of mastering, that's probably the biggest thing of all, is that you want consistency from song to song. You want it to sound like one album... you don't want it to sound like 10 different mixes. Even though you probably want some variety, like you didn't just push up the faders and let all 10 songs roll, you want some variety in your songs but you want it all to sound like a consistent album with consistent amount of bass, treble and volume. So no listener should have to reach for their bass, treble or volume knobs during the whole album. You may want it to breathe more, like a quiet part and a loud part, and that's where it comes into a subjectivity of how squashed (compressed ) you want it, from just straight out, in-your-face rock and roll to a jazz project or classical, which is obviously gonna have a lot more dynamic range to it. So those are the three main reasons to master. Make it sound clear, with a proper high end and low end. There's kind of an objectivity about it at that point where I'll use my ear. I've mastered probably 500 albums or more, so I have a pretty good idea now of where the frequency response should be, depending on the kind of music. It's to the point where I'm pretty much objective. Then it'll come back to a subjective point of just how crunchy do you want it, just how bassy do you want it, how bright do you want it--which comes to the producer and other people to tell me what they had in mind beyond the overall objective frequency response and stuff.

But say some band just finished recording, everything came out great, they played the tapes on different systems and it never seems to be lacking. They want to just put it on CD and be done. What are they missing here?

I'd say, "Oh great--go for it." One good thing about it is... even if I produce something--and I'm kinda bad about this 'cause I'll produce something and go ahead and master it myself anyway--but it's good to put an extra pair of ears on it, especially somebody that's a mastering engineer. Hopefully, you'd think if somebody's a mastering engineer they have good ears and know what they're doing. If people aren't happy with their mastering they should raise all kind of stink about it and take it back and get it right so they are happy. People are paying huge bucks and there's this kind of attitude like, "I'm the mastering guy so I know what's right for your project. This is the way it needs to be and just take it and that's it. Give me my $3000 and we'll talk later." That's not right. People should be happy with their products and I always tell people to let me know if we gotta do a little revision or something, which is harder now 'cause I gotta re-rent the gear. But that's my own problem. It still comes down to the client needs to have it exactly the way they want. I've had people tell me, "No, I don't want any compression on this at all." I'm like, "Yeah, but this is a pop thing and it's a live album and it goes down to -30 for a while and sits there." It's not up to me. I've made my suggestion and they want it a certain way. We did this live "bootleg." It was called Bootleg Snacks by the Floating Men, a little alternative/stoner rock band from Nashville. That was the case I'm talking about. The producer, he's a real persnickety kinda guy, didn't want any compression on it; just a little bit of EQ. I was like, "Well, alright." By the end of it, after we'd listened through the thing, I thought it was really refreshing because it's not the way most music is. In fact, I just listened to Thick as a Brick (Jethro Tull) today, and I put it on and was looking at my meters and it starts at -30 with that guitar thing at the beginning and it takes a while to build up loud and it's kinda neat. You don't get that anymore. Pearl Jam and all that kind of stuff it just goes right up to zero and just sits there. I think, sometimes, I would prefer less that some of the squashing that's going on. I heard Bob Ludwig is making a call for a little more dynamic range in music. Sometimes it's just so squashed that it just sounds crappy.

In almost all listening environments conditions are less than ideal. If you're keeping it above a certain point it's always gonna be heard.

I think, mainly, a lot of that has to do with radio. You don't want to be quieter than the last thing that was just heard, you wanna be louder.

You definitely hear that on college radio with independently produced stuff next to full on production.

Right there's a good example. You can compare the difference between your pop/rock station versus a college station. They kind of cheat too, 'cause the big station has 100,000 watts and the little station has 1000 watts.

But even the compressors at the college station aren't as good.

That's true too. A big station squashes it even more. At a little college station you'll get all kinds of different qualities of sounds. We have a station here, that plays Beck and all the "big-name" alternative people, but you'll notice a lot of variety in the EQ. That's partly because people, even though it is mastered, are going different ways. Some bands have a whole bunch of bass and they want it that way. Country music and Christian music and other kinds of music are more consistent. If you listen to a country station, one's gonna sound pretty much the same, EQ wise, as the next. Something you'll notice on those projects that haven't been mastered is that something is gonna sound really dull. Where's the vocal or where's the bass? There hasn't been one project that I couldn't help. If I couldn't make it sound better, what am I doing? I will always A/B (compare against the original signal ) it to make sure I'm doing something that's good to it. Hey, if I don't have much to do, that's great. I'll just level them all up, compress it a little, bring it all in the pocket, and just use my EQ to bring in differences between songs. Singles and demos and songs that people are shopping don't matter as much as far as consistency. The consistency from song to song, level and tonally, is the main part of it I think. Everything says, "Digitally Mastered." That's not that cool. Actually, analog mastering is better. What it does is that it's actually adding more coloration which is actually distortion, the same thing you get off analog tape; that big, fat, warm sound. I love mastering through tubes, especially with all these ADAT studios--these little clean digital studios with clean little mixers and stuff, which are all fine, but we want to get it all big and fat sounding. You can really add a quality. What I'll try to do is maximize the quality of the album that I'm handed. I did this folky, almost like a Nanci Griffith-type, project and worked with this woman a whole lot and it actually got pulled from me after I had already mastered it. These people had some different ideas even though she was the producer--she was pissed. The quality and the character, of that whole album, that we captured was a really warm, intimate kind of feel. The feel of it you could really get with mastering a lot.

