Empathy for the listener

The creator of a song imbues certain meaning to it because of their experiences (the subject matter, the creation process, and a million other things). But in the same way that the setting and feeling of a dream is vivid to the dreamer but impossible to convey, that meaning doesn’t necessarily translate to the listener.

This is especially true for solo artists working in the vacuum of their own studio and process, often without the experience of a collaborator or live audience to gauge the effectiveness of their ideas.

Really successful artists often have a natural (or hard won through experience) ability to have a sort of empathy for the listener that lets them get the impact of their ideas across the gap.  

Third parties like mixers or mastering engineers bring an important perspective to these projects, as a sort of ultra experienced test audience, one that may be able to extract meaning and detail from the song in a way that greatly enhances the probabilities of it connecting with an audience.

Tastefully fucked up

We have the potential for infinite variety, yet in practice so much converges to sameness and safety.

Listeners are eager for things that break the monotony. 

Let the weird bits stay.  More perfect is easily replicated and easily ignored.  Tastefully fucked up is not.

Niche is the new niche

Every few years I undertake the massive process of cataloging and migrating the data from over 25 years of mastering projects onto new hard drives and long-term backup storage. At this point that’s thousands of albums! 

And every time I do this I come across so many great albums that pre-date the digital and streaming era, and are long since out of print on CD, vinyl, (cassette!), etc. I’d love to see these albums have a chance at a second life.  If you’re the creator of one of these, get in touch and I’ll get you your masters and help point you in the right direction(s).  

I’ve been encouraged by seeing first hand how albums that were maybe a bit too niche for the physical era can have another go-around in the digital realm, and find their audience many years later.  Let’s get these out there!

Process Knowledge

The expertise of human mastering is not a set of instructions that can be written down for a machine (or even another human) to follow.  It is a collection of process knowledge - as Cory Doctorow writes: hard-won lessons that can never be adequately captured through documentation, can't be bought or sold, and can't be abstracted away or commodified.

Process knowledge is just the right touch on a finicky machine, an understanding of the upstream and downstream context, the obscure solutions at the terminus of a hundred tiny decisions made instantaneously. When an icon like Steve Albini passes away, we mourn the individual, but we also mourn the loss of their process knowledge. “They’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know.”

In Doctorow’s words, “process knowledge is squishy, contingent, and wildly important in a world filled with entropy-stricken, off-spec, and stubbornly physical things.”

Worth remembering

“You are a creator, and creators must create or they just devolve into normal boring people” - David C. Baker

Future Value

2 years, 5 years, 10 years into the future what will the result of this work be? 

Do the right things now so that the work has a chance to create value well into the future. Like a huge flywheel, it takes a lot to get it going. But once it starts spinning it carries tons of momentum, always dropping fresh opportunities on your lap.

Present your work to the world now as if it has already achieved that 10 year goal and your chances of actually being there in 10 years increase exponentially.

Accuracy is overrated

The words “accuracy” and its false corollary “flat response” get tossed around a lot when talking about the kind of speakers you might find in a mixing room. 

But given that your speakers meet some reasonable technical criteria, what’s way more important is that recordings that you know to sound good in the real world sound very, very good to you on your speakers, in your room.  

It doesn’t matter how “accurate” a speaker is, if you are not mixing things into your comfort zone, you are fighting a losing battle.  

No amount of mental translation can compensate for speakers that don’t sound comfortable to you.

How to become a better mastering engineer in 30 minutes or less

One word. Move.

Nothing clears the ears and reboots the mind like a brisk walk or run. In fact, I would venture to say that a day in the mastering room is akin to an athletic event, and benefits from the same kind of preparation. Exercise, diet, and rest all play a role in achieving the state of relaxed focus needed to consistently do great work.

Push one button, hear better immediately

I have an ultrawide monitor mounted on the adjustable screen platform of my Northward Systems mastering console.  It’s recessed enough to be an acoustic non-issue, and I like having it right in front of me when I want to tweak a plugin, or edit.  

But this has made all the difference in the world - a simple utility that runs in the background, and allows me to assign a key command to instantly black out the monitor display.  

It is incredible how different things sound when I am not staring at the screen.  It’s like an instant improvement in my ability to focus on the work at hand.  

I can safely say that I will never eq a mix while looking at a monitor ever again.

Built in Serendipity

Analog gear has a wide sweet spot, or perhaps better said, a wide margin for error.  When you don’t know (lack of experience) or can’t hear (poor monitoring) what you’re doing, it’s possible that some analog gear will help get acceptable results because you stumble upon a setting that works. It’s a tool with built in serendipity.

But when the quality of your monitoring environment and listening skills reach a tipping point, you may find that well chosen digital gear gets to the intended result faster, because you can hear exactly what you’re doing, and the digital gear (Weiss in my case) gives exactly what is expected, with no surprises.

When you can clearly hear the tradeoffs of (even the best) conversion, and adding extra analog circuitry inline, the serendipity factor of analog loses its charm fast.