Recording - October 2014 - 44

Interview by Paul Vnuk Jr.

You are the fourth mastering engineer I
have interviewed over the years, and
only one of them-Trevor Sadler
(December 2007)-actually started as a
tracking and mixing engineer. I interviewed Howie Weinberg two years ago;
he started as a mastering guy, and it's
the same with John Davis, interviewed
elsewhere in this issue, who just remastered the Led Zeppelin catalog.
I have all three of those first Zeppelin
remasters sitting about three feet away from
me right now. I was really smoked by what
they did and I've listened to these records
since I was a kid. I know everybody says it,
but I heard new stuff on that that I've never
heard before, and I dig that!
What's your typical workflow? Do you start
with a certain EQ, or a certain signal flow?
Like a sonic recipe? It's kinda weird 'cos I
don't. I want to say jokingly that the way that
I play a mastering console is the same way
I used to play the drums-I sit down behind
it and I react musically to what I hear. It's all
second nature. One of the beauties of working in a room where you know the gear really well is you don't think about "how am I
going to do what I am doing?", instead you
just think "what do I want to do?" and mastering becomes possibilities, not challenges.

A much-in-demand mastering engineer takes our readers to school
Stephen Marsh has a discography that goes on for pages and reads like a Who's
Who of the entertainment world. In addition to mastering everyone from Jars Of Clay
to Keb' Mo', Ben Harper to The Donnas, and Jeff Beck to Los Lobos, his mastering
expertise has graced dozens of film and TV soundtracks like Veronica Mars, X-Men:
Days Of Future Past, Rio 2, and Life Of Pi. We had a great chat with him and learned
his history, his methods, and his suggestions for readers who might want to try mastering themselves.
Can you summarize your background? Where did you get started and how did
you end up with your own place, with your name on the door?
Stephen Marsh: I grew up in New York and I came out to LA when I was 19, knowing nobody, and I answered an ad on a bulletin board for a studio looking for a runner. That was Sony Music Studios. Within about three or four months of being a runner, they let go of the night guy that worked out of the mastering room, and then said
in the proverbial, "Hey, kid, do you want a shot at the big time?" It was just running
tape clones in the middle of the night, but it was cool in that I got to scrutinize and
listen to fully prepped digital album masters of every top engineer that was doing
work for Sony Music Labels at the time.
For the most part, digital cloning consists of data checking, so you can actually
run it through a desk and run some EQ and experiment with things as it runs. I could
listen to the night's playback of the new Pearl Jam record and learn how to hear and
how to understand just exactly what mastering was and what it wasn't. I found that
I sort of had a proclivity for it, so I apprenticed under a guy named David Mitson
and worked for him for about seven years.
At the end of 2001 Sony closed the West Coast operation; two other guys and I
bought out the whole facility and the staff, and we set up a new facility called
Threshold. Then I split off the mastering operation from that. That was about eight
years ago, I guess, and that was where Marsh Mastering started.
So did you do any traditional engineering along the way?
I've kind of always been a mastering guy. I played in bands growing up, and I
was always the techie guy in the band that ran the PA, so that was my experience
with engineering. I was very fortunate to be able to turn that into a career.
44

RECORDING October 2014

So what is Step One when you start a
new project?
We work everything at high res here. So
even if it comes in 16/44.1, the first thing I
do is bump it up with an algorithmic process
to a higher resolution, typically 24/88.2.
This way any digital processing that I do
gets twice the mathematical resolution and
it's captured back at a higher res too after
going through the console. Typically we
work out of Pro Tools and sometimes we use
Prism converters, sometimes we use Burls;
we used to use Apogees as well.
All of my EQ happens before my compression. I don't know if that's "right" or "wrong",
frankly, and I don't really have an opinion-
it's just the way I've always worked.
That seems to be the general consensus
I have found with most mastering engineers I know, EQ > compressor > limiter.
That's ostensibly what I work with these
days. I had a much larger, more elaborate
console in my last place. I've spent the first
ten years of my career adding gear, and
I've sort of spent the last ten years of my
career peeling it away to just the things that
I need. Sometimes you just want to say,
"Well, it needs 8K, and here's the 8K that
I got." The limits sometimes empower you.
We recently pulled all the low res digital
stuff out of the desk. If it doesn't go up to
24/192, I just don't want it in the room. I don't
want bottlenecks, I want to do all the work as
dynamically as I can. I'd rather have everything go up to DSD, but I'm living in a fantasy
world in that regard, I suppose. [laughs]

Recording - October 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - October 2014