I assume when you're talking about tubes you're not talking about a single 12AX7 device. You were talking before about the Fairchild and the Manley compressors.

I'm just about to get into the Manley. We had a Fairchild 670 at Final Stage (Karl's old employer) and the album so I just did here I did rent a Fairchild and bring it here. It has 23 or 24 tubes and it's real finicky. The Fairchild 670 is the grandaddy of all compressors and it's a beautiful thing. It's a $20,000 piece of gear if you can even find one anymore.

How old are they?

They're 20 or 30 years old. Beautiful things. There's only a couple of knobs--you can't adjust many parameters. You actually can, once you know the device, how to get out of it what you want--more kick or more bass. I can do a lot of that kind of work before I even touch the EQ.

So what's the signal path for mastering a CD?

This kind of comes back to how people should prepare their masters. The masters I get from Greg Freeman are on ¼" tape but almost everything I do is off DAT. A couple of things are off ½" tape. The biggest, most finicky people used to always mix to ½". There's really good analog-to-digital converters now and there's also some 24 bit storage mediums and things people are going to 'cause it's really bordering on being better than ½". ½" can be better than DAT if it's all calibrated and aligned right and the engineer really knows what they're doing, you can get a real nice mix going to a ½". My personal belief, and this may stir a little controversy with Greg, is that I personally think that DAT has a better sound than ¼". That's not necessarily always the case but at some place like Greg Freeman's (Lowdown, S.F.), where they're cutting on 2" 16 track anyway, you've already got the big, fat analog sound--go ahead and capture it as nicely as you can onto a nice clear medium 'cause the sound that you're after is already there. Maybe, if you had a really nice ¼" machine and a really clean studio with ADAT's or a DA88 maybe you'd go to that. That's just my personal thing. I think Greg likes to cut the tape up and edit that way. One thing that I get from him is A and B side reels that are exactly spaced how they want them. That can be good, for them, mastering across the country. Generally I'll go from DAT and through some nice converter, like an Apogee, from the DAT.

Do you have a converter there?

No, I don't have any here. This last project I did I was able to use some converters from the studio where I used to work. I don't know how long that's gonna happen! Good converters, especially on the way back in, are a good call. Especially when you're trying to recapture the analog mastering. So we go analog out of a DAT and into a real nice, stereo, parametric EQ. There's some mastering ones that are clickable, with detents, so you can exactly recall what you did even though it's analog. The one I've been using here is not a mastering EQ but it's a regular GML 5 band parametric. It's a real nice sounding thing. I was using the GML mastering EQ at Final Stage and it's almost exactly the same. I EQ before compression and I think that's what most people do. Some people EQ before and after. I like to EQ on the way into the tube compressor and after that it'll go into an analog-to-digital converter, hopefully a nice Apogee or something like that, and then a digital limiter.

Can you explain the difference between a limiter and a compressor?

I can explain how we do it. Those pieces of gear I was talking about don't have things on it like "ratio," 2 to 1, 3 to 1. It's more of a threshold, input gain, and time. The end result is that the compressor gives you the VU and the limiter just keeps you from having any "overs." You set your limiter to a third or half a dB under zero. I've found it to be one of the weakest links in the chain, depending on what you're using. The limiter just cuts off the zeros, it's like a real hard knee, right at the very top. You don't have overs. Hopefully it doesn't do anything sonically. When you push a digital limiter too hard it gets crackly. Compressors do that too, and it's sort of an effect where it's all crunchy and compressed. The guy who masters Reba (McEntire) and some of those big country acts does it all digitally with Pro Tools and an L1 limiter and he squashes the shit out of stuff. It'll be like a Reba ballad and it sounds great for the first verse but when it gets to the chorus it just goes to zero and doesn't move. It's out of hand. It gets crunchy and crackly and it also thins out. The more you compress stuff the more bass gets added. That's one tip, people should leave a little less bass on their mix than they're gonna want in the long run. When you squash it, the bass will come up, get sustained more and be more in your face and generally louder. If you go past that, to the point where you're just squashing this thing, it'll start thinning back out. When things are too bassy, I'll do that. Generally, a good, decent amount of compression will add more bass. I find that the trend is that people are getting more and more bass than they did 5 or 10 years ago. That was the digital craze, where everyone wanted it really bright, real clear sounding. That's a hard call 'cause some people want normal sounding bass and some people want a lot more. Bass, to me, is the most variable thing. As you get to the top end it's more objective and the mid range is pretty objective too. You can tell if the vocal's clear sounding or if there's a wet blanket over it. It's easier to tell in the high end and a little bit of EQ goes a lot farther in the upper register. I usually don't get past a dB or a couple of dB's in extreme cases whereas sometimes with low end I'll go 5, 6, 7 or 8 dB's that I'm having to cut or boost if the mix is way off. Generally it's not that bad.

