From Ohm to Om — The ZenMastering Blog

I’ve blogged before about drums, as well as had an article published in EQ magazine about how to more successfully record them.

I’m thinking about drums now because I just did a sample for a potential client. It’s a good recording, but two things made it tough. First, it’s HEAVY stuff. Second, the cymbals were eq’d pretty heavily on the bright side.

These two things don’t go together well. The more you squeeze (smash) a mix in mastering, the brighter and edgier it gets…and the more it breaks up on the high frequencies. So, if you’re starting with an already “trashy” cymbal sound, you’re in trouble.

Honestly, I don’t really care how people record drums. There are various good ways for different styles of music. But learn how to get a good drum sound without processing. It’s going to make your mixes (no matter what style of music you record) sound more professional.

People say that the era of the album is over. That all anyone wants or needs is a single. This may be true from a marketing perspective but musicians still put out albums so, like it or not, how an album is sequenced still needs to be considered.

One of the things I learned years ago (that I think is still one of the finer points of being a mastering engineer) is the difference between mastering a song and mastering an album. When you master a song, you make that song sound as good as possible…maximizing the strong points and minimizing the problematic issues. When you master an album, you may adjust that same song a bit to make it fit in better with the rest of the songs on that album.

You’ve got to think in the big picture, not just master ten songs and put two seconds between each one. Volumes, equalization, fades: it’s all part of the art of sequencing an album. And as long as people are putting out albums it will be important.

Sometimes in life you get a good question that makes you think and re-calibrates you. I’ve received a lot of these in yoga classes…or reading yoga books.

One I came across the other day was “what would you do if you knew you could not fail?”

Something worth pondering. My answer was pretty quick, which is that I’d still be doing ZenMastering. It was an idea I had about ten years ago and it’s an idea that’s developed the way I’ve wanted it to and is still worth pursuing.

What would you do?

To counter-balance all the quasi-tech-opinionated blather I’ve been posting recently, let’s get back to non-scientific sound. Gut instincts record making.

When you go out for pizza, you don’t really care the exact temperature of the oven, how much salt and water are in the dough that make the perfect crust, or how much sugar is in the pizza sauce. You just want the best tasting pizza you’ve ever had. And creating that is an intangible combination of all the ingredients, the tools that cook it and the person making the decisions preparing the ‘za. In the end, though, it’s the taste that matters.

It’s the same thing with making a recording. There’s tons of technical back-end that needs to be understood, protocol/order of operations/best practices that need to be followed. But when it’s all said and done, does it sound great or not? Or — to stay with the pizza analogy — is it satisfying?

On the heels of Things You Want a Lot of, there’s something a mastering engineer should just have one set of. Namely, one pair of mastering speakers.

A lot of amateur (and some professional and/or semi-professional) mastering facilities incorporate several speaker setups into their playback system. The theory is that the lo-fi speakers (or “alternate” speakers) will emulate how your sound will be reproduced in the real world. It sounds good on paper, but IMO it falls under the snake oil department.

The best mastering facilities have the sound of their playback system (converters, cables, amps, speakers, room) dialed in so tight that they’re listening in the most accurate, neutral environment possible. One where the system isn’t hyping the sound one bit. It’s in this place where the most objective, valid decisions can be made.

Second-guessing by running your music through cheap speakers is a flawed theory. One that I went into in a bit more detail in an article the Sound on Sound magazine published a few years back called The Sound of Science.

Unlike processing, where various textures can add options, an audio engineer’s playback system is the microscope they see through. The more consistent and focused the better.

Being a mastering engineer is like being a makeup artist. You want a lot of different brushes and various hues in your pallete because different pieces of music, like people’s faces and complexions, need different treatments.

Things you want a lot of are equalizers, compressors, limiters, and dithers. They all need to have high resolution and transparent sound (i.e. mastering-grade processors), along with a good differentiation between their sound. Some should be neutral, other should be colored. But all will be useful at one time or another for different applications.

So, after years of trial-and-error, I’ve picked a handful of processors that I think are ideally suited for mastering. The processors I personally use are digital, and I don’t think that in 2008 that’s a compromise. DSP power and software coding have evolved to a point where computers can handle the very high-resolution compressors, limiters, and equalizers that a handful of the better software companies are creating. And I’m trying to strike the balance between maximizing efficiency in workflow and providing the processors that deliver the best (and most appropriate) results.

And, as I always like to say, these elements all work together…intertwined. Paring a really clean equalizer with a colored compressor and/or “soft” limiter will give you one sound, and utilizing a colored equalizer with more minimalist compressor and/or “hard” limiter will give you another effect.

Having access to a good pallete of processors is the toolbox for an audio engineer. Knowing how and when to use them is something that is learned through experience, trial-and-error, and objective discretion.

“Hello Paul,

Any advice would be welcome.”

Thanks for the note. It looks like you’re in the $500 price range. I don’t know what your requirements for simultaneous inputs is, but I’m guessing the more the better. I’ve never been a fan of [brand XYZ]. And I don’t know much about [brand ABC] other than their analog modeling acumen.

I would recommend MOTU and Presonus as they both have quality preamps.

I wouldn’t let non-192 deter you. I think it’s a waste of disc space. I recommend people record at 24/48, as most A/D converters spec to about that anyway.

Hope this helps!

The other day a musician came down from Orange County (”The OC!”) to deliver a disc for me with his finished mixes on it. He was skipping FTP because he said that he’d recorded at 24/192, and uploading files of that size just took too long.

When he arrived, he handed me a single CD. I immedialy knew something was wrong and when I inquired how he got 2gig of information onto a single CD-R, he said he’d cut the disc through iTunes.

I know that not all musicians are technical. I mean, that’s one of the reasons they come to me (other than obviously to get a well-mastered album). But iTunes is not a good medium to cut discs that you’re going to deliver for mastering.

In addition to truncating everything down to redbook standard (16/44.1), users may inadvertantly add fade-ins and processing, depending on how the program is set. Not good.

I’ve mentioned a lot of “prepping audio files for mastering” tips in a previous article, but the way things change, software-wise, everything anyone writes is quickly outdated (six months?).

There are lots os apps (third-party and built-in) to both OSX and XP/Vista to burn audio. My quick-and-dirty advise is to just double-check to make sure that the file size of what you burned is the same as what you rendered. If it’s not, something’s up.

I wrote a post a few days back about cables, and the concept hit me again recently when I saw an online ad for a mastering facility. It shows a mondo compressor with more knobs than you can count, and in the corner of the picture you see it’s run through a patchbay with a low-end cable. I thought, “that’s like drinking european beer through a leaky straw!”

This post, or course, will sound like advertorial rhetoric. But it’s based in truth that can be applied to any mastering facility…not just ZenMastering because it has a great infrastructure. The bottom line is that, in many cases what you don’t see is as important (or more so) as what you do see.

If you see a recording or mastering facility with great equipment, the cables and patchbay connecting that equipment are just as important as the gear itself. If you see great speakers, how the room is treated and the position of the speakers (and how they integrate with the subwoofer) is just as important to the sound as the speakers themselves.

But these are things you don’t often see in ads…or even when you walk into a studio. In fact, they’re things you may never think about. But they’re like the foundation of any audio facility. Remember, every great piece of equipment is only as good as the things connecting them.

I was e-mailing with a potential client today. They’d been recommended from a previous client who was a friend. The said, “we’re a pretty heavy band, and it looks like most of your work has been with acoustic music. Will this be a problem?”

Interesting, I thought. I’ve worked with extreme death metal, electronic, DJs, punk, and hip-hop artists…but somehow my Web site reflects acoustic musicians. Maybe it’s because I’m an acoustic guitarist.

Anyway, it’s interesting (and educational) to see how people perceive you. Even after years of work for artists around the world in just about every genre imaginable, I guess I still have some refining to do in ZenMastering’s messaging.