How were most famouse hit tracks mastered

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panax_27

Member
Throughout the decades were most hit songs typically mastered by making the final track brighter or clearer or did they typically put a smooth glaze over a brighter sounding mix? i know they were done both ways but my question is how would of the "best" sounding tracks typically be done in the end? Thanks
 
panax_27 said:
Throughout the decades were most hit songs typically mastered by making the final track brighter or clearer or did they typically put a smooth glaze over a brighter sounding mix? i know they were done both ways but my question is how would of the "best" sounding tracks typically be done in the end? Thanks
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Great question, would love to know more myself!
 
The products that came out of the studios were the best they could manage for the market of the day. I’ve no idea what yo7 mean by this smooth glaze stuff? I’ve never heard people ever list this kind of thing as an aim? I’ve never heard of these two kinds of mixes? It’s a very strange concept. You’d have a sort of sound for each genre. Some have changed over the years, some haven’t. Look at rock as a genre. Listen to early Deep Purple, then the remastered stuff done twenty years later. Tastes changed. Disco seemed to stay static. Once we had EDM in the various styles, we had a new standard, and it went on. Brighter, clearer or ‘glaze’ whatever that is might be a producer or performer aim, but tastes change, and now we seem to have a quality quest again. Best can’t be measured without relating to preferences, and they keep shifting.
 
Maybe I can help make the question more... appealing to the aficionados :-)

What goes into the mastering process? What effects are considered "mastering effects", especially in a way that they aren't used in "mixing"? How is a mastered cut different from a pre-master mix?
 
LazerBeakShiek said:

How were most famouse hit tracks mastered?​


Loud. They are mixed to be loud.
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This is it, really.
During the loudness wars, I wondered what in the world people were fighting about. Singles were processed to be loud for impact and during the late 50s and early 60s, British artists drooled at the mouth as to how American pressed records were always so loud while over here the sounds were rather anaemic. Since very early on in the annals of recorded music, the equation "Loud=best" was more pervasive than anything Einstein ever gave the world of science.
 
It depends which decade you are asking about. Mastering to vinyl was mostly about getting the music to fit within the limitations of the record. There was always a tradeoff between low frequencies and loudness and the amount of playing time that could exist on a disk. Then there was adjusting the phase and monoing the low end, so the needle wouldn't jump out of the groove. On top of that, trying not to make it sound bad was another priority.
 
Farview said:
It depends which decade you are asking about. Mastering to vinyl was mostly about getting the music to fit within the limitations of the record.
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they had to pay attention double. They even had to adjust for what part of the LP record , the inner or outer layers, would compress different.
 
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I never remember hearing about ANY mastering engineer saying that they were trying to degrade the sound of any record. They tried to get the best sound they could get within the limitations of the cutting process (we're talking records here, not CD or streaming). Farview is right on the money. Get the record as loud as you can without having the stylus jump from the groove, not distort (especially on the inner grooves) and keep the highs trackable by a stylus. Oh yeah and apply the RIAA EQ curve.

What kind of lengths did they go to? How about half speed mastering so that they could have more leeway when cutting the grooves. Direct to disc so that you didn't have to accept the degradation and noise that you got with tape generations. A standard record was 23 minutes/side max. People would sometimes push it for a few extra minutes, so the recording level would drop and surface noise would start to intrude.

A good mastering engineer would have a idea what level they would need, and how much compression they might need to use, add a touch of EQ. Places like Doug Sax's The Mastering Lab had hand built electronics to make sure things had the utmost in clarity. Bob Ludwig said the most important thing was to make sure every second of the record sounded as good as possible. Bernie Grundman, original mastering engineer for A&M studios, mastered over a hundred gold albums. Stuff like Steely Dan, The Carpenters on up to present day digital stuff. He makes a distinction between popular music (making it competitively loud) and classical and jazz, (making it sound natural).

This whole digital mastering dance (adding grunge, lo-fi, loudness wars, etc) is for the most part the antithesis of what mastering was in the 50s to 80s.
 
