John Sayers
Solar Power!!
I've just spent the time to read the long long mastering fiasco that I never noticed before because I was cruising around the top end when it occured. This is my slant on the whole process.
One of the first jobs I had in a studio was in 1967 when I had the task of cutting the 30 and 60 sec radio commercials made by the studio to Vinyl. I soon learnt that extreme low end produced big swings in the cutting needle thus taking up a lot of the recording space, so if I wanted to fit all the tracks on the record I had to roll off the low end. I also noticed that tooo much highs caused such variation in the track that the play needle had a job trying to duplicate it. I soon found that I had to make the appropriate compromises to get a decent sounding finished vinyl record. This skill is what most people have learnt to refer to as MASTERING i.e. making the final acetate master which was then copied in reverse to make the Mother for pressing the records.
Everyone wanted their recording to be louder on radio than everyone elses and to achieve this the cutting engineers (as they were refered to in those days) were carefully using EQ to stop excessive needle swings and progressively the sound of recordings changed. The sound got thinner and thinner ( remember Yes!, and The Commodores to name a few) as more low end was removed to make the recordings louder on air and the radio stations were replacing the low end by boosting it at the transmitters and the home listener was adding extra bass through the loudness control, adding sub bass controls etc etc etc.
With the introduction of the CD all the problems of the dic cutter went out the window yet the job of the mastering engineer didn't go away because by then people were realising that mastering engineers were more attuned to understanding the frequency responses of tracks more than others and the mastering engineer remained part of the process.
It is the mastering engineer that makes the mix you did at 2am at the end of a tiring mixing session sound like the one you made at 1pm when fresh.
It is the mastering engineer that helps determine the appropriate space between tracks, put the songs in the predetermined order, checks for phase relationships and generally acts as a final analyser of the finished product and makes any necessary adjustments before it hit the public. It is nice to have that extra experienced opinion, thus the mastering engineer is still a key person in the chain to the final release of what could have been 6 months of work. You get to know your mastering engineer and he/she gets to know you. Gets to know how you like things to sound and works to achieve that.
A typical conversation between myself and a mastering engineer would be:
"so how was it"
"Fine, I added some 10k to track three to match it to the other tracks. The others were fine so I left them alone"
"cool"
cheers
John
One of the first jobs I had in a studio was in 1967 when I had the task of cutting the 30 and 60 sec radio commercials made by the studio to Vinyl. I soon learnt that extreme low end produced big swings in the cutting needle thus taking up a lot of the recording space, so if I wanted to fit all the tracks on the record I had to roll off the low end. I also noticed that tooo much highs caused such variation in the track that the play needle had a job trying to duplicate it. I soon found that I had to make the appropriate compromises to get a decent sounding finished vinyl record. This skill is what most people have learnt to refer to as MASTERING i.e. making the final acetate master which was then copied in reverse to make the Mother for pressing the records.
Everyone wanted their recording to be louder on radio than everyone elses and to achieve this the cutting engineers (as they were refered to in those days) were carefully using EQ to stop excessive needle swings and progressively the sound of recordings changed. The sound got thinner and thinner ( remember Yes!, and The Commodores to name a few) as more low end was removed to make the recordings louder on air and the radio stations were replacing the low end by boosting it at the transmitters and the home listener was adding extra bass through the loudness control, adding sub bass controls etc etc etc.
With the introduction of the CD all the problems of the dic cutter went out the window yet the job of the mastering engineer didn't go away because by then people were realising that mastering engineers were more attuned to understanding the frequency responses of tracks more than others and the mastering engineer remained part of the process.
It is the mastering engineer that makes the mix you did at 2am at the end of a tiring mixing session sound like the one you made at 1pm when fresh.
It is the mastering engineer that helps determine the appropriate space between tracks, put the songs in the predetermined order, checks for phase relationships and generally acts as a final analyser of the finished product and makes any necessary adjustments before it hit the public. It is nice to have that extra experienced opinion, thus the mastering engineer is still a key person in the chain to the final release of what could have been 6 months of work. You get to know your mastering engineer and he/she gets to know you. Gets to know how you like things to sound and works to achieve that.
A typical conversation between myself and a mastering engineer would be:
"so how was it"
"Fine, I added some 10k to track three to match it to the other tracks. The others were fine so I left them alone"
"cool"
cheers
John
