So I’ve made some changes to my new dilruba.

The first thing I wanted to do was improve the action of the instrument slightly.  I’ve checked a few of the dilruba sites (yep, they exist!  Although the Rule34 implications terrify me) and most of them recommend improving the bridge.  The bridge that comes with these cheap instruments is essentially a big slab of carved bone, heavy and not especially well-carved.  So I took the dremel to it to give the bridge a bit more arc, and then took the power drill to it to punch out a few holes and reduce the damping mass of the whole thing.  Once I’m feeling a bit more confident I’ll probably get a bit more aggressive on that front, but I probably pulled a few grams of mass off the bridge already and it’s made a notable improvement in tone.  And the change of the bridge arc gives me a little extra playability – I’m not constantly unintentionally hitting my drone strings.

I still need to get a better bow, though.

Anyway.

The other change was less intrusive, but also weirder and more nonstandard.  The traditional way to play a dilruba is sitting on the floor, with the base resting on a table cushion, or a foot, or something similar.  Which is fine and all, but what if I wanted to play while sitting in a chair, or standing up?  Or just walk up to the thing and start playing?  Nontraditional, and I’m sure Guru Gobind Singh would be appalled, but hey, this is me we’re talking about.  Taking a cue from the Steinberger upright bass and cello, I decided I needed a stand mount.

This posed a few problems.  While I had no problem with the idea of attaching things, I was not at all prepared to disassemble and muck about inside the instrument.  That would be a recipe for disaster, since I am not much for the woodworking.  However, grating something to the outside seemed like a good option.  And I had a lot of leftover drum mounting hardware from some of my previous attempts at building drum controllers and the like.  At first I thought about using a cymbal mount, but I couldn’t come up with a good way to hold everything steady and keep the whole instrument from rotating along the z-axis.  Then I found a tom bracket and post – it was kind of perfect – it mounted flush to the bottom of the instrument, could be clamped down hard to keep things in place, was able to be height-adjusted based on where I wanted the instrument to be in space, and had a ratcheting adjustment so I could angle it however I wanted.  Perfect!

Well, it turned out to be a little bit bigger than I’d hoped – so it overshoots the tailpiece by about a half an inch, but I’m willing to live with that.  I can still play it sitting on the floor, and it clamps in nicely to a cymbal tripod so I’m set there.

Interesting way to spend an evening, I’ll say that much.

In short, I was out of space. I could add no more gear, and I was getting dangerously to the point where my monitor speaker positioning was being dictated not by acoustics, but by the placement of my screens.

The planning began. First, I checked the internets for studio furniture. As far as I can tell, studio furniture is regular furniture, maybe built a bit more solidly than your average desk, but still, standard furniture, with a few rack spaces added and a grand affixed to the price tag. Oh, sure, some of the Argosy stuff is optimized to reduce comb reflections, etc, but nevertheless, it’s still for most practical purposes a heavy duty desk. This was clearly out of my budget. My next option was to build. I wasn’t sure how, since I’m sort of the opposite of handy, nor was I sure what I was going to want to do, so I had to sit down and think about this for a while.

The first step was lumber. I figured I could cannibalize the heavy steel legs from my old desk, so I was already set there. I looked all over the place for good, solid chunks of wood and while I found a few that were workable, they weren’t quite perfect. I ended up springing for a piece of ¾” oak plywood, furniture grade. It wasn’t super-cheap, and I could’ve found oak ply cheaper – but not furniture grade. This had a very nice grain, no blemishes, was not warped in any way…perfect. To strengthen it I bought a piece of stiff ODF.

Next, since this was a studio desk, I wanted some rack space. I had some 12” rack rails already, so I figured I’d use those. A little cabinet hardware and some of the scrap wood from the trimming of the plywood sheet have me a cabinet that would slide on rails and hold all of my gear. The sliding bit was important to me, since it meant easy access to the back panels of my gear, saving me some effort in patching and re-patching.

After agonizing over what color to stain the thing for several minutes, I picked “antique oak” and got a stain/polyurethane combo. I stained everything, put a good solid coat on, then waited for it to dry.

Next morning, it was time for final assembly!

Of course, there was one problem – fully loaded with gear, the cabinet weighed the desk down on one side, and because of the configuration of legs made it slightly unsteady. And being heavy it didn’t slide easily. So I headed to home depot and bought some 3” casters for the bottom. Then got home and realized I’d purchased 2” casters that had been sitting in the 3” caster bin. (in my defense, I hadn’t had breakfast). But the casters gave it the support and flexibility, and now it slides well.

So I’ve got plenty of room now. There’s room for both screens, and I can position my monitor stands behind and not worry about them being blocked or acoustically shadowed. My head is now directly in the acoustical sweet spot. I’ve added a few gizmos to make my life easier – some ¼” hex bolts make for lovely headphone hanger pegs. Steel O-rings affixed underneath help keep cables organized. I may add other doodads as time goes on.

Hooray!

While maybe it’s true that the mastering engineer *can* indeed fix these things, the smartest policy is to fix these things in the mixing stage first.  Any fix in the mastering stage comes with a cost, whether that cost is monetary (extra engineering time means extra $$$) or just the cost to the overall quality of the track.  That kick drum too boxy in the 200hz range?  The mastering engineer could do a very precise reduction on that frequency…but anything else with harmonics at that frequency would also be affected.  Vocals need to be louder?  A little middle-band compression may help tighten that up, but at the expense of the overall width of the track.  It may be subtle, but it’s going to hurt.

I’ve often heard of mastering referred to as a “surgical” process.  That may be true to a point, because the tools are usually precise, specific, and often dangerous for the unpracticed to play around with.  The analogy sort of breaks down at that point.

A better analogy would be perhaps one of a car detailer.  The guy’s got special tools – an orbital buffer, polishes, hammers for pounding out dings, stuff that an average car owner probably doesn’t keep handy.  The detailer’s job is to make your car look as good as it possibly can, buff it to a high gloss, maybe smooth out some scratches and chips.  But you wouldn’t ask the guy who details your car to fix a problem with your head gasket or your muffler.  The mastering engineer is like the detailer – he’s got the tools to make your track shiny, polished, and professional-sounding.  And while he may have the ability just by chance to fix a mix problem (much as the detailer probably knows how to change your oil) it’s not the sort of thing you really want him to be doing.

