First mastering session

[staticcast]

Tomorrow morning I'm sitting in on my first mastering session (as in, for the first time, someone else is mastering my tracks and I'll be there). Any tips from the pros? I'd imagine I'll mostly just be sitting there and letting him do his thing - it's Rashad Becker at D&M so I have faith. But if anyone who's been there before has any suggestions on what could make the session go more smoothly or give a better end result, I'd love to hear 'em (apart from the obvious shit like don't put anything on the master bus and keep your subs in mono).

I've supplied full mixdowns, mixdowns without drums, and mixdowns of drums only, just in case they come in handy. Anything else?

[deadly_habit]

heh give me a min gonna go scan the last page of this months tape op

[deadly_habit]

[staticcast]

ha, nice

[DJ Crackle]

"Thank you for sending me your records for mastering. The mixes were
128 kbps MP3s"


LOL'd right in the middle of my phone call here at work.

[paravrais]

"convincing the deaf that they can hear is unnecessary XD

Full of win.

[krispy]

wow what an opportunity
you are lucky you get to do such a thing, sounds very interesting

[decree]

that was a very funny read thru, thank you deadly !
i laughed out loud as well (also at work)

[Sharmaji]

reading my mind, deadly.

let him do his job and ask questions in a non-nagging way. most ME's love to talk shop.

[macc]

That thing got a big LOL here I've had several albums of 128kbps MP3s!

@ the OP - make sure the coffee is good, that's most important. MEs have a sort of unspoken 'best coffee competition' thing going on

Seriously though, if you're sitting there and aren't sure about something, just ask. It could be 'what does that knob do?', or more importantly if you aren't totally into something he does, then don't be afraid to tell him. It's his studio, but it's your music.

Just enjoy it man! I remember my first session, ahhhh.... those were the days.

[DJ Crackle]

Seriously though, if you're sitting there and aren't sure about something, just ask. It could be 'what does that knob do?', or more importantly if you aren't totally into something he does, then don't be afraid to tell him. It's his studio, but it's your music.

Yeah, I don't know much about the mastering side of things, but that's some basic solid information.
Give him time to develop what he's doing, though. I'd assume that's pretty obvious, but I know I've been in a studio where someone keeps talking about how something doesn't sound quite right, as the sound is being tweaked. It was just really disruptive. hahah.

[macc]

most ME's love to talk shop.

[macc]

How'd you get on man?

Come on! Spill the beans!

[staticcast]

How'd you get on man?

Come on! Spill the beans!

Great. It was really, really educational. If you ever have the opportunity to sit in on a mastering session with a really good engineer in a really good room, it's totally worth taking. I'd venture to say it's worth keeping it local if there's someone good in your city, just for the purposes of being there yourself.

It's interesting how much mastering seemed like really intricate audio surgery -- finding the peak of the kick just so he could cut it out and pin it down temporarily, in order for it not to get in the way while he examined the rest of the spectrum with a really narrow bandpass and cut those bits out as well. And then vice versa. Constantly and very quickly flicking between M/S, different parts of the song, different listening levels, original/master, comparing all the time. It's a really, really intricate process -- for sure, I will never ever skimp on mastering in future now that I know how involved it can be. There is an absolute world of difference between what I saw yesterday and "a bit of EQ, compression and PSP vintage warmer". IMHO there's no point paying for mastering at all unless you're paying someone who really knows what they're doing.

Rashad's approach is totally musical - it's about bringing out or softening specific musical elements and instruments within the track. He doesn't think about level at all. He A/Bs by matching the perceived level of the most central instrument or part -- eg the snare drum in The Goose That Got Away -- more than anything else (perceived overall level, RMS, peak level, etc). And it's not about "this seems a bit bassy" or "let's have a bit more 800Hz", it's more stuff like "the whole track is carried by the sub but it has a very constant sustain and not very much punch, let's fix that specifically". After listening to the song dry for the first time, the first thing he asked was "how does this compare to what you'd usually expect to hear from this track?". It was a pretty salient question -- listening to the track in a heavily treated room with two of the most enormous Genelecs I'd ever seen made me feel like I'd painted an intricate painting wearing someone else's blurry glasses, and that I'd only ended up in the right ballpark by fluke. I guess he gets that a lot. You hear EVERYTHING in there, and I mean everything, to the point where it's easy to be a bit embarrassed about peaks and glitches you never realised were there. Funnily enough, while the difference between the premaster and the master was like night and day in the studio, as soon as I got home I did the A/B comparison again and could barely hear the difference. Moral of that story: room treatment (and good monitoring to start with) is EVERYTHING. I've got a pair of VXT8s - decent monitors - but still felt totally blind compared to listening in the mastering studio.

