The Null Device Blog

You’re on stage.  This show is great.  The crowd is eating it up.  This will be the defining moment of your musical career.

Hey, what was that popping sound?

Where did the vocals go?

Oh…oh, hell.

It’s an inveitability.  Play enough gigs and something catastrophic will happen.  Laptops will crash, mics will short out, cables will die, the monitors will explode, the guitarist will have a  strobe-light-induced seizure…something is going to go wrong eventually. 

In these cases you have two choices: stop the show and get offstage, or deploy a backup plan.  I’ve always preferred the latter, although there are cases where the former is really your only option.

What constitutes an onstage backup plan?  In an ideal world, like the world that a lot of larger bands live in, you just have identical gear you can just swap in when something goes wrong.   Open up any of the big touring band interviews in SoundOnSound and you’ll see rigs that have two of everything, and there are copanies that make gear specifically for the purpose of sycnhronizing for seamless failover.  Unfortunately, most of us don’t have that luxury.  I certainly can’t afford to keep a second cloned laptop at the ready if mine goes out.   However, I do keep an iPod with all the backing tracks and the appropriate patch cables at the ready.  It’s not optimal, but it’s to my mind better than not performing.   I also keep things like backup mics, backup DI’s, extra batteries, and spare cables in a bag just offstage.  While the soundman may have a bunch of these things, he may also not.  I prefer not to take chances, and these are reasonably cheap investments.

I also keep needle-nosed pliers, electrical tape, a small screwdriver, and a soldering iron in the bag.  This is obviously not something one can use onstage – “hang on, let me resolder this broken adapter…” – but quite often technical problems manifest during setup or soundcheck, and you have some extra time to rectify them.  Not everything can be fixed, of course, but it never hurts to have some tools ready.  A screwdriver can be the difference between a great show and not performing at all.

For the electronic artist, it is good to remember that hard drives are cheap.   Stuff happens on the road that is generally not conducive to the proper functioning of a laptop.  Keeping a cheap backup drive with all your important stuff on it handy is a Good Thing.  Again, not something you can do on the fly (“GOOD EVENING CLEVELAND!  Are you READY TO give me a few hours to RESTORE from this BACKUP!?!  WOOOOO!”) but it can at least mean the difference between cancelling a gig and cancelling a tour.

So what about the band members?  You can’t keep a spare singer handy.  You can, however, keep throat lozenges, decongestants, ibuprofen/asprin, pepto, imodium, and other such OTC rememdies around.  They don’t take up much room.  And when you need them, you’re really, really glad they’re there.  While it’s not the greatest thing in the world to perform with a band stuffed with indigestion meds, the alternative is far worse.

I’ve also learned – the hard way, mind you – that all this preparedness does you no good whatsoever if you can’t get at it in a hurry.  If you’re in the club about to go onstage and something breaks, or you suddenly feel that imodium is necessary (ahem), it won’t do you any good if those things are locked in the van in a parking garage behind the venue.    This also raises the issue that every band member on the road should have extra underwear packed.  Just sayin’.

As both a guy who makes music and a guy who masters other people’s I’ve encountered the tendency – sometimes even in myself – to write off some mix errors as just “stuff that can be fixed in mastering.”

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 rise in the DIY Mastering ethos for independent studios, a number of companies have put out all-in-one mastering solutions, generally a single program or an all-in-one plugin that handles every major step in the mastering chain.  I can’t say I’m a huge fan.

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.

Friday night was the late-night, barely-controlled chaos that was a Caustic show.  I mention that merely because I was rocking the theremin and some keys for that gig.  I also mention that because it meant I didn’t get home to sleep until well after 2am.

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.

Recursions is almost done.  I’m in the process of getting the final masters together.

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.

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