It’ll save you, the artist or producer, time, money and headaches to address any mix problems at the mixing stage, and not the mastering stage.

So what about the case where the engineer hears a problem you missed?  A good mastering engineer would likely tell you about it.   In the world of the radio-hit machine, maybe not, because it has to be done yesterday and ready for the radio, but there it doesn’t come up as much to begin with because your track is mixed by Mark Stent or Tony Maserati and it’s just not an issue.  For the rest of the indie pro-sumer crowd, though, the option is usually there to send the engineer a new mix with the fixes in place, and any resulting charge will be minimal, if there’s any charge at all.  I know that when I master an album, I listen to it first so I know what I’m going to do before diving in, and I’ve on more than one occasion said “hey, the bass is a little loud on track 3” or “that lead synth has some weird phasing, is that intentional?” and if it’s a problem and not an artistic decision,  I’ll gladly take delivery of a new mixdown before I start mastering  (there are limits, of course – eventually I’ll want to get to mastering and not waiting for the 8th upload of a new mix, and sometimes the engineer does have the right to say “look, I don’t know how to fix it or I just don’t want to – do what you can with it.”  But these are rare cases).

In short, the strongest recommendation I can make to anyone about to submit their music for mastering is “give them the best mix you can, and don’t expect the mastering engineer to fix what you didn’t.”  A strong mix will need less processing in the mastering stage, leading to a cleaner, better-sounding master and a better experience for the listener.

With the exception of the very-high-end stuff, like SaDiE, most attempt to integrate with an existing DAW and focus solely on the audio side of mastering and ignore the media-output end of things.  But that’s not really why I don’t like them.

Now, to be fair, most of them do their best to provide some fairly impressive functionality.  IK Multimedia’s T-Racks suite, for example, has some very lovely options for emulating a Pulteq EQ and a Fairchild 670 compressor.  iZotope’s Ozone has some very powerful options for mid-side processing on material.  The problem is that these packages inhabit a very strange no-man’s land in the market.  They’re more expensive than the software that comes with most DAWs and offer more functionality in many ways, but at the same time, the kind of engineer who is going to need that sort of functionality is going to likely want even finer control and higher-quality than these intro-to-midrange packages can provide.

It’s sort of the Swiss Army Knife problem.  Swiss army knives are really cool.  Some of them have a zillion little tools, from tiny screwdrivers to folding pliers to scissors.  They’re great in a pinch, although some of the fancier ones are rather pricy.  That’s just it, though – they’re great in a pinch, but you wouldn’t want to do an awful lot of real repair with them, and for the price of the one with all the fancy little clever tools on it, you could buy a pretty decent kit of basic full-size tools, a socket set, and a respectable power screwdriver.  All-in-one suites are pretty neat, but like Swiss army knives, why spend the money on such a fancy one when you can get a bunch of “full sized” tools for the same money?

Perhaps that’s a little hard on some of these packages, as they do often have “full-sized” tools in them.  The problem is, as I see it, that not everything in one of these suites is going to be perfect, you’re often paying for a lot of functionality you’re not going to need or want, and quite often you get stuck with a characteristic sound over which you have little control.  Take, for example, T-Racks.  As I mentioned, the Pulteq EQ and Fairchild Compressor emulator is pretty nice, and certainly for the price it out-competes an awful lot of stuff in the same price class.  But some of the other modules are not so great, and you may find that even the really nice stuff isn’t what you need in the mastering stage (but would be more appropriate for tracking and mixing).  So you spend $500 MSRP for a bundle with a great compressor and EQ that you never use for mastering, and some middling other plugins that you do.    Similarly with Ozone, there is certainly some power under the hood, particularly with the M/S processing.  Frankly, though, the overall sound is decent but not pants-wettingly spectacular, and a few of the inclusions seem a bit baffling to me – the “mastering reverb” for example, seems like a module of extremely limited use.  If you’re at the mastering stage and you find you need to add reverb, something has gone wrong.  It’s not a bad-sounding reverb, but it’s not a great one either.  We’re also back to the “what market is this for?” problem – if you’re mastering your own material, you can go back and add your own reverb to the mix with much more precision than any full-track mastering ‘verb could; if you’re mastering this for someone else, there’s a good chance you have already invested in better gear than this and could apply it yourself.

Then there’s the preset problem.  I‘ve had the opportunity to bash my way through some of these suites and they all seem to come with a pretty deep library of presets.  That’s all well-and good, but even in my limited experience as a mastering engineer I can tell you that no two tracks will ever need the exact same settings.  Sure, presets always do make a great starting point, saving you a little time dialing in some common settings, but the urge to just fire-and-forget, especially in the neophyte stages of the process, is strong.  Some of the presets in any one of the packages have the terrifying ability to sound completely awesome, but only in the context of a good set of speakers.  Hit Ozone’s “enhance and widen” preset and you’d get a lush, wide, open mix on a good set of monitors…that would sound washed-out and phasy on a club system.  Such a preset might help rejuvenate an old mono mix or something pulled off an archival 4-track, but it has the capacity to completely screw up a modern recording.  Through the joys of psychoacoustics and comparative listening, after hearing that, every other track will sound dense and narrow and feel like it needs the same effects, which will mean an *entire album* will sound wide and airy  on the monitors and then washed and phasy on a club, or ear-hurtingly trebly on a car stereo, or grainy and weird on an ipod.