I think it's also worth sticking to the same studio and/or ME for more than one session. When he'd finished working on Tinderbox it felt to me like the sub wasn't prominent enough and he happily obliged my request to turn it up a bit -- but then I got home and realised that actually he was probably right. Morals of THAT story: a) have a go-to engineer and studio, so that you too can get to know the characteristics of the room and the rig, b) bring some of your own reference material, and your own cans, and don't be afraid to ask to check things on them, and c) you might be paying the bills, but if you know you've got a good engineer, then sometimes it's best to trust the judgement of someone who's worked in that studio for many years and knows how it translates.

Finally, if you're cutting to vinyl, I think it's really worthwhile going to a mastering house that does its own cuts (assuming it's a good enough mastering house that they do a lot of test cutting). Rashad would set a bit of the track on loop and test cut the signal at various points on the record with various groove depths and configurations, constantly checking the playback to see how the signal was reproduced depending on the settings. At 33rpm, for example, the difference in high frequency response between the start (outside) and end (inside) of the record is really NOT subtle and this has to be taken into account. The playback artifacts and distortion - particularly on a DJ cartridge (which isn't designed for fidelity) - are also not subtle, and sometimes it's necessary to make changes to the master (especially in the high end) in order that the signal you get on playback is as close as possible to the original. Sometimes, on the other hand, the distortion you get is desirable, and it turns out you can master with that in mind too -- for example, the hats on The Goose That Got Away have a small amount of subharmonic distortion when you listen back to the vinyl, and a bit of added stereo width because of the way the needle doesn't quite track the groove. The bottom line is that vinyl is a very physical medium with considerable limitations, and on the recording end, the audio is subject to change at just about every point up until it's cut to the master lacquer. IMHO that's why it's worth supervising this process and feeding it back into the mastering stage, rather than sending your digital masters to the pressing plant and having the acetates cut there. At least you know that once the master lacquer is cut, that's what's going on the record - the pressing after that is just a cloning process.

For anyone interested, I'd thoroughly recommend reading the interview that Rashad did with Robert Henke a few years back. It's a really enlightening read and made me feel very comfortable working with him:

http://www.monolake.de/interviews/mastering.html

and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend him (or Lupo) at D&M if you've got the budget. Their discographies speak for themselves. They're not cheap - for 2-track 12" single factor in about an hour to 1.5 hours of studio time at 120 euros an hour - but if you're a label pressing a record yourself, then an extra 50-100 euros is negligible on top of the 1000 or so it costs to press 400 records.

http://www.dubplates-mastering.com

Anyway, here are the finished products (sorry for the spam):

Soundcloud
Soundcloud

Wow. Long post. I'm out.

TJ

[deadly_habit]

good read and tunes

[staticcast]

EDIT: oops, meant to edit, not reply

[DJ Crackle]

Fucking jealous. I really want to watch some good mastering at work now.

[FSTZ]

hey static_cast

why the name change?

[staticcast]

hey static_cast

why the name change?

I've never released anything as static_cast and it's a pretty shit name so I figured I may as well jump ship. It doesn't really work for anything other than really clinical techno, I think. Also.... because I don't have any particular bullshitty statement to make with this combination of tracks -- it's not like they tell a story or anything -- I kind of liked the idea of keeping artist and label one and the same, and just stamping "OBJEKT #1" on this record and putting it out. (It's not an anonymity statement or whatever, like the slew of anonymous techno whitelabels that've been coming out recently; they're just gonna be DJ records with two tracks I made. Each release is its own thing.)

[FSTZ]

noted!