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From: Ken Deifik
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 17:35:29 -0800
Subject: Mastering

Last week I posted some thoughts on making the vonBrellas recording. In
this post I recommended mastering your record, forgetting that this is a
little-known part of the record making process.

In a private post, a friend wrote:
>I am not sure I know what "mastering" really is in the sense
>you are talking about.

I replied:

Ah, so grasshopper...

Mastering is little known outside the recording industry, and many people
IN the industry have no idea what it's about. I have a theory that this
obscurity has its roots in the probabilty that, early on, post production
mastering was a trade secret.

Mastering is a step that can and should come between final mixdown and test
pressing. It allows the recording engineer to think about getting a good
sound without having to think about a number of post-production technical
issues. Futher, it allows the engineer to record each tune on its own
terms without having to think "Shit, the sound I'm getting on this tune
might as well be on another planet compared with the sound on the last
tune. And yet the sound on the last tune would sound wrong on this one..."

The work of a mastering engineer is so different from that of a recording
engineer that you rarely see guys who are really great at both. The
equipment is really different, the listening/work space is usually quite
different.

A good mastering engineer has a huge, often proprietary, knowlege of the
interactions of sounds. There are many counterintuitive factors in sound,
and others at cross-purposes to each other. For example, let's say you
have a recording where the quietest passages are 20db and the loudest are
90db, a difference of 70db. You can make this recording sound louder if
you compress the signal so that the loudest and quietest passages are less
than 70db, say 50db. Why this should work, I do not know, but it does.

Well, mastering engineers know millions of little things like that. They
can read a fast fourier transform graph of a recording and know exactly
which frequencies to lower and which to raise in order to bring out and
bring alive all kinds of sonic details that are either covered up or dead
sounding in the original mix.

Among the most important things they do, however, is give the mix a
"finish," as a finish-carpenter might give to a cabinet. And the mastering
engineer will take all the diverse sounds on your various tunes and make
them sound like they are of a piece, without making them sound alike.

Finally, a mastering engineer is a specialist in prepping your tape for CD
and casette replication. The CD master will sound significantly different
from a casette master, because the frequency response and dynamic range is
so much greater on CD.

You can hand a good mix to a CD manufacturer and get back okay results, but
master that mix, your CD will sound much more professional, and almost
certainly closer to what you'd like your listeners to hear. The stuff that
creeps into a mix, or hides within it, pre-mastering, is less like what
you'd want your listeners to hear.

On this notion of trade secrets, a mysterious little story: I was at
Atlantic Records, either on a session or hanging out at someone else's,
back in 1971. Just down the hall from the recording studio is a door
marked DO NOT ENTER. It's serious as a heart attack. Adds to the glamor
and mystique of the place. I was always intrigued by that door. At one
point in this session I head off to the Coke machine and I notice that DO
NOT ENTER is open! I take a quick look inside as I pass. I see a
Turkish-looking man (Atlantic was co-owned by Turks, but this wasn't one of
them) wearing earphones and sitting at a very strange console of knobs and
tape decks.

In front of the console is a large table with a big mic in the middle, and
the mic is surrounded by various loud speakers. In an instant I get the
picture: this must have been how they got the wonderfully distinctive
Atlantic sound (outside of having great singers, inspired song choices,
great studio ensembles and engineers). My sense is that this guy was
prepping (mastering) a track for 45's, albums and such. By varying the
levels and placement of the speakers around the mic he could probably add
that final Atlantic touch that nobody was ever able to duplicate. (Who
knows if that's what that room was really for, but I know what I saw.)

Another famous (and possibly apocryphal) mastering technique was the Motown
Car. Supposedly they tricked out a car so that the mastering engineer and
the producer could play with settings WHILE BEING DRIVEN AROUND CITY
STREETS. They figured that they were selling most of their records from AM
radio play on car radios, so why not optimize for that situation!
Supposedly the real reason the beautiful bass playing (played by this
writer's favorite musician ever, James Jamerson) jumps out so starkly is
because they found that, if mastered just-so, the rumble of the engine
reinforces the bass magically.

>From such beginnings comes modern mastering.

Ken