The kitchen-sink approach is also a little worrisome.  I have come across very few mastering jobs that require not merely the same settings, but even the same effects chain.  Some won’t require any extra compression.  Some won’t need EQ.  Some won’t need any maximizing/limiting.  So there’s no need to even have these effects patched in, much less turned on.  When you have a suite with 8 or 9 effects available at all times, you have to know and know well what you need and what you don’t, because turning on a multiband limiter when you don’t need one is going to dramatically change the sound of the output.  Certainly, messing about with stereo width is always a very dodgy proposition, because the capacity for phase problems is extremely high, so many mastering chains don’t even bother (or, if they do, use some M/S processing for the effect) – so having a dedicated stereo imaging processor available at all times is sort of the mastering equivalent to keeping a loaded gun on the nightstand: you may never use it, but just having it there is risky.

This is not to say these things are not without their place.  I’ve mentioned that Ozone’s M/S processing is really excellent.  The problem for me is that I don’t necessarily need to buy an entire suite to just do M/S EQ or compression, when I already have the ability, albeit with a little extra bus routing, to do M/S processing using any plugin or hardware I like using only the stuff that comes with Logic.  Sure, it might be easier to just hit the MS button in Ozone, but because I now know how to accomplish this from first principles, I can get even more precise, and do multiband M/S processing if I really desired, or use M/S processing with anything, not just the processors that have it enabled.  Or I could do it as simply as just increasing the relative levels of the mid or the side without processing either one.   I didn’t need to spend $400 to keep myself from having to learn a useful skill.

And there, right there, is the crux of it.  Mastering isn’t about the gear as much as it is about the ears and the grey mushy thing between them.  Don’t get me wrong, great gear is awesome and makes things sound even better, but knowing the deep science of the process and knowing exactly what to listen for is the real trick, and no mastering suite software is going to help that.

Some things have gone quite well, of course.  I’ve re-engineered backing tracks to make them cleaner and punchier in the live environment.   I’ve been able to do this quickly and efficiently with the new machine, since I don’t have to freeze tracks to be able to play back my mixes.   I’ve also got a new rack of DI’s en route, thanks to a lovely tip from Mr. Wade Alin.  They’re not Radials or anything, but they look to have better build quality than the ones I’ve currently got.    Also there’s a new ATA rack to put them in coming.  I decided that the 6-unit full-depth rack I’ve got is entirely unnecessary for my 3 units of shallow-depth gear, so I’ve got a 4U Gator on the way.  Also, being ATA, I feel a little safer about it than I do about my current rack.  Plus that extra space leaves a little room for expansion.

The things that haven’t gone right?  Well, yesterday I opened a newish track that I had recently transitioned over from the old system.  I hit play and…it sounded really weird.  That wasn’t right.  I popped open a few of the plugins I was using and noted that every.  Single.  Instance of PODFarm Plat had switched back to its default setting, which happens to be an emulation of a Fender Jazz amp with reverb.  Basically, the entire song sounded like each part was being played from inside individual cardboard boxes.  And I used PODfarm a LOT on this track to get grungy synth distortion, so the track was pretty much hosed until I could fix it.  I spent much of the afternoon switching as much as possible over to Logic’s native Amp Designer.  It doesn’t always sound quite as nice as PF for some of the emulations, but I can at least be assured it’ll work next time I open it.  I get to look forward to the next few days of recreating settings and rebuilding tracks.  Grumble.

A nasty headcold coupled with my usual overactive sinus-based ick has kept me from recording any vocals for the past week and a half.  This is particularly annoying, since I have stuff stacking up I want to record/rerecord/fix.

Aaand finally, I plugged in my MOTU 828 (mk1) yesterday, to test out my backing tracks and…kernel panic.  I rebooted, and…kernel panic.  I unplugged it and…kernel panic.    Some online searching demonstrated that hey, whaddya know, the new MOTU drivers under snow leopard don’t like the old 828 all that much.  I dug out one of my archived installers and put an older driver on, and it seems stable.  For now.  Nonetheless, this makes me kind of twitchy about relying on a nearly-10-year-old audio interface.  I do have plans to get a new one but…not for a while yet.    I just bought a new car, I’m a little low on petty cash.

Sigh.

Ordinarily, a Friday night gig would just mean “sleep late on Saturday.”  This however was not an option, because bright and chipper on Saturday morning I had a carnatic classical trio coming by to record.  It was an unusual configuration, too – saxophone, mridangang, violin, and the omnipresent electronic tampura/sruthi box.  (I offered to delve into my surprisingly vast library of tampura samples, but they opted to pass.

Over the course of two days, we recorded well over two hours of music.   They played as an ensemble, which meant I had to be diligent with my microphone choices and positioning.  Also, because there were six inputs and my ULN2 only has,  well, 2, I had to do some fancy routing and device aggregation in order to get everything set up and sounding good.  These guys had to play as an ensemble, so I couldn’t simply isolate and multitrack them as I do with my own stuff.

These guys came in from parts distant – the sax player was from north Chicago, the violinist from west Chicago, and the mridangam player was from Washington DC.  I was referred to them as someone who could record carnatic music for a reasonable price and not screw it up, I guess, but I had to keep asking in slight disbelief “uh, you guys know that this is just a room in my basement, right?”  I can see people coming from, say, Milwaukee to record in my basement, but Chicago?  DC?  They apparently were fully aware of this and wanted to go ahead anyway.  It could be my remarkably affordable prices.

What follows is a technical description of what went down, merely because I lack the appropriate music theory to describe what happened musically.

I slaved my old trusty MOTU 828 to the ULN2’s clock, which significantly improved the performance of that box.  I also attached by dbx tube pre to the ULN’s SPDIF and clock-sync’ed that too.

The mrid got a pair of 57’s, run into the 828.  57’s are always reliable of percussion instruments.  They were perhaps a little dark and dense on the treble head of the drum, but they still got me a reasonably decent fidelity on the attack/decay range.  And because they have such a forward pattern with good side rejection, I didn’t get much crosstalk between the two mics, or from the other instruments.

The sax got the Oktava.  Sumanth had specifically requested a rather dark sound on his sax, so the combo of the Oktava and the dbx tube pre was a natural fit.  It was pretty warm and punchy by the time it was all recorded.  The mic was a little gainy, so I did get some “room sound” off the mridangang too, but that was to be expected.  If I’d had a good ribbon mic, that probably also would’ve worked really well.