People have it right here. I remember finishing mixing a band and sending the 2track off for duplication, and getting it rejected because they could not handle the bass part of the mix. The mastering engineer I paid to sort it somehow kept the bass up, but apparently my mix would have popped the stylus out of the groove!

Now the only important thing is making sure itunes, spotify, youtube and the others don't mangle it - a that's level based. It's not mastering in the old sense at all.
 
rob aylestone said:
The products that came out of the studios were the best they could manage for the market of the day. I’ve no idea what yo7 mean by this smooth glaze stuff? I’ve never heard people ever list this kind of thing as an aim? I’ve never heard of these two kinds of mixes? It’s a very strange concept. You’d have a sort of sound for each genre. Some have changed over the years, some haven’t. Look at rock as a genre. Listen to early Deep Purple, then the remastered stuff done twenty years later. Tastes changed. Disco seemed to stay static. Once we had EDM in the various styles, we had a new standard, and it went on. Brighter, clearer or ‘glaze’ whatever that is might be a producer or performer aim, but tastes change, and now we seem to have a quality quest again. Best can’t be measured without relating to preferences, and they keep shifting.
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its just like a glazed donut... you can still see the donut underneath it but doesnt hide it, meaning make it warmer sounding but still clear sounding, without putting chocolate (mud) over to cover it up the transients. i make up my own words because people say very general things that people misunderstand. its not a strange concept in the old days peolpe recorded very bright and loud and put onto tape and if it muddied it up then they make it clearer later on and then final product would put a very light smoth warm glaze to polish up any sharp sounds. seems like its a lost art, i cant stand todays muddy muffled songs and im a young guy. you notice how remastered always sounds sharp and hollow compared to the originals? seems like nowadays people ty to cover up things with mud be it a mucky sounding interface/microphone (so many options today) or bad eq desicion or simply a bad sounding recording. i cant listen to a bad recording even if the song is good sometimes these days and thats why iv come to talk about it finally on here i listen to a lot of old music and quickly switch back to new stuff on flat sounding headphones to hear the difference. the older stuff tends to be more focused sounding, and im not saying the old recordings sound better perfect or "better" but nowadays things seem to focus on eq rather then the fundamental sound.
 
Serendipity Records said:
Maybe I can help make the question more... appealing to the aficionados :-)

What goes into the mastering process? What effects are considered "mastering effects", especially in a way that they aren't used in "mixing"? How is a mastered cut different from a pre-master mix?
Click to expand...

yeah all that stuff im really interested actually how they used to do it as opposed to how they do it now.... how were your favorite records typically mastered?
 
rob aylestone said:
People have it right here. I remember finishing mixing a band and sending the 2track off for duplication, and getting it rejected because they could not handle the bass part of the mix. The mastering engineer I paid to sort it somehow kept the bass up, but apparently my mix would have popped the stylus out of the groove!

Now the only important thing is making sure itunes, spotify, youtube and the others don't mangle it - a that's level based. It's not mastering in the old sense at all.
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oh i see what kind of moniters are you currently using? are you using an interface or a board?
 
One of the problems is using terminology like making something "warm", "fat", having "bloom", adding "glue" putting a "glaze" on it, etc. It really doesn't describe something accurately. It's almost meaningless from an audio standpoint. In the audiophile community the favorite phrase is "as if the veils were removed" when they describe the latest/greatest piece of gear. But you hear it, repeat it, the magazine articles say it and it becomes fact. Everybody knows it, and if you don't hear it, you're either deaf or have an untrained ear. Or maybe the description doesn't fit the sound.

I find the same thing when people describe foods. They use flowery language, "this bourbon has notes of strawberry, tobacco and leather".. seriously? It got corn, barley, rye and aged in charred oak. It sounds impressive. It says "I have such developed senses that I smell and taste things that aren't' there!" Personally, I've never tasted a bourbon with strawberry or leather and I've tasted a LOT of bourbons (although some might have been improved by being served in an old shoe!).

