Mastering - Oh no not again!!

[John Sayers]

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

[Uladine]

extra bass through the loudness control, adding sub bass controls etc etc etc.

So the thinness of vinyl recordings must be why all those old "garage sale" stereos sound so powerful playing CD's.

My dad bought me an old stereo from the 70's with all these EQ knobs and different functions for $10 at a garage sale and it sounds way better than many of these $800 and up stereos that they make today. Go figure.

[Downside Studio]

I had to transfer a recording on vinyl to cd. I had to borrow a player because I don't own one anymore. After trying for 10 minutes to get the damn thing rotating I gave up and thought the machine had passed away. My studiopartner who is a little older said this was common use, and probably the rubberband was loose. He repaired it within 20sec. I myself would have never gotten the idea of how to fix this. Man do these things fade away fast. I wish I could 'repair' of fix all my equipment this easy when it fails.

[John Sayers]

Allan Parsons. Behind the Glass by Howard Massey. Page 111.

I'm perhaps a litle old-fashioned in that repect I don't see the point of going to a mastering room, expecting to transform the project from what you had in the studio. What I want to hear from the mastering engineer is, "I think it sounds fine; I don't want to do anything to it." If he has suggestions, I'll go with them; a mastering engineer listens to a lot more records than I do , so he knows what to expect. But I think people wrongly go into a mastering room thinking, "Oh, let's try a bit of compression; let's try a bit of drastic EQ"

cheers
John

[CyanJaguar]

Originally posted by John Sayers


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

Cool post John.

I'm just wondering if the 10k boost on track three was worth the US$5000-7000 price

[John Sayers]

Maybe if he'd said - Track three was OK but I rolled 10K off the rest I might have got my monies worth. I did used to send tracks to the US for mastering at great expense, but that was cos you guys knew how to cut to vinyl louder and better than we did. That was why we imported your versions of recordings. Don't need that service anymore. In fact it's sortta turned around, you now send your movies to us to make

cheers
JOhn

[atomictoyz]

Originally posted by CyanJaguar


Cool post John.

I'm just wondering if the 10k boost on track three was worth the US$5000-7000 price

What John failed to point out was the reason the Mastering engineer only said he did a lil boost to track three is because the other technicalities are probably of no interest to John. Does John want to know how long the data transfer took, if there were format discontinuities? Does John care about how many passes it took to be sure it was only a boost at 10k on one song? How about clicks and pops or dropouts...? How about how many patches were made until the signal chain was optimized for the material? I can guarantee that the mastering engineer did way more than turn a knob clockwise once. When you ask a brain surgen what he did during the operation, you get the most simplified answer you can understand without information overdose, "we removed the tumor successfully". Im not saying John isn't capable of understanding or caring, Im saying he told John what was pertinent to John, Just like if a drummer asked a question about mic placement he wouldn't get a dissertation on Polar patterns of pre-war vintage tube mics from Germany.


Its Monday and my Unix server has crashed...

Peace,
Dennis

[CyanJaguar]

Originally posted by atomictoyz


What John failed to point out was the reason the Mastering engineer only said he did a lil boost to track three is because the other technicalities are probably of no interest to John. Does John want to know how long the data transfer took, if there were format discontinuities? Does John care about how many passes it took to be sure it was only a boost at 10k on one song? How about clicks and pops or dropouts...? How about how many patches were made until the signal chain was optimized for the material? I can guarantee that the mastering engineer did way more than turn a knob clockwise once. When you ask a brain surgen what he did during the operation, you get the most simplified answer you can understand without information overdose, "we removed the tumor successfully". Im not saying John isn't capable of understanding or caring, Im saying he told John what was pertinent to John, Just like if a drummer asked a question about mic placement he wouldn't get a dissertation on Polar patterns of pre-war vintage tube mics from Germany.


Its Monday and my Unix server has crashed...

Peace,
Dennis

The bottom line is that he only needed to apply boost at 10k on track three. Does not matter if he used a million dollars worth of equipment to do it.

Anyhow, the point is, is a 10k boost on track three worth $5000-7000? Not to me, but to some people it might.

[atomictoyz]

I agree the bottom line is a 10k boost...Thats a heck of a Eq... I wonder how much of the cost is a attributed to the gear addiction....Oh..man...I really want that API strip.....

Would the $7000 tweak be worth it if you your job as a competitive artist in the BillBoard top 100 depended on it...?

Its all relative to your sense of value...I could never pay $7000 for anything other than a house or a car because of my vaulue system. My wife freaked out when I ordered my YSM-1's because her value system... I can't afford to pay for anyones opinion except a doctors or a lawyers opinion....


Peace,
Dennis

[John Sayers]

Does John want to know how long the data transfer took, if there were format discontinuities? Does John care about how many passes it took to be sure it was only a boost at 10k on one song? How about clicks and pops or dropouts...? How about how many patches were made until the signal chain was optimized for the material? I can guarantee that the mastering engineer did way more than turn a knob clockwise once.

No you can't - do you think I would send a track to mastering with clicks, pops and dropouts??

cheers
John

[atomictoyz]

Originally posted by John Sayers


No you can't - do you think I would send a track to mastering with clicks, pops and dropouts??

Sorry John, I wasn't trying to say you would, or have for that matter, sent a 2 track to a mastering engineer with clicks, pops or drop outs. My guarantee wasn't specific to that problem which does happen in some cases. My "guarantee" is meant to show that mastering is not merely adjusting the knob of some dynamic processing tools. If all the mastering engineer did was a 10k boost, how did the 2 track tape get onto the acetate master? True, there are mixes that need absolutely no dynamic processing, but there are lots of other things that are needed to be done to finish the job. Im probably wrong though, I will take my guarantee back and say John's or Johns Client paid someone to turn one knob 15 degrees clockwise once :0) at a cost of $300 per hour.
Whew!

Peace,
Dennis

[John Sayers]

Peace to you also
my point is that you don't need an acetate master anymore.

cheers
John

[Gidge]

i dont wanna put words in your mouth, but could part of your point be to not leave part of making the track sound good to the mastering engineer...thats not what hes there for...as a mixing engineer it is your job to get the best possible mix possible...if the mastering engineer has to do anything substantial to the track, it coulda been mixed better........

well recorded tracks virtually mix themselves....

well mixed tracks dont need mastering......

if you gotta ask, go to a pro studio.........

[atomictoyz]

Originally posted by John Sayers
my point is that you don't need an acetate master anymore.

I thought this would be true also, a few weeks ago, I read an article about the high demand of vinyl due in part of the rappers and scratchers. There is one guy, his name escapes me, that still uses and has made some improvment to the cutters, allowing much higher voltages than before. He has blown cutter heads that have cost him upwards of $15,000 to refurbish. His business operates almost completely as a vinyl mastering facility, he has something like 6 cutters.

Sounds like an opportunity John... See if you can find some bargain cutters and dust off your ustacoulda's, there is money to be made, rappers to be satisfied. Is there alot of rappers in Australia that need help?

Its seems to me, that guys who are from the vinyl era prior to CD's still are able to produce a better product. Is it because you needed a good understanding of how a small change in decibels can be devastating when poragated through a high voltage machine. The new guys don't appreciate dynamic range very much...

Peace,
Dennis

[John Sayers]

Yup - that has been suggested tome Atomictoyz but in reality cutting discs all day is BORING!!! I know, I've done it.

cheers
John