The violin was the toughy – seeing as it’s a much quieter instrument than a saxophone or a drum, and full of all sorts of crazy harmonics, I had to be pretty careful where I put the mics.  I used the pair of Pulsar II SDC’s that I keep around for just such things.  Since I happen to have a violin, I did some experiments with configuration, and skipped doing my initial x/y stereo placement in favor of an almost guitar-like arrangement – one mic pointing at the f-holes, and the other aimed towards the neck.  The biggest challenge was keeping the mics far enough from the violinist so he could actually play, but close enough that they would get good signal and not pick up every stray noise in the room.    I ended up with a bit of a compromise – I got strong signal but still got some spillover from the sax.  There’s only so much I can do about that, short of throwing up some gobos – but then the instrumentalists wouldn’t be able to see and hear each other, which defeats the purpose.  I ran the mics into the ULN so I could up the gain pretty high without too much noise.

Some of these pieces ran upwards of 20 minutes, one coming in close to an hour, which meant to fix things there was a lot of punch-in/punch out and clever crossfading between takes.  They specifically requested a spacious sound, so I’m judiciously adjusting the panning and reverb settings to get it nice and concert-hall-y without being swamped by deep ‘verb.  I’ve still got some more engineering to do on this yet, but it’s sounding pretty good so far.  These guys were pretty serious players, so that helped an awful lot.

I also learned once again that curious kittens often hamper the recording process by headbutting microphones or deciding to get chummy with  the percussionist in the middle of a take.

It occurred to me, with a bit of prodding from Matt Fanale, that I’ve never actually talked about what mastering really is.  I’ve blogged passionately about what to do and what not to do, and what gear is good, and what gear isn’t, but…I’ve never actually said what it is and why it’s important.

Part 1: Mastering – What It Is.

(paraphrasing what I’ve got on submersiblestudios.com)

Mastering is that final stage before going to disc (or tape, or TV, or whatever).  It’s often spoken of in hushed tones, for fear that the Wizards of Mastering Engineering might overhear and smite thee with a curse. Everybody’s told they need it, few are told why, and even fewer really know what’s going on.

In reality, it’s less mystical and magical than one would think. It’s really just a form of audio processing done to add that final polish to an album. Of course, that’s just the basics.

It’s a finicky process, that requires good ears, good gear, and practice.

So why is it important for an indie artist?  The common answer is “it makes things sound better.”  This is part of the equation, but not all of it.   The end result may even sound “better” before it goes to mastering – but the mastering engineer makes it sound good on a whole range of systems.  A track may sound awesome on a set of studio montiors, but sound like complete pants when played through a car stereo or a TV speaker.  Mastering engineers polish things up so it sounds as good as possible everywhere, from a giant club PA to a tiny radio.  Sometimes that means a sacrifice on one system or a another.

Part of the process, of course, can be sweetening and shining the sound, cleaning up some rogue frequencies, making sure every track on the disc is reasonably consistent, etc.  Usually, the process of making it sound good everywhere makes it sound better overall.

Part 2: Mastering – Why You Need It

Simply put, it makes things sound professional.  Since you have very little control of the environment in which your work will be heard, having someone with some experience in optimizing your tunes can be tremendously helpful.

Mastering can make a well-mixed song sound great.  It can also make a poorly-mixed song sound slightly better.  It can’t fix everything – it’s not magic, despite what you may have heard – but it can glue things together sonically, make transitions between tracks on an album flow better, and clean up some things you might not have been able to hear.  It also puts an extra set of rather finicky ears on your tracks, which can help immensely.    Sonically, a mastering engineer can do a lot for a recording that you can’t necessarily do by yourself.

There’s also the element of the mastering process that’s not always discussed when people think of mastering – burning the master CD.  While yes, you can make a master recording with iTunes or RecordNOW or Nero, a real Redbook CD – standard master has PQ codes, ISRC embedding, CD-Text, crossfades, etc.   A good package can create DDP images and Edit Decision Lists for a replication house, too – not strictly necessary but often times they increase the reliability of the replication run and save everybody time and money.  It’s not a huge deal for a demoes, but before replication of an actual album, it’s a nice thing to have.  All those little extras can provide benefits on a variety of systems – and in some cases, for sales tracking.

In short – you need your stuff mastered because it makes everything sound polished, professional, and consistent.  It brings your recording out of the studio and into the real world.

Part 3: Mastering – What Goes Into It

Most of what mastering is, from a masterer’s standpoint, is listening.  And, in some cases, watching (those spectral analyzers can see those subharmonics and high frequencies that a human can’t).  But that’s also sort of a douchebag answer, because it doesn’t tell anyone what the process is like.

The problem is, the process is difference for every track.  Like writing a song, or recording a song, mastering audio is unique to the source material.  There are a number of tools, though, that are commonly used.

Harmonic Coloration and Excitation – I’ll start with the most contentious one.  Most pro mastering houses wouldn’t put this in as a step.  But then most pro mastering houses are already using top-of-the-line gear that will handle some of this for them.  Digital recording can be a little sterile or flat, so the addition of a subtle amount of coloration – whether by the use of real hardware or emulation software – can sometimes liven up a recording.  Some systems have this as in independent stage, others work this into the compressors and EQs by emulating high-end gear.  It is, of course, best done subtly, since over-application can turn a recording to mud (which is why it’s contentious).  Excitation adds some upper harmonics to give a bit of brightness to a dull recording, and can add a little extra “sparkle” to a darker track – but when overused can set a listener’s teeth on edge.  Exciters were used a lot during the mid-80′s – witness the teeth-shattering treble on most of the Stock/Aitken/Watermen records.   At any rate, coloration in any form is to be used only as necessary.

