Major Label Mastering

Professional Mastering Process

Evren Göknar

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351673136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Acoustical Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Major Label Mastering: Professional Mastering Process distills 25 years of mastering experience at Capitol Records into practical understandings and reliable systems. Containing unparalleled insights, this book reveals the mastering tricks and techniques used by Evren Göknar at one of the world's most notable record labels.

Beginning with the requisite competencies every Mastering Engineer must develop, Major Label Mastering delves into the particulars of the mastering studio, as well as fundamental mastering tools. Included among these tools is The Five Step Mastering Process, a rigorously tested system that equips the practitioner to successfully and confidently master a project to exacting standards of audio fidelity. Covering all bases, the book discusses both macro and micro considerations: from mindset approach and connecting with clients down to detailed guidelines for processing audio, advanced methods, and audio restoration. Each chapter ends with exercises intended to deepen understanding and skill, or to supplement course study.

Suitable for all levels, this is a unique resource for students, artists, and recording and Mastering Engineers alike. Major Label Mastering is supplemented by digital resources including audio examples and video tutorials.

Part I

The Key Competencies and Understandings of a Mastering Engineer

A Mastering Engineer must endeavor to develop critical audio analysis and processing skills, and also understand fundamental principles of digital and analog recording. Once a baseline of proficiency is achieved in these areas, the conceptualization and execution of audio mastering becomes readily available, and the audio fidelity of completed mastering projects drastically improves.

Chapter 1

The Mastering Engineer

Competencies

In this chapter, I will identify and explore The Ten Competencies of a Mastering Engineer. This represents a bird’s-eye view for those seeking a greater understanding of or considering a career in audio mastering, or a checklist for established or practicing Mastering Engineers. Broadly speaking, audio mastering represents a discipline that requires sophisticated listening abilities, familiarity with musical genres, technological acumen, and an awareness of musicianship. More specifically, a dedicated and effective Mastering Engineer must understand, practice, and execute a set of component skills that constitute the greater discipline of audio mastering. The array of these skills is expansive but can be organized into the following ten competencies, one must become:

1. An Audiophile
2. A Critical Listener
3. Aware of Recording Methods and Technologies
4. Knowledgeable About Audio Mastering Tools
5. Informed About Acoustics and Listening Environments
6. Proficient With Digital Audio Workstations
7. Adept at Quality Control (QC) Methods
8. Able to Generate the Audio Master
9. Implement Recallable Workflow Approaches
10. Personable and Entrepreneurial in Demeanor

This represents a comprehensive list and no aspiring Mastering Engineer begins with proficiency in each area. The process of regular engagement with audio, mastering, and seeking expertise such as a community of Mastering Engineers, or this and other pertinent books from reliable sources, will activate and develop them. Some of the listed skills may come more naturally to you than others, but fortunately all of them can be learned or improved upon, and ultimately achieved with time and dedication. Engaging in and developing these skills will allow you to offer the client insight into audio fidelity enhancement and prepare you to interact effectively with them. They must feel confident that you understand their sonic vision for the finished product, so you must be an effective listener to their requests or concerns. As the critical last stop in music production, mastering involves great responsibilities and the Mastering Engineer remains accountable to the artist, engineer, producer, and record label in completing each project effectively.

Once you are mastering, you may receive fantastic feedback, and feel great about your results, but you will be best served by a mindset of providing excellent audio fidelity while continually evolving. Allow your network of clients, the quality of your work and studio/facility, and your accolades to represent your success. Confidence in your abilities accompanied by a beginner’s mind (shoshin¹ in Zen Buddhism)—engaging the totality of your sensibilities—represents an effective mindset for a Mastering Engineer. This way, you remain open to new approaches and ideas as you work and evolve. Whereas your opinion will clearly matter, understanding an artist’s musical vision and delivering a great sounding, high fidelity master will allow you to meet or exceed their expectations and result in referrals, repeat customers, and an excellent reputation. Let’s now explore the ten competencies in greater detail.

Become an Audiophile

Embrace becoming an audiophile, literally “audio lover” in Latin—audire means to hear, and phile means to love. In doing so, you will increase your awareness and understanding of the quality of recordings, the common formats and resolution options for digital audio, and the quality sound playback systems that reproduce them. This concept underlies and informs the ethos of audio mastering. Audiophile values include a pure connection with and sensitivity to the music, ideally reproduced on a transparent playback system with minimum hardware component coloration, revealing only the music captured in the recording. By engaging in some basic research, you will become knowledgeable about both analog and digital audio playback devices and components (cables/interconnects, software players of digital files, turntables, computer input/output [I/O] cards, digital-to-analog [DA] converters, audio cables, power amplifiers, