Mastering The Art Of Mastering
The “Bangkok Rock Report” by Benny White
There’s a reason you don’t see some fresh-out-of-recording-school whiz-kid in a mastering bay. It not only takes a great set of ears to be a mastering engineer, but years of experience to properly handle this most technical of audio tasks. Mastering pro Bob Ludwig delivers priceless advice for any artist about to put the “final touches” to their recordings.
As a mastering engineer, Grammy winner Bob Ludwig has worked with so many of the greats (including Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and U2 to name a few) that a tally of his non-clients would likely be shorter than that of his actual clients. Legends such as Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones and the Who are on his short list. The Gateway website has a more comprehensive roster. Ludwig got into the business in 1967 and worked at a variety of plants until founding Gateway Mastering Studios in 1993. This year he’ll chair the Platinum Mastering panel at the Audio Engineering Society Convention in New York. Here’s a scoop of insights from “the master of masters”.
Choosing An Engineer
A lot of times it’s the producer or A&R department that chooses. Big artists that are also co-producers get involved. Very often (band) managers or recording engineers do the choosing.
Prepare to Master
Definitely have everything sequenced together because that will cut down on the amount of time that the studio project takes. At least with us, we charge by the hour so if everything’s already sequenced and you have the correct gaps between the songs, things will go a lot smoother than if we have to plow through a pile of one-inch tapes. The other thing is to have listened to your flat mixes in as many places as possible and come in with a critique of what you’d like to hear done to them.
“Sometimes mixers take a perfectly good mix and purposely ruin it - in my opinion - in order to get sheer level instead of artistry.”
Artist Input
Artists should have maximum input because it’s their record and they’re the artist. Unfortunately, A&R people end up having more input than the artist does, unless they’re high-profile. On the other hand, many artists are doing their first record; they’re inexperienced and the A&R people - if they’re good - can add some really valuable input. It’s a balance.
The artists should walk away feeling that the record met their artistic intent and the A&R person should feel like they’ve got the first single.
DIY Mastering
The people I work with wouldn’t dream of mastering their own stuff. But unfortunately with the level wars today you hear stories of famous A&R people who keep their playback level control in one position and refuse to move it. Some routinely reject mixes from the engineers if they aren’t already kind of pre-mastered, which is just a crime, but that is what’s going on. Sometimes mixers take a perfectly good mix and purposely ruin it — in my opinion — in order to get sheer level instead of artistry. That’s probably one of the reasons why the record industry is suffering as much as it is.
Led Zeppelin II, Band of Gypsys
When I did the master of Led Zeppelin II with Eddie Kramer I never dreamt that almost 40 years later it would still be on the radio and keeping new bands off the radio. If you look back 40 years from that album, the music of the time was like Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. The music really evolved a lot 40 years before Zeppelin II and it hasn’t really evolved all that much since.
Achieving Musicality
The purpose of the mastering engineer is to get as much musicality out of the tape as possible. If the tape comes in sounding like dog meat, sometimes with our magic we can make it at least sound normal. But you get a record like All This Useless Beauty that Geoff Emmerick (engineer) and I did with Elvis Costello. It was so perfect I felt I needed to get out of the way of the record and just let it be because it was so beautiful. Sometimes something comes in and you say, “Wow, this is really perfect the way it is. Don’t touch it.”
Fortunately for us, 99.9 percent of the time that’s not true. Sometimes the trick is having a room full of gear and doing nothing.
Big Changes
I hope people get over this stupid level addiction at the cost of artistry. Hopefully the industry will grow up a little and people will make records that sound good. A friend of mine — Doug Sax, a great mastering engineer — said “You should never master anything that you don’t think you’ll be proud to hear in five years.” On the other hand, the artists and producers are our clients and you need to make them happy. Part of what a great mastering engineer can do is to make a record that’s competitively loud and yet still not cross the boundary of where it’s loud for loudness’ sake.
Certainly we’re going to see better interface, I hope. Mastering is a very creative step. We don’t want what we have today: little plug-ins with these little interfaces. You’ve got to stop what you’re doing and put your glasses on to read the small print to figure out what knob to move two millimeters. That takes you out of your artistic flow.
For years I’ve been looking forward to equalizers that are based on keys so you can enter the key signature of the song you’re working on. The equalizer will equalize according to the overtone structure of the notes in that key.
Radio, Clubs & Digital Devices
The digital device is similar to the compact disc. Any 128 kilobit AAC stream, if you compare it to what’s going in, is pretty much ruler-flat. There’s nothing you need to prepare in advance for it. With those things it just doesn’t have the resolution that a master has. The only thing that’s missing in the 128KB AAC files is some of the musicality that’s in the master tape. It reproduces the exact level you give it; it reproduces the exact dynamic range and frequency response. Basically, if it’s good for compact disc, it’s good for the iPod.
For radio, there’s a great irony. A&R people, when they expect things for radio, want them very loud and compressed. But Bob Orban, who makes the modulators for FM radio stations, says that’s the last thing you should do; he says FM modulators don’t like highly compressed, squished signals. They do their own compression.
If you’re doing something for a club, it’s kind of the opposite: It’s something that’s going to be played on a huge system. You would only compress as much as needed for musical reasons. With clubs, you’d want to have subsonics and things that go down really low. Different formats do get treated differently.
Final Advice
If you want to try mastering yourself, there’s a plethora of plug-ins out there and they can really take your focus off what you’re trying to do. I suggest choosing just a few really high-quality plug-ins like Waves’ Renaissance, George Massenburg Labs’ equalizers or Oxford plugins. Limit yourself to a few of those until you really learn what they all sound like. The secret to becoming a great mastering engineer is that you can hear a raw tape, instantly imagine what it should sound like and know what knobs to move to make it sound that way.
For more information visit: www.gatewaymastering.com