EQ – the unsung hero of the mastering process.  Smoothing out that one peak that makes track 5 sound so completely different from tracks 1-4, taming some out-of-control subharmonics, adding a little “air” to the top end, EQ helps bring everything together.  In the digital realm, linear-phase EQs are often preferred because, while they are processor intensive, don’t risk screwing up phase balance in a track.  However, some of the vintage EQ plugins do a nice job in some circumstances as well.  And certainly, various bits of hardware like the mastering EQs from Manley and others add a nice character.  EQ has the added bonus of reducing some of the overall levels (when you’re pulling down a frequency, anyway, which is the preferred way to do it) which gives the masterer more headroom to play with.

Compression – the bus compressor is the most misunderstood and abused link in the mastering chain.  Judicious use of compression can “glue” a track together by selectively squashing out some dynamics and levelling things out.  It can give a bit of a pulse to a dance track.   It can also completely destroy a track by sucking all the life out of it.  Multiband Compressors are even more dangerous in this regard – yes, they can tighten up some sloppy bass or bring out the midrange a bit better, but a 4-band compressor just gives a person 3 additional ways to destroy the dynamic of a piece of audio.  Worst is when a track comes into the mastering studio with a lot of bus compression already on it.

Expansion – compression’s antimatter.  It does just the opposite – expanding dynamic range instead of compressing it.  It’s not used much, but occasionally it’s needed to emphasize some dynamics.  It can be an antidote to overcompression, but only to a point – it can’t replace dynamic range that’s no longer there.

Stereo processing – sometimes a recording is very narrow and everything is clustered in the center of the stereo field.  Sometimes it’s really wide and everything sounds washed-out.  In cases like these, stereo imaging tricks can be used to fix things.  It can be very, very tricky – since screwing with stereo imaging often affects phase, and not in a good way.  The last thing someone wants with their music is for the vocals to drop out when the club speakers are too far apart, or for the song to consist of just a bassline when played in mono.  What will happen often to fix stereo imaging is that, instead of actually adjusting the stereo image, the mastering engineer will split the track into a band representing the middle of the sound field, and a band containing the sides of the sound field.  They can be adjusted independently, then, and mixed back together.  A tigthter middle can make an overly-wide recording have more punch, and a louder side channel can make a track sound wider and deeper without actually expanding the stereo field.

Limiting/maximizing – two sides of the same coin.  The final stage is usually some brickwall limiting to keep he signal from getting peaky, with the added bonus of increasing the perceived loudness of the track overall.  Again, though, as a type of compression, limiting removes a lot of dynamic range from a track, so in addition to making the thing seem louder, it removes the quiet parts necessary to keep “loud” sounding loud.  The human ear adjusts to constant loud noises, so without the contrast of a dynamic range, “loud” starts sounding “flat” after a while.  That said, limiting and maximization are necessary parts of the mastering process, as they help even out albums-worth of material, add some consistancy, and give everything that room-filling sound.  They’re often abused, even by big names, at the behest of artists or producers who want their track to be the loudest thing on the radio.  That, however, is a separate discussion.

Dithering – much of what goes on in the mastering process occurs in the digital realm, at bitrates higher than the standard 16-bits of a CD.  A straight conversion from a 24-bit recording to a 16-bit recording will likely sound fine, but adding a little bit of dithering – a process of algorithmically selectively adding certain kinds of noise to smooth the edges of a harsh downsampling -  can make things sound pretty nice on a CD.

Metering – keeping tabs on levels, headroom, phase, clipping, RMS, peak, and spectrum is very important.  A track may sound good right now but if it’s clipping or has some subtle phase problems that even the good mastering ears don’t catch, it may sound terrible on some system.  The eyes see what the ear can’t.  When I’m mastering, I like to keep various metering tools enabled between every stage of the process, so I can keep tabs on where anything’s going wrong in case my aging ears don’t detect a problem.  Certain metering systems exist so that perceived loudness is baselined and can be kept consistent easily.

Testing, testing, testing – The real hard work.  The mechanics of mastering are not just the technical tweaking of compressors and EQs.  There’s an awful lot of critical listening.  If you were to look at a photo of a real, high-end mastering studio, the first thing you’d see would be multiple sets of speakers – from tiny nearfields to giant, wall-mounted mains, and usually a set of midfields, and possibly even some battered old Yamaha NS-10′s.  Since the goal of mastering is to make sure the track sounds good outside the studio, a wide array of listening systems are used to verify that, in fact, this club track doesn’t lose all the bass in a car, or distort like crazy through a set of crappy computer speakers.  Those of us who do mastering on the cheap are usually limited to nearfields (since a good set of mains requires more money and installation time than any of us really have) so we’re forced to test by playing tracks in the car, or through the iPod, or whatever various systems we have handy.  After a while, a masterer can develop decent instincts and know what’s going to pass the “car test” before actually trying it.  Also, a good suite of the aforementioned metering tools helps, since they can see that, yeah, there’s a spike at 22hz that none of your speakers pick up, but a cheap subwoofer would make sound flabby.

You might notice that there is a common thread in all these tools – it’s all about careful application and critical listening.  A lot of the more severe applications of effects that come so normally in mixing are usually inappropriate in mastering.  EQ boosts and cuts are rarely more than a decibel or two, compression tends to stay on the mild side, and so forth.   Mastering engineers also worry about signal phase a lot, since phase problems lead to cancellations, comb filtering effects, and muddiness.  The whole process  is just very fussy.

Of course, you may be thinking, “gosh, Eric, I’m already a super-fussy guy in front of my 64-channel Neve board, and everything is balanced and EQ’ed just so.  Why do I need you to master this?”  Well, you might not.  A good mastering engineer also knows when to step back and say “yeah, this already works just fine.”  Chances are, though, if you submit 12 tracks to the mastering engineer and one of them is great, the other 11 are going to need to be adjusted to match.

Part 4: Mastering – Can You DIY?

The conventional wisdom is currently that it’s de riguer to pay someone else master your tracks.  This is primarily for two reasons – 1) you already think your tracks sound good, so someone else’s ears and opinions can correct things that you don’t notice and 2) people who do this professionally likely have better gear and acoustics than you do, specifically for this purpose, so they’ll be able to reproduce and test in a way you can’t.   However, this being the era of both music-technology democratization and vastly reduced production budgets, it is entirely possible to DIY.

