MASTERING/RECORDING
EQIPMENT DIFFERENCES
(We also have our
General Mastering FAQ,
section, as well as our in-depth
Dithering Discussion
that deconstructs this seemingly mysterious process, and some of
my "Studio
Secrets" on my blog.)
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A Little Background First
In all honesty, I think that any recording studio is
short-changing bands when they decide to add "mastering" to
their line of services as an afterthought. Why do I
feel qualified to say this? - Because The Playground was one
of those studios. I am a record producer/engineer at
heart, but I was fascinated with the entire record-making
process, that I sat in on, or "mastered" every record that I
was a part of. This, combined with my live sound
experience mixing for tons of bands in the 90's like Lush,
My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Stone Temple Pilots, Flaming
Lips, and lots more, gave me a unique perspective on sound
production. I wanted to capture that live wall of
sound in the studio, and make sure it didn't get lost in
mastering.
So, after seeing many mastering sessions, I decided to buy
Toast and Wavelab, and offer mastering services at the
Playground. And we made some really nice sounding
records, but I think that I simply got lucky. Why? -
It's always been my theory that a mix isn't ready for
mastering until I feel that it doesn't need any mastering.
As a matter of fact, one of the deep, dark secrets of
records like the Flaming Lips and HUM records I produced,
they didn't actually get any traditional "mastering" applied
to them. The signals were simply boosted as loud as we
could make them, and nothing more.
This is why I think we could get away with offering
mastering services.
But now, as I spent the past 2 years not recording and
mixing bands, but tromping around this planet, and taking a
deep, honest look at who I was, where I was with my career,
and what I truly wanted for my life. I wanted to
explore this every corner of this planet, I wanted to fly
above it and dive beneath its oceans, and I have. But
during that time, sound production never left my mind, and
in fact, I was working harder on the mechanics and the math
of it than I ever did when I was locked in the studio every
day, day after day making music.
This gave me the freedom to test virtually every preamp in
existence, every console, every plug-in, every vintage piece
of gear, and every mastering solution available, including
Wavelab, Peak Bias, Sonic Solutions, Pro Tools, Toast, etc.
The result was a new Playground that has a focus on
mastering, but is even more capable of tracking and mixing
than ever before. I had the luxury to piece together
the exact studio in the exact way I wanted, with the exact
gear I always dreamed of having, especially when it came to
mastering.
During that time, I was also listening more critically than
I ever had before, testing every type of source material I
could, spoke with technical engineers, recording engineers,
mastering engineers, and anyone else who would have a
conversation with my about sound and the equipment that
helps us make it and capture it.
Why Recording Gear is So Different Than Mastering
Gear
The One of the most important things I discovered during
this time, was the vastly different set of equipment that s
required to make music and the gear that's required to
master that music. For me, producing records is far
more "feel" based, where mastering, although it requires the
same kind of creative skill, needs far more math and science
than I ever imagined.
Bob Katz has a paper chart that maps out every frequency and
its corresponding value in Hz, so he can quickly and easily
tune out offending frequencies in masters. But now,
we've got the luxury of PAZ meters from Waves and lots of
other companies, that will analyze your signal for you,
telling you where frequency dips or peaks are, without
having to hum it to yourself, and then look through a long
list of notes and frequencies to isolate it.
Besides these things, though, there is so much that goes
into preserving the chain of signal from its original
waveform to final master, and some of these pieces of gear
required to do it, simply aren't used in normal recording
situations. For example, most studios wouldn't have an
Apogee 200 or a WEISS Convertor lying around when they've
got their favorite preamps and Pro Tools boxes to record
into. When mastering, though, I wouldn't trust
anything to the Pro Tools boxes, and would only run an
analog signal though the Apogee or the WEISS, bypassing the
Pro Tools converters altogether.
And the list goes on and on. There are plug-in bundles
made just for mastering, including specialized de-essers
that go way beyond the capabilities of de-essers built into
Pro Tools, and in fact, WEISS makes a box called the
DS1-MKIII that costs about 8K, and is made mainly as a high
resolution digital de-esser for mastering. There are
Massive Passive boxes that are specifically designed to give
ultra-quite, phase aligned equalization for ultra-critical
situations like mastering.
This also made me realize that "Recording
Engineer <> Mastering Engineer", and although I
think coming at mastering from a music production standpoint
can be a great asset, I think that few have the time or take
the time to explore and master the unique skill set that
mastering requires. I thought I had a critical ear
when mixing...often taking me hours to get through the song
once without having to change a single thing in it.
But it's a completely different kind of critical listening,
and instead of listening for that noise floor and the reverb
trails decay when a signal is dithered from 24-bit to
16-bit, I'm listening to a bigger picture, making sure that
every note, every instrument, every color, level, and pan is
exactly in the place I want it to be. Read the article
just above if you're curious, and read my disturbing article
on the "Studio
Secrets" section of my blog to see why "Digital
Does Analog Better Than Analog Does" if you
dare.
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