And people don't perceive bass the same.

Yeah, that's a bonafide physiological fact that people should take into account when they're mixing. I definitely take it into account when I'm mastering. I master at a pretty nominal volume, about 90 dB. I'll turn it down and up a little bit so that I don't get burned out or ear fatigue. That does occur too. You can't hear, even if you want to and you're still attentive, your ears just burn out, they really do, they just need a rest. I tried mastering three albums in a day. By the third one I was still up for it but I couldn't literally hear what I was doing. I can still hear changes that I'm making but I'm having a harder time telling which direction it needs to go. I lose the perspective on it and it's just sheer ear fatigue. That's a bonafide thing too. There's people in Nashville that mix at all different volumes, some people that mix really loud. They must know what they're doing 'cause the people I'm talking about are big-name people. In general, unless you're those people, I would recommend people to mix at a pretty nominal volume. Not too loud. Do your mix and then go ahead and listen to it cranked up if you want. Take it out to your car on a cassette. Check it out and get a good idea, before it's mastered, that you're in the right ball park. When people mix and it's way too loud, and you play it back at a listening volume on a home stereo, it'll sound flat, like it's just laying there. That's something to watch out for. You can shoot yourself in the foot like that. So anyway, what I'm doing here now is I'll put the signal back on another DAT, because I don't have a computer here. I do all my digital editing and PM CD's and stuff at another studio that has Sonic Solutions. I'll go song by song. I'll dump a song to DAT, write down all my settings, go onto the next song. If no one's talking, and I'm on a roll, I can pretty much go right on through. If we've taken a break, or we had to chat about something, sometimes I'll go back and skip through and listen to a little bit of all the songs before and get back on track tonally. Tonally, now, it's real easy for me to make sure that they're real consistent. It's a real easy thing for my ear now. When we get it in the computer, we can do some final touches on the leveling. One thing I've used here, instead of a limiter, is the soft-limit feature on the Apogee. It's a pretty nice sounding limiter actually. One thing it does is it puts the peak at -2 dB, so it leaves you 2 dB of headroom. What I'll generally do is go ahead and boost it all up 1 dB in the computer, which leaves me 1 dB to come up with the quietest things again. We'll bring it right up to zero. Even the occasional over is okay. Different DAT machines show overs at different numbers of consecutive words of over. (Panasonic) 3700's will show overs at 8 consecutive words of full value. The 7010's and real nice, pro Sony's will show up at 3 words of over. Sonic Solutions will show you on your Mac screen at one word. The number where it shows an over on the CD, if you were gonna go to a CD production, is 8 words. At the CD plant, I don't even know if there is an official number where they'll send it back to you because of overs. There are production CD's that have overs on them and that's okay.

When you're mastering do you ever put in other CD's to A/B against what you're working on or do you find that that's just useless?

It's not useless. I don't usually do that, unless, for example: The very first album that I just did here, which it's new... there's so many new variables. I know my speakers but I don't know how they're sounding in this room. We took an old bluegrass album--I've mastered about a dozen albums for this guy--so we took one that we'd already done that we liked the sound of, and A/B'd to that for sure when we were starting.

Just to see how it was coming out and how the room sounds?

We figured that we know the sound of the CD and we'll take that as a constant and get familiar with the room. I had it so I could switch back and forth while they were both playing and make sure that our bass and treble were comparable. That's a good way to do it. Sometimes people will give me a suggestion... there was this Christian hard rock thing I did, I think they were called Prophecy, and they said they wanted to sound like 311. I really liked 311 a lot and had listened to it a lot so I didn't need to stick it in and A/B it. Those kind of tips can help me with which direction to take it. 311's really compressed and has a little bit of really overpowering bass. It's almost like rap a little bit. Usually I'll end up mastering alone but sometimes there's clients and if they want to get used to the room they'll bring in CD's. That's a good idea for them. Especially if they're gonna be leaning over my shoulder and telling me they want another 1/2 dB at 420 Hz. I hate that! I hate it when people lean over my shoulder and tell me what to do. "Sit back, be quiet, and let me do my tweaks. I'll give you the nod when I want your opinion."