Most standard DAW packages come with everything you need for basic mastering in plug-in form.  A compressor, a limiter, an EQ and a variety of metering tools.  These are usually of varying quality, though, so you may wish to invest in better  hardware or software.  Regardless, these tools are not going to get you the same level of quality Bernie Grundmann studios is, since they have multi-kajillion dollar hardware and software for doing this.  However, if you’re trying to keep costs down and this is really an indie release you’re selling at gigs or giving to indie labels, your own software is probably fine.  There are economies of scale involved.  Without the right tools and environment, you’ll never get that track mastered to sound as good as Coldplay’s does on the radio – but you also don’t have to pay the prices they paid to have that done.  You can likely get close enough that it won’t sound like crap by comparison.

Where it falls apart for most people is in the arena of hardware.  Many people kit out their home studios with fantastic software, plugins that sound like the best vintage analog gear, high-powered computers,  super-featured DAWs – but then completely neglect to  think about the listening environment or the output gear.  If your monitors are crap (or even if they’re just “decent”), your I/O isn’t clean, or your room acoustics aren’t any good, then forget trying to DIY mastering.  The tools for mastering are surgical, and having a insufficiently detailed listening environment is like trying to do surgery with a burlap sack over your head – you’re likely to do more damage than you fix.

This part of the equation can be costly, too.  Good nearfield monitors are not cheap, nor are precision audio I/O systems.  Acoustic treatment of a room requires time and effort (although it’s less expensive than one might thing – I have other posts on that).   To really do things right, if you want to be all pro about it, your mastering room and your own mixing studio should be separate, and you should have midfield and mains monitors too, but that’s starting to get into the Grundmann teritory again.  This is why it’s often more cost-effective to pay some guy a few hundred to master your stuff – it’s cheaper than buying new gear for it.   There are a lot of low-end mastering houses, too – people with said gear who, while maybe not providing the fanciest of results, are still better at this than most and have invested in at least some of the gear.

If you’re fixated on doing it yourself, at a minimum you need good monitors and some acoustic treatment of a room.

You should also own Bob Katz’s book “Mastering Audio, the Art and the Science.”  While Katz often gets off onto technical, beard-y discussions of jitter and compressor knees, his knowledge is still pretty indispensable.  Also, he’s a vocal critic of the loudness war, and his K-system metering standard is an excellent reference system, since it is predicated on a calibrated listening environment.

What you SHOULDN’T do, EVER, is grab a cracked copy of Waves L2 or fire up Logic’s Adaptive Limiter and crank the gain knobs.  It may sound awesome and space-filling for about 2 minutes but your ears will get tired and you’ll get really bored with it – and so will anyone who’s going to listen.  This, unfortunately, has been the M.O. of too many people, leading to loud, squashed indie recordings that only perpetuate the loudness race, and piss off professional mastering engineers.

Mastering is really all about the ear and how it relates to the totality of the source material, so most of what you’ll be doing in the mastering process will be listening to a track, comparing it to another track, changing settings, and then doing it over and over again.  A common myth is that mastering is mostly about making a track sound good – this is partially true, but it has to sound good in context.  A great, pumping club-loud track is going to really stick out on an album of dynamic ballads, so even if the mastering job is good in isolation, it’s could  sound bad in context.

There are also, of course, many all-in-one, master-your-tracks software packages.  T-Racks and Ozone come to mind immediately.  They’re all reasonably nice programs, but they do afford one the laziness of hitting “dance music preset #1″ and expecting everything to sound good.  This rarely works  (Ozone, for some reason, also includes a “mastering reverb” which seems like a Bad Idea) and often causes the end result to be a distorted, overcompressed mess.  Certainly, this can sour a person on the whole concept of mastering, and the number of poorly self-mastered songs out on the internet is a testament to this. These tools are not to be dismissed out of hand, though – they often do have some very nice options hidden within.  Ozone’s M/S processing is  brilliant, for example.  However, you can build a really flexible mastering chain out of a bunch of different pieces of software and hardware, to suit your own needs and workflow.   PSPaudioware, Voxengo, Waves, Roger Nichols Digital, Wavearts, and many others make high-quality, mastering-chain software plugins.  As for hardware, there’s all sorts of stuff out there, from Manley to UAD to DangerousMusic.

The biggest part of the DIY mastering chain (or even the pro one)  is the one sitting in the chair by the mixing console or computer.  The fundamental center of the mastering world is good, trained ears.  It takes practice to hear a lot of things.  It takes practice to compensate for your own high-frequency hearing loss from all those years as a club DJ.  It takes relaxation – a tired listener means tired ears, and tired ears cannot perceive detail or loudness well.  Dehydration, alcohol, caffeine – all these things affect listening, and should be taken into account during the process.  Taking a break to rest the ears, to approach things fresh again after a while, can make a huge difference.  Hell, it makes a huge difference when mixing, too, but it is really critical when doing the fine-tooth-comb work of mastering.

Well, kinda.  I suppose I could say it was too successful.

I’d used my remaining lumber and my last slab of OC703 to build two 2-foot by 2-foot panels, which I wrapped in musiln, then bolted together at right angles, forming a kind of acoustic corner.  I’d hinged it so I could fold it up when not in use.

The hinging provided some problems.  It left me without a good “hard point” from which to mount it to a mic stand, as all my hard points would move.  So instead I removed the hinges and bunged it together with some angle brackets.

This still left me with some problems.  I needed something that I could clamp onto a stand that wouldn’t collapse under the weight of the thing.  After several false starts with mic stand clamps, hinged clamps, and 5/8-27 thread mounts, I finally screwed on a crossbar and some drum mounting hardware.  This worked rather brilliantly.  Except it required me to mount it to a drums stand instead of a mic stand.  Fine, I guess, because a drums stand was the only thing sturdy enough to hold it all.

