This might lead you to believe I’m some sort of an Apple fanboy.  This isn’t strictly accurate. The fact is, I’m an Apple Fanboy the way I’m an Indoor Plumbing Fanboy – it’s simply something that’s been an omnipresent part of my life for so long that it almost doesn’t register anymore.

I learned how to use and program computers in 1980 on an Apple ][+, and ever since then, I’ve used and/or owned a variety of Apple products almost continuously, from the first golden era, through the dark Scully/Amelio times when even “The Simpsons” mocked their near-demise, through their second renaissance to today. Without the Apple II, I wouldn’t’ve discovered that I love programming, which led to many opportunities for me down the line. Without the Mac, it’d be a lot harder for me to write the music I do. Without the iPod, it’d be a lot harder to distribute the music I make. None of it would be impossible, but all of it would be a lot harder.

So to say Steve Jobs has had some impact on my life is pretty much a large understatement.

I’ve never aspired to be like Steve. He’s not really a personal hero to me. But then, neither is Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. They’re each guys who had many personal quirks that made them disliked or even feared, and they probably aren’t necessarily personalities to model oneself after. Nonetheless they each made huge contributions to the shape of modern technology and industry. They may not always have personally been the innovators coming up with the great ideas themselves, but they knew how to pick and choose ideas (and pick and choose colleagues and employees to develope those ideas) and bring them to the masses in a way that made the ideas seem self-evident, the resulting products ubiquitous, and their own names immediately recognizable. There were cars before the Model T; there were mp3 players before the iPod. The singular vision was not to respond to the needs of the market, but to anticipate them; to take “niche” ideas and use them to transform society as a whole.

One of Steve’s peculiar gifts was to not merely make these products, but make people excited about them.  What other company gets major-network news coverage from a new phone rollout?  When was the last time CNN speculated on a new laptop that wasn’t an Apple?  Somehow, he could make the ordinary seem extraordinary.  His much-ridiculed “reality distortion field”, that strange mix of charisma, geekish enthusiasm, and laser-like intensity, attracted interest in ways no mere list of product features ever could.

I cannot deny, ever, the profound effect Steve Jobs and his company have had on my life in particular. I owe a lot to Jobs (and Woz, too.  And Linus and Bill and Dennis and Bjarne, and…). Love him or hate him, cast him as angel or devil in the silicon valley story, nobody can deny the fact that Steve Jobs managed to make profound changes to the way we think about computers, helping transform them from intimidating beasts in the domain of eggheads in the back room to friendly appliances we hold in our hands.

Goodbye, Steve. It’s been Insanely Great.

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!

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’.

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.

My Oktava 219 arrived yesterday afternoon, back from Oktavamod.  It was great working with these people – they kept me informed every step of the way.

I haven’t had a ton of time to really put this mic through its paces, but I did want to hear what it sounded like, compared to my Rode NT2.

It’s…really different.  The Rode, being designed to be an “airy” mic, has a lot of top-end.  Sometimes this is very nice, particularly with female vocalists.  But it can be rather “eshy” and brittle too, and lacks punch in the low mids.

The Oktava, on the other hand, is a much darker mic.  It imparts a very warm, punchy character to the material.   It makes my voice sound pretty damn good, I’ll give it that.

As a little experiment, I set up the Rode right next to the Oktava, plugged it into input 2 on the ULN, linked the trim settings and set the preamp characters to neutral.  Then, I sang.  The difference is very audible.

Rode NT2

Oktava 219

Given that, back in the late 90′s when I bought the Rode, I paid somewhere on the order of $400 for it (it was before the explosion in low-cost condenser mics), and the Oktava I managed to snag on ebay for a whopping $70 + the $270 charge for the mod…well, the Oktava ends up being a simply fantastic value.  The Rode is by no means a bad mic – particularly since it has a multiple patterns, very low self-noise, etc.  But for my own vocals?  219 FTW.

I do wish I’d kept a few sound files of the Oktava before the modifications, though. It really is an entirely different beast now than it was before.

I’ve been watching the eBay auctions – the trick seems to be to get the 219.  The newer 319 has a nicer-looking Neumann-style cylindrical body.  Because of that, they’re in higher demand and seem to command higher prices.  Given that the capsule design is identical to the 219, I don’t know if there’s much advantage in the 319.

The OktavaMod people also do other mics, not just Oktavas.  I’m half-tempted to buy some cheap ribbon mics and let Mr. Joly work his magic on those at some point.