So much music today is squashed to make it sound big, loud and impressive. There's little in terms of dynamic range. Louder is better becomes the mantra. One would think that the advent of the CD with 90dB S/N and high def streaming with 24 bit/192k would bring recordings that use the range to preserve the dynamics. Instead we went the opposite direction. Vinyl records were compressed because you had maybe 60dB S/N with good vinyl, 50 or less with recycled. Channel separation was maybe 20dB at 1K, less at high frequencies and bass was rendered in mono. Why do we have CDs with 20dB dynamic range?

I'm not sure what you mean when you say people recorded very bright and loud and put onto tape and if it muddied it up then they make it clearer later on and then final product would put a very light smoth warm glaze to polish up any sharp sounds. Are you speaking of transient information? EQ? It really doesn't make sense to me. Producers in the past worked hard to make sure that the master tape they produced was generally clear, balanced and cohesive. Sounds were adjusted and blended. Bad recordings weren't "fixed" to sound clear and snappy. The goal was to have good tracks to work with.

Bad recordings rarely reached the final product stage, although there are exceptions. One of my favorite "bad recordings" is Go Now by the Moody Blues. It's incredibly distorted. But it's an outstanding song, went to #1 in the UK and 10 in the US. Of course when it was released, you probably listened on a 45 record player with a 4" speaker, or on the car AM radio. A little distortion didn't matter.

As to why you don't think today's remasters don't sound good, well, it can be several things. There's the matter of taste. I'm sure the person doing the remaster thinks it sounds better. Most analog/vinyl recordings have less high frequency content and softer transients than today's digital recordings. Maybe he was trying to add that back via some fancyEQ, but then it can sound bright, so you pump up the lows and low mids. If your perspective is compressed bright digital recordings, then you'll try to make the new master sound like that. Maybe the reproduction system emphasized a sound that is different from yours.
 
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Monitors wise, Celestion, from a long time ago, and I know them very well. When one dies, I shall be really stuck, and have to relearn everything. Interfaces for me are a Tascam 8 input, a Presonus 8 input or a Midas M32 with ‘the Midas famous preamps’. It rarely gets connected unless I need all the inputs. I can hear bad preamps and interfaces, but once they do a good job, I simply cannot tell my listening which device created a track.

one thing about the hifi folk that always leaves me smiling are the ‘improvements‘ certain products offer when few of their essentials were ever used in the studios that generated their source material?
 
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Probably worth doing a bit of research starting with

George Peckham - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

and then Dennis Blackham

Skye mastering - history

Audio CD mastering and E-mastering from the Isle of Skye. History
www.skyemastering.com

Between them they've produced some very decent cuts over the last 50 years.

I've also had the chance to compare production masters with the original first generation masters that the mastering engineer would have worked from in the vinyl days. The production master was nearly always more compressed with the high end slightly rolled off in order to accommodate the limitations of the cutting process.
 
TalismanRich said:
One of the problems is using terminology like making something "warm", "fat", having "bloom", adding "glue" putting a "glaze" on it, etc. It really doesn't describe something accurately. It's almost meaningless from an audio standpoint. In the audiophile community the favorite phrase is "as if the veils were removed" when they describe the latest/greatest piece of gear. But you hear it, repeat it, the magazine articles say it and it becomes fact. Everybody knows it, and if you don't hear it, you're either deaf or have an untrained ear. Or maybe the description doesn't fit the sound.

I find the same thing when people describe foods. They use flowery language, "this bourbon has notes of strawberry, tobacco and leather".. seriously? It got corn, barley, rye and aged in charred oak. It sounds impressive. It says "I have such developed senses that I smell and taste things that aren't' there!" Personally, I've never tasted a bourbon with strawberry or leather and I've tasted a LOT of bourbons (although some might have been improved by being served in an old shoe!).

So much music today is squashed to make it sound big, loud and impressive. There's little in terms of dynamic range. Louder is better becomes the mantra. One would think that the advent of the CD with 90dB S/N and high def streaming with 24 bit/192k would bring recordings that use the range to preserve the dynamics. Instead we went the opposite direction. Vinyl records were compressed because you had maybe 60dB S/N with good vinyl, 50 or less with recycled. Channel separation was maybe 20dB at 1K, less at high frequencies and bass was rendered in mono. Why do we have CDs with 20dB dynamic range?