It wasn’t too heavy, honestly, but being 2×2 and v-shaped, it was really unbalanced.  While I could probably guesstimate the center of gravity fairly well (college physics comes streaming back) I’d never get it exactly right, since it’s not a spherical object of uniform density.

I brought it downstairs, into the studio.

This is where things went wrong.

It worked brilliantly.  It was also huge.  It dominated one side of the room.  Having a large acoustic absorber on one side of the room basically meant there was an enormous dead spot on one side of me that wasn’t on the other.  The whole room began to sound kind of weird.  I had only a limited number of places to put it too (I may have to move some furniture) without blocking my egress from the room or, more importantly, the cats’ access to their respective litterboxes (and I am not about to change the studio name to “Mouldering Cat Crap Studios).

So that was kind of sucky.

Back to the drawing board.  I disassembled the V and used the hardware to mount the panels on the ceiling.  So I’ve got acoustic panels on the ceiling now.

Oh well.

Friday was mostly given over to meat. And beer. Courtesy of our bassist-in-residence, Mr. Chuck. However, in the evening Wendy and I went to the CTRLSHFT/Caustic/Babyland show. It was Joe and Maggie’s bon voyage, as they leave for higher altitudes. I’m gunna miss those kids.

Saturday I spent a large quantity of time mucking about at Home Depot. For a while I’ve been of the opinion that I need new/better acoustic treatment for my studio, since my previous attempts have been 1) ugly 2) not as acoustically useful as I’d hoped and 3) did I mention ugly? My previous attempts have been first to wrap OC703 in landscape fabric, which was ugly and hard to mount. Second attempt was to wrap them in canvas and glue them to a board. Problem was they looked silly and the canvas was not especially acoustically transparent, meaning they didn’t really do as good of a job as they could, and they looked funny in the process.

So I bought a bunch of 1x3x8′s – construction grade, not furniture grade, for a savings of about $7 a strip – some angle brackets, and 16 yards of unbleached muslin. The lumber got cut and bracketed into 2′ x 4′ frames. I grabbed all my myriad pieces of 703, many of which I’d cut into smaller traps and the like, re-assembled them, jammed them into the frames and wrapped the whole deal in muslin. The end result looks pretty decent and sounds much better. I made 5 acoustic panels from the bits I found. Then I discovered a sixth piece in the back of the garage, so I have one left over that I now intend to use to make a portable hinged microphone isolation baffle.

I think overall, even with the 703, each panel cost me about $15.

Saturday night, Wendy and I hit Summerfest in Milwaukee, where we got our prerequisite grilled corn, hung out with the one and only Robin (without whom I’m pretty sure Summerfest would collapse into a smoking, chaotic ruin). We had some side-stage passes to Flogging Molly, which was pretty excellent. I was only passingly familiar with them before (“If I Ever Leave This World Alive” showed up on a few shows I watched) but having seen them live, they’re awesome. It’s impressive that they’re all pretty consummate musicians, all the more impressive that they can remain as such without sacrificing any onstage energy. That’s rare. Their opener was a DC fiddle band that was also surprisingly good – and also surprisingly capable of doing “rock leaps” while playing violin, which made me giggle.

I’m totally going to have to try to re-learn irish fiddling. I started once, long ago, and kind of forgot everything I ever learned. I have a book of fiddle tunes I bought in Galway and haven’t really cracked open since. I don’t know if I’m talented or coordinated enough for the crazy Donegal style, but maybe I can learn a Mayo style or something. Plus, I discovered that a jig can overlay a chaal beat quite nicely, so three cheers for cross-cultural fusion, eh?

Sunday, I finished the remix I started on thursday, and I’m very pleased with how it came out. It’s kind of big and orchestral. I like doing this sort of thing, and I think I’ll have to do more. It raises some vexing questions about how to pull this off live, but I’ll deal with that later.

I also spent about two hours playing with mic positioning techniques. For the first time, and only briefly, I got my dhol to not sound like a trashcan. I even got it to sound vaguely taiko-like when mic’ed appropriately. This opens up many possibilities.

What I can’t stress enough is just how important even just a little acoustic treatment is.  Good acoustics can make the difference between a crappy recording and a good one – the best mics and monitors and consoles won’t help if there’s no way to know if the sound is accurate.  A lot goes into it, but it’s not a tremendously complicated thing to do.

Acoustic treatment is not the same as soundproofing.  Soundproofing gets you sonic isolation, and is another important facet, but not as critical to mixing and recording as one is often led to beleive.  And most acoustic treatment products have little effect on the overall sonic isolation of a room – if you live in an apartment, hanging acoustic panels will not keep your neighbors from hearing things.  Only heavy mass and airflow management can do that.  Acoustic treatment may help with the neighbors a bit, inasmuch as you won’t need to monitor at high volumes to pick out detail.

The first instinct of a lot of people, myself included, is to start by buying a mess of cheap eggcrate foam and lining their room with it.  That sort of soft batting does manage to do things like dampen slapback delay, trim reverb etc.  Unfortunately it’s commonly used as a panacea, and as such the room ends up oddly anechoic with a lot of high frequency damping but no low frequency management.  This isn’t going to help much – it’s a false sense of security.  Also, most cheap commercial eggcrate foam doesn’t absorb an especially broad range, so it may just cut some slapback but not even control midrange.  A few strategically-placed pieces of real acoustic foam or acoustic paneling, available from a lot of places online, will help a lot more than dousing the room with cheap eggcrate.

