Recording - October 2009 - 24

Interview by Fabio García Why did you decide to be a mastering engineer? Did you ever aspire to be a mixing engineer? Bob Katz: Actually, my entire mastering career comes from my musical and recording and mixing experience. I started out as an audiophile recording engineer, recording and mixing acoustic and electric groups live to 2-track. So I’ve always been a mixing engineer. My career in mastering began when my recording clients asked me to prepare and assemble the songs to make the album. I would dub the original recording to a new tape through equalizers and other processors, edit the tape, assemble, space it and prepare it for LP transfer. Besides adding some eq, compression and limiting, what more is there to the mastering process? Mastering is not about processing! Mastering is (and should be) the ability to know what not to do to a recording. You’re starting with the wrong orientation if you begin by thinking “what can I compress, what can I equalize?” Instead we start by feeling the music and understanding thoroughly what the musicians and the music are trying to convey. Then we use our experience and knowledge to decide if (not when) there are any processes or combination of processes which can improve the recording or help the songs to work together as an album, or communicate the recording better to the listening public. Finally we connect the processes which we think may help the recording and using the highest quality monitoring to see if these processes actually help it or hurt it. We listen to every frequency range and each instrument in the recording to ensure, for example, that if we are trying to help the punch, we are not destroying the feeling of any instrument or instruments. That said, to answer your direct question (what else do we do in mastering besides equalize and compress), we may adjust minute passages in each song, raising or lowering them to get more drama. This is a form of manual compression (or expansion). We may apply noise reduction to get rid of annoying noises, being careful that the cure is better than the disease. We have to decide whether the tools that we are applying are the best tools for the job. 24 RECORDING OCTOBER 2009 Instead of compression, we may apply expansion, or some tool to improve the stereo image or the depth, or add distortion or other colors, perhaps through analog tape, or an analog tape simulator, or by using an analog amplifier with a color (like a tube preamp, transformer, equalizer or a particular flavor of solid state amp). We may split the signal into M and S components and separately process each portion to affect the balance of lead vocal versus band. We may adjust the left to right balance, and so on. Should one bring all the mixes or the finalized multitrack recording to a mastering session? The more choices you have to make, the longer the session takes and the more you lose focus. The object is to bring mixes as close to “finished” as you know how to make them to the session.You should already have listened to them on a variety of systems, checked the translation, worked very hard to make them translate. You should already feel comfortable with the vocal and instrumental balances. You should make alternative mixes available as safeties, as protection, but not as a way to postpone the decision-making process. As soon as you open up a multitrack, you are opening up a potential can of worms, the session starts to become “I think the electric piano is too low in the verse” instead of, “how does the sound feel, is it too warm or cold, are the dynamics adequate enough, is it punchy enough, and so on?” For a successful mastering session, you have to let go of your mixing head, and start thinking holistically about what the album is becoming. That said, bringing safeties is a good thing. Leave the laptop or desktop with the multitrack in the car, but in addition to the full mix, bring along safeties with the following stems: 1) Lead vocal (in stereo), because this is probably the most important element in your mix, and getting it at the right level can make or break a tune. We use it (plus the TV track) if and only if there is a problem. Otherwise we use the full mix. 2) TV track—this is also called the “Performance” track. This is what the performer would use if singing on

Recording - October 2009

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