macc wrote: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
I've had several albums of 128kbps MP3s!