The first thing anyone who has a project studio should do is position, adjust, and decouple their monitors.  Make sure that the tweeters are pointing towards your ears, equidistant from your head, from your normal sitting position.  You don’t want them too close to you – that approaches mixing binaurally with headphones, which opens up loads of problems.  Make sure there are no surfaces the speakers could reflect off of on the way to your ears – setting them way back on a desk ofent means there’s going to be sound waves bouncing everywhere and that can lead to phase cancellation, comb filtering, and other ugly sonic smears.  Easy way to check is with a hand mirror – if you put the mirror down someplace and you can see from your normal seat a reflection of a speaker cone, that spot is a possible reflection point.  Speaker stands help with this, as do desks with multiple levels, so you can elevate your speakers to a point where they’re too high to put you in a reflection path.  Finally, decoupling your speakers from anything that can resonate is a good idea.  Heavy, sand-filled stands are a popular option, albeit an expensive one.  Industry giant Auralex makes MoPads, some molded foam pads that act as shock absorbers.  There are other varieties of this, ranging in price from $20 to a few hundred, but even a few simple pieces of squishy packing foam can work well – just something so when the speaker vibrates, it doesn’t make your workspace or your floor vibrate too.  I’ve heard of people trying to hang speakers from the ceiling to decouple them, but that’s not generally a good idea unless they’re heavy enough not to drift any – the kick from the woofer can push the speaker a few milimeters around, causing minor changes in phase and angle at a nearly constant rate.  This would negate the benefit of any decoupling, and probably make things sound worse.

Bass traps?  Bass traps.  BASS TRAPS!  No room used for mixing or recording should be without them.  The corners of any room are going to be death for accurate monitoring – they reflect low frequency like mad, set up phase amplifications on some low frequencies and damp others.  It’s bad.  Bass trapping isn’t difficult to do.  There are numerous decent commercial solutions – Auralex LENRD corner traps are pretty affordable, the stuff that the guys from RealTraps is without equal (the owner, Ethan Winer is an authority on studio acoustics who is kind enough to publish vigorously on the internet and moderate a number of studio acoustics forums), there’re some decent cheap ones from Acoustimac, there are a bunch of free plans on the internet for building your own fancy resontant-cavity traps.  You can DIY bass traps low cost with a few slabs of Owens-Corning 703, 705 insulation or Mineral Wool wrapped in burlap.  Even more cheaply, albiet not quite as effective, is a giant cardboard cement mold tube (get ‘em at home depot for about $4) packed with fiberglass insulation and sealed on both ends.  Take any one of these solutions, stick them in room corners (especially the corners behind your monitors) and it’s amazing how quickly and dramatically the bass response on the monitors tightens up.

Diffusion vs Absorption always comes up.  There are tons of products on the market that are foams or panels or suedes or fabrics that promise sound absorption and control.  No sound absorber is perfect, though,  so some sound is likely to get through and bounce around.  This is particularly problematic in the area directly behind the listener.  The answer there becomes diffusion – setting up something to keep the sound from reflecting directly back, scattering it in multiple directions.  There are a number of commercial diffusers, and many are quite attractive as wall art.  However, all a room really needs is something that takes up a lot of space, has different depths and angles, and a little mass.  The easy answer is furniture.  A bookshelf makes a remarkably good diffuser – the different depths of the books (plus the absorption factor of a lot of papery mass) and the shelves works well to diffuse random reflections.  Plus it can hold all your myriad software manuals and books on mixing.  If it’s big enough, a couch can also work, and that can provide absorption as well (and a place to sit) although usually they’re too low to offer enough help.  Even randomly hanging different-sized pictures on the back wall can assist (but the bookshelf works better).  The trickier bit is on the ceiling.  Diffusion or absorption over the workspace can help reduce reflections and smear.  Obviosuly, mounting a diffuser overhead is no mean feat, and you can’t put a bookshelf there.  A cheap solution I’ve seen is to use a thin piece of plywood, bent so that it’s a convex surface, hung from the ceiling.  Thin plywood can be tensioned with cheap steel wire so that it holds its shape, or it can be forced into a frame to hold it there too.  That will help diffuse reflections enough that there shouldn’t be much reflective interference.  Some sort of absorption above could work too.

Most sources I’ve come across recommend treating about 30-40% of the available wallspace.  That’s sort of a mixed bag for most project/home studios – it can be expensive, and there’s the mere fact that this room is not a single-purpose control room, usually.  Often it’s used for recording, mixing, mastering, rehearsals, and so forth.  For something like recording vocals, it’s often nice to have a more “live” -sounding room to add a bit of natural space or air to the recording that a reverb can’t provide.  And not everyone has a perfectly rectangular, purpose-built room at their disposal that’d be easy to treat.  And some people rent, meaning bolting a few inches of OC705 to a wall is not an option.  And, honestly, for those of us who don’t have a separate set of midfields and mains for previewing, just some simple treatment and bass management is enough.  I’ve seen other more modular solutions as well – I once knew a guy who had a very dead room for most of his recording (back in the days of the 4-track) and he kept a big slab of plywood in his garage that he’d put on the floor before he did any vocals, allowing his dead room to temporarily liven up.  Flexibility seems to be the key.

Isolation can be nice for recording a mic, but everything needs to be isolated – including any headphones.  I’ve come across many vocal takes from people where you can tell they spent a lot of time isolating their vocal booth but the headphone bleed is painfully obvious.  Vocal booth isolation is only really necessary if the engineer wants to monitor at the same time, or if there’s a lot of extraneous background noise.  Over-isolate and the vocal takes can sound strangely flat.  Really, what a good recording space needs is some degree of modularity – depending on the singer or instrument mic positioning is going to vary as is the mic’s position within the room.  Things like RealTraps Portable Vocal Booth or sE’s ReflexionFilter are meant to prevent dicretional sound sources (vocals, instruments) from transmitting past and subsequently boucing off the far walls.  They can be used behind the singer/instrument as well to prevent room sound from affecting the recording.  These things do cost money, though.  A simple and time-worn technique is the “wall of mattresses” or “blanket on a clothesline” – some big, heavy, soft material is suspended near the mic to deaden early reflextions or room sound.  This is of course only if the sound needs it.  If the room already sounds great for recording, there’s no reason to mess with success by adding a fancy isobooth contraption.  You can convert a bathroom or a closet or a spare room into an isolation booth, but that’s a double-edged sword – unless the acoustics are right there, too, the vocals will end up sounding like they were recorded in a closet or bathroom.  And of course when dealing with amps and all that, the rules all change, but I’ll leave that for a guitarist to detail.

Acoustics.  Useful stuff to know.