What kind of things can people do to prepare for mastering as they work on an album?

One thing that just came to mind... the first rule of all is: There are no rules. You should use your ear. Look at somebody like Beck or even Jimi Hendrix in his day. " What's this crunchy guitar panned left and right?" There are no rules and you should never sell yourself short. Go ahead with an idea. If you want a vocal to sound a certain way make it really that way. I don't mean overdo effects. What I mean is don't be hesitant with your work. When I first started doing mixes what I found is they were very well balanced, everything was in its place, you could hear everything very clearly and there it was... it just kind of sat there. It didn't have a lot of life and I didn't take any chances. There's no rule, other than your own ear and your own feeling to it. If you're gonna be the original one to set out to start a whole new trend and a whole new sound it better not sound just like that album that you really like. It's just gonna be another Weezer copy or whatever. It keeps you enthusiastic and always looking for new sounds. As far as more specific tips: It used to be that places would say to leave a few dB at the top for the mastering engineer. It doesn't really matter now 'cause we can adjust the gain up or down. If you're mixing to DAT you get higher resolution the higher you record. It is actually better to get it right up to zero. I can add or subtract just about anything. It's easier to add bass than to take it away. Compression you can't take away. When I get something in that's just squashed, usually it's with a DBX or something, nothing like what I have to work with. Plus it wasn't EQ'd first on the way in. Basically I just throw my hands up. "What am I supposed to do with this? I can EQ it but I can't compress it now that it's already squashed. I can't expand it! When it's overcompressed you can't go back. That's the worst thing. Even if you want a lot of compression, I would leave some room, so it can be EQ'd first, and tell the mastering guy to squash the hell out of this. If you know you recordings gonna be mastered, you should ask if it's gonna be digitally mastered or analog. If it's gonna be analog mastered, you might as well go ahead and record (your mixes) at 48 kHz. It's just about 10% better, more samples, there's certainly a little bit more resolution in the higher frequencies. When we bring it to analog we bring it to 44.1 kHz on the way back in to digital. If you're gonna master digital, there's lots of digital sample rate conversion you can do to get it to 44.1 kHz anyway but you might as well go ahead and mix at 44.1 kHz.

I've heard the sample rate conversions can be a little bit sketchy at times.

It can. Even in a digital-to-digital transfer, where it's supposed to be exact, there have been people noticing differences in that, which is unsettling. That's scary stuff. Usually the differences you notice there are in imaging. The image will seem to close down a bit and not be quite as big. So 48 kHz is good if you're mastering in analog. It doesn't matter if you mix in order, of course.

How much should people budget for if they're planning to have someone like you master their CD?

About $500 to $600. I'm pretty cheap. This whole niche of people, exactly the kind of people who are going to be reading this, that's the market I wanna be in. I don't give a shit about mastering some big-name country guy. I don't even want to do it! I used to master a whole lot of Christian music. We would do a fine job but I want to be able to get the bands in here that I want to do. Were looking at over $500 but certainly under $1000, and I know mastering can go well over that. It's $100 an hour plus some editing and other parts and I cover the cost of rentals and the other studio to cut the CD.

Are there extra costs for revisions?

People vary on that a lot. In a lot of cases you get what you get and if you want more you pay more. That's pretty standard, I'm afraid. I always tell people, if you have any revisions let me know, I'll make sure that it's right for you. I usually don't have revisions.

They just go out and bad-mouth you!

I hope not. That would be pointless. If people really need to have it changed they should tell me and get it done right.

So you do mastering out of your own studio there?

Yeah. I just started doing it since I got laid off at the mastering place where I used to work. I was due for a raise and they said, "Work's light right now" and laid me off. I said, "Fine." I'm kind of in with some boys that do a rental company here and they've got all kinds of nice analog gear. The same stuff I was using before and some other choices too. They give me a good deal.

Do you rent stuff for projects or by the month?

Yeah, I rent it by the project. I kind of have to eat it if I have to go back and do revisions and stuff... or I'll just try to time it when there are other projects going on.

So what else goes on at your studio?

I have a ½" 8 track, a Mackie 1604, a (Panasonic) 3700 DAT and a little bit of outboard gear.

Do you record bands there?

I'm going to. Right now I'm still trying to get it finished up. The mastering is an easier thing to come by. I already had the business and the control room is good enough that I can do mastering in it but the rest of the place isn't really finished yet. A lot of people are waiting to come in and work in here so I gotta hurry up. I might do a little bit of low key, indie band projects. Get some big huge tie-dyes on the walls--some big candle holders and oil lamps and colored lights...

To make a different kind of place?

Yeah, a real vibe. An anti-professional, anti-music row kind of thing 'cause that already exists here.