I'm not sure what you mean when you say people recorded very bright and loud and put onto tape and if it muddied it up then they make it clearer later on and then final product would put a very light smoth warm glaze to polish up any sharp sounds. Are you speaking of transient information? EQ? It really doesn't make sense to me. Producers in the past worked hard to make sure that the master tape they produced was generally clear, balanced and cohesive. Sounds were adjusted and blended. Bad recordings weren't "fixed" to sound clear and snappy. The goal was to have good tracks to work with.

Bad recordings rarely reached the final product stage, although there are exceptions. One of my favorite "bad recordings" is Go Now by the Moody Blues. It's incredibly distorted. But it's an outstanding song, went to #1 in the UK and 10 in the US. Of course when it was released, you probably listened on a 45 record player with a 4" speaker, or on the car AM radio. A little distortion didn't matter.

As to why you don't think today's remasters don't sound good, well, it can be several things. There's the matter of taste. I'm sure the person doing the remaster thinks it sounds better. Most analog/vinyl recordings have less high frequency content and softer transients than today's digital recordings. Maybe he was trying to add that back via some fancyEQ, but then it can sound bright, so you pump up the lows and low mids. If your perspective is compressed bright digital recordings, then you'll try to make the new master sound like that. Maybe the reproduction system emphasized a sound that
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Yeah I agree thats why I make up my own words like smooth glaze rather then warm and good traction meaning clear and precise sounding...

What I mean is that in the 1960s amp were loud and bright and tape and analog consoles and microphones was smooth and warm and added a little color im not even talking eq and compression. I agree you have to get it right from the start . That's what u mean when I say you can't polish a turd . I never said degrade . Thats not the goal. Get it right from the start I totally agree with that. That's the whole problem these days in my opinion with modern recordings. And the reason why i think remastered almost always sounds worse is the gear and adding excess eq and loudness
 
That's a common modern viewpoint that isn't really based around what really happened. In the 60s, frequency responses of so much gear was based around full ranbge speakers, or at best a small HF driver with a single capacitor to filter off the bass - the bass drivers were rarely limited by components, and were just left to do their own HF roll off. Hiss was the enemy, so HF wasn't really wanted. Often it was available, but simply not wanted because it sounded nasty. Higher power systems often had quite harsh top end - which also meant the top end was unwanted. I remember a person in a studio complaining angrily about the tinny sound, and being told - that is treble!!

I think it's just genre and fashion. Now we want detailed HF, in the 60s, we didn't. Designs of gear cater for the buyers.

The only snag with making your own words up is that only one person knows what you mean? I get warm, and harsh, but colour is lost on me. I think I know what it is - but to me it's probably nice distortion?
 
Serendipity Records said:
Maybe I can help make the question more... appealing to the aficionados :-)

What goes into the mastering process? What effects are considered "mastering effects", especially in a way that they aren't used in "mixing"? How is a mastered cut different from a pre-master mix?
Click to expand...
No matter how well a Mix is done - they often have some parts or frequencies that are errant - Mastering is just putting the final touch on a recording - Mastering Engineers use highly surgical and specialized EQs and Compression - when there were Records and CDs it was much more critical that you got all the elements right - People who are mixing could do the Master - but it is ear fatiguing and they often need a clean set of ears in a different environment to get it right - these days - Mastering has taken on a bit different task - that is to make things louder or more dynamic - but when you are in the digital world - and I know I going to catch flack about this - but tracks don't often have to be mastered in order to be released - they often won't be as good as it gets - but then again few people are after that anymore.
 
I think you hit it. The traditional Mastering Engineer (in real world job title) had the ears to make quality judgments based on the current sound of good quality - a judgement call by a skilled person one step away from the studio. Now, with no restriction on content, a competent producer gets a good result - perhaps not truly wonderful, but good enough. The person with the ability to improve it can be squeezed out. The person who recorded, mixed and mastered it producing a decent enough product. The major labels still know what these people do and use them. A sort of unappreciated job role now.
 
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