Recording - October 2009 - 32

Astudio owner’s lookatasometimesmysteriousprocess Looking around on the various online forums, I see that in much the same way that musicians have taken the recording process into their own hands, they’ve also begun doing their own mastering. While DIY is often a good thing, I realize that quite a number of those mastering their own projects really don’t know what mastering should entail—and for that reason, I decided to offer my own thoughts on the subject. To me, ‘mastering’ is a kind of umbrella term that encompasses a range of services; some of these are directly related to the audio that makes up the project and some, while at least as important, are not. Not always In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that a number of my clients do not send their completed projects to a mastering house; for budgetary reasons, their projects go straight from Java Jive to replication. For those clients, I will offer ‘faux mastering’; that is, I’ll use a combination of compression, limiting and eq to make their mixes louder and brighter if that’s what they want. The studio also offers a ‘low-budget mastering’ package, where each track is tweaked to work with the project as a whole, and the appropriate subcode information is added, but I always point out the advantages of taking the project to a real mastering engineer and suggest that avenue when the client’s budget allows. Vive la différence—NOT By the time I finish mixing a project, what I really have are anywhere from 10–15 songs—songs that, though they are part of a general genre (blues, jazz, western swing, Americana or whatever), may encompass a pretty wide variety of styles. For example, the last blues record I did had some fairly traditional slow 12/8 blues but it also had some Stax type tracks, some tracks that were more blues/rock (think Janis or early Mothers Finest), and at least one that was essentially a swing tune, horns and all. The songs were not all mixed at the same time—and now that I think about it, I may have been auditioning monitors during that period, so they may have been mixed on different speakers. So the ‘flavor’ of each tune differs a bit—some will be louder, some softer; some may be more low-end heavy, and some may be brighter than others. Part of what I want the mastering engineer to do is to make these disparate songs sound good when played in sequence— in other words, I want the final CD to sound like a seamless whole rather than a collection of unrelated songs. 32 RECORDING OCTOBER 2009 BY DAVE MARTIN Mastering tweaks To accomplish this, the mastering engineer may make adjustments to the relationship between the low end and the high end of some songs (this isn’t necessarily done with a simple eq; a number of other processes can be used); he may change the overall tonality of some songs to match the rest with eq or by other means; and he may change the volume of some songs (that doesn’t necessarily mean that he makes everything louder—it’s not unusual for a song or two to be made quieter to fit with the rest of the tracks). But there’s more to correcting volume issues than simply turning each track up until either the peaks or the averages are the same, since it doesn’t work that way. For instance, if one song has a full rhythm section with a screaming electric guitar solo and the next is a piano and flute piece, you can’t simply make them peak at the same level; I expect a piano/flute ballad to be quieter than the full band, so a competent mastering engineer will allow the quiet songs to be ‘quiet’—at least to a certain extent. Compression and limiting may be used to bring up the average level of a track if that’s needed to make it fit with the songs on either side of it as well, but it’s not a requirement. The mastering engineer may also use limiting to bring up the levels of the whole project, but at least on the projects that I produce, I emphatically do not want a ‘loud’ CD—at least, not at the expense of the sonic quality of the record. Voice There’s also the issue of where the vocal sits in the overall mix; with some projects, I’ve printed 3 versions of each mix—one where I think it ought to be, one with the vocal (or primary instrument, if you like) up in level, and one with the vocal down. The mastering engineer has the option, if he chooses, to use any of the three, or even all of them, if it makes the song work better in the context of the project as a whole. “All of them?”Yes
Recording - October 2009

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