mastering

Mastering can be thought of as creating a "master" copy of a music CD ready for mass duplication. This is not just copying data into a final format - mastering might need just as much creativity as recording and mixing. It's the last chance to enhance a mix, the final intervention to fix any technical problems, it's quality control. Mastering is also the process of making a coherent whole out of many items. Often the mixing process doesn't include time to make sure all items sound 100% compatible with each other - and even the best engineers hear things a little different when mixing different songs on different days. 

These days as more music is released online - "digitally" - mastering has not changed much, apart from there not being a physical product with control over track order & gaps etc. At the end of the day the music still has to sound great, whatever, whenever. As the internet grew up to enable delivery of better than CD quality audio, there's a growing movement to reduce loudness processing and preserve dynamic range, which I feel will help music in the long run. At the same time we're seeing the slow decline of conventional studios and more artists opting for the freedom of home recording, resulting in new challenges for mastering. And the disappearance of good quality "stereos" often replaced by single small mono Bluetooth speakers - a big downgrade of the listening experience in favour of convenience. Then there's headphone or earbud listening - all types of qualities or lack thereof but very wide stereo. And there's the new surround formats (Dolby Atmos, Apple Spatial Audio) delivered either on ears using HRTF algorithms to mimic space, or less so, in "home theatre" style setups that can deliver the same spacious or real life experience to a group. As you see, there are many moving targets now.

Mastering needs those involved to make carefully considered decisions about the audio. My approach to mastering has been to develop innovative all-digital workflows that maximise quality and creativity. I’ve been doing this since 1996, when digital mastering was very much an outlier. My methods are a step forward from conventional mastering processes that can tend to make musicians feel locked into a rigid technical schedule, or to simply feel the process is inaccessible. Instead of trying to do everything in one long session, it's now wiser to come back to the work more than once. Only with all-digital mastering has this become practical, as analogue equipment can't easily "remember" the previous day's work. The digital workflow can do both "clean" and "warm”, or anything else. In the last few years much work has been done on modelling the best analogue gear and nowadays this is easily good enough to sound indistinguishable from the real thing. Another digital advantage is automating smooth processing changes of many parameters at once is easy, but on analogue systems this can be impossible or at best very stressful.

Above all, the mastering studio is a “listening room”, that is an acoustically fine tuned space to enable careful and critical work. For main monitors I currently use Genelec 8351s with W37A woofers, calibrated to the room and the listening location. They are fed by Apogee Symphony DA converters and a custom made passive monitor controller. This system easily goes down to 22Hz and is a rock solid reference. I use Spectrafoo Complete for visualisation and can also monitor and master in Dolby Atmos. The space, the speakers and the DA converters enable me to make trustworthy judgements about sound quality, informed by decades of experience. 

If you want to know how I work and how to prepare, read this. 

Above all I'm into communication about your music - this is a little easier in attended sessions where you can hear things taking shape in real time. Long distance is fine too, just send an email to learn more.

As a mastering engineer I have worked on a lot of independent music since 1996, credited on many hundreds of CDs spanning all the genres. To see who I've worked for, look me up on discogs.

My advice is never believe those people who try to mystify mastering or say it’s a “black art”. I grew up in times where mastering was done on ageing analogue gear with usually male gatekeepers who needed to keep it all in-house. And most definitely controlled the process by mystifying it. I railed against that and came up with my own way using the new digital tech that I was exposed to as a student.

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So for me mastering has become the opposite of those old ways - its the skill of finding the elephant in the room, to identify what’s obviously wrong or right and just deal with it by addition or subtraction. The obvious may only be audible on good systems, by comparison with other audio, etc - there’s a few paths up that mountain - some quick and some slow. But really mastering is about being very strategic in a limited context where you can’t unpick a mix to rebuild it, at best you can make it great if you know how. Hearing the obvious is the starting point, like seeing the forest for the trees. Taking initial notes is a powerful tool to remember what matters if you get lost in the work. And being able to explain the obvious in words or to fix it with a single plugin is the true art and creativity in this discipline. 

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So no digging in the weeds needed… just deal with the obvious.

AI these days is still too primitive to do this sort of mastering. One needs to combine technical and aesthetic judgements, plus a knowledge of different genres and how to hear what a customer wants without too much back and forth. Sometimes it calls for listening between the lines. At the end it’s about which technical interventions feel best to us humans in the room (or rooms if remote). 

Whereas AI will analyse the frequency spectrum of a file and a few other parameters then bend the audio based on its programmed definition of what’s normative. So yes it can make good changes at a basic level, but subtlety or customisation to particular needs is way too hard. AI mastering is fine if you’re producing elevator music or are trying to be right in the middle of the road (could have been produced algorithmically in the first place even - no worries). But not good enough if you want to sound special and unique, or bring out the fine points that were missed in the mix. Only a human to human interaction can do it, and it all starts with a conversation not an algorithm.