Song and performance over production

Useful rule of thumb - the song and performance must be better than the production. 

If the production outdoes the song the mystery is revealed.

The Best Way to Emulate Analog

Use no analog emulation plugins.

Start by thinking about how things were recorded in the analog-only past.  Then consider that in the best tape machines of that era, output sounded very, very close to input.  So use converters where output sounds very, very close to input, and disregard the idea that the magic is in the tape.  

Get your sounds 100% right on the way into the box using an appropriate analog front end (preamp, compressor and eq if needed).  

Mix simply using LCR panning and faders only.

Leave off the plugins. Every plugin you add is one step further away from the analog sound you have captured.

Two Techniques for Cutting High End

Cutting high end is one of the more difficult things to do in a mastering context.  The ear naturally perceives more high end as greater detail, so cutting highs feels like losing detail, and makes A/B comparisons difficult.

1) Make a broad and deep high frequency cut, way more than needed so the track sounds really dull.  Give your ears a few seconds to adjust.  Or even better, listen for 10-20 seconds, and turn off the monitors for another 10-20 seconds.  Play the track again and slowly bring the highs back in, adjusting the width of the cut (if needed) as you do. Settle at the point where the highs now sound sufficiently bright and clear.   

2) Make a high frequency cut normally, but do it with the monitors turned down a fair bit.  10db or so down usually works for me. 

Three Passes

I find I have about 3 passes of a song before I start trying to fix “problems” that aren’t actually there.

So given my point earlier about first impressions, the sweet spot for making a good master seems to be somewhere between 1-3 passes, and no more.

Things I’d actually like AI to do for me

• Download the day’s mixes and load them in sequence in the Pyramix timeline

• Scan for clicks, pops, and glitches and place markers where any are found

• Automatically run masters of alternate versions and instrumentals based on the settings of the main versions

• Export finished masters and upload to the client for approval

• Export approved production masters in all formats

• Null test or otherwise verify all production masters

There’s probably a bunch more useful tasks I'm forgetting, but you get the idea.  Get these repetitive menial jobs done and leave the actual human work to me. 

How to make everything in your mix sound bigger instantly

Turn down the cymbals.  

Seriously. 

The listening public is not nearly as excited about the sound of your overheads as you are.

Don’t Delete

With the low cost / high storage capacity of current hard drives it makes a lot of sense to keep all of your clients’ masters (and working files) forever.  

Fill a drive, put it on the shelf, and pop in another.  

In my case I have a four bay SSD dock. One drive holds the current work, another clones this drive, and a third is for daily incremental backups.  When the current work drive is filled it just goes on the shelf along with it’s clone, with a note marking the start and end dates of the contents.

As a further backup I clone the full working drive to a huge 24TB USB drive. Redundancy is good. For many years I had everything mirrored in an unlimited storage Google account as well, but the Google enshittifiers pulled the plug on that one.   

When I need to find an old project I just look back through emails or billing records to quickly find the date a project was mastered, and thus the right drive, without the hassle of maintaining a formal drive directory listing.

I don’t advertise or charge for this, as I don’t want the potential legal ramifications of running an archiving service, but if anyone asks I just tell them the files will be here until the hard drives fail (which they will eventually, but so far so good), and encourage them to keep their own copies and backups too.

Countless times I have been able to provide replacement files after all manner of tragedies, including stolen computers, hard drive crashes, even house fires.

The goodwill this generates can only be good for business.

High Fidelity versus Listenability

What makes for the most hi-fi master may not make for the most listenable master.

More Minimal

Try:

- balancing a whole album with only gain changes first (then fill in the gaps with eq)

- finding the one perfectly placed broad band of bell eq that brings the whole track into focus

- giving yourself one pass to nail the next track

The broader the adjustment, the wider the translation

One of the goals in mastering is to make adjustments that translate into improvements in the sound of the master across a wide range of playback situations - everything from big stereos to small stereos to computer speakers to headphones to cars to …

The broader the adjustments, the more likely it will be heard as intended in the widest variety of playback situations.  

For example, a 1db change in overall volume sounds like a 1db change pretty much everywhere.  Similarly, eqing with very broad shelves translates into tonal changes that sound consistent across many different speakers.

On the other hand, very specific adjustments like narrow eq tweaks are much less likely to be heard as intended on a wide range of speakers.  The narrower the tweak, the more likely it will only be an improvement in your room.   Out in the real world it may sound better on some systems, be mostly inaudible on others, or even sound worse than the source.

Before getting surgical better be damn sure you are fixing a problem in the recording and not a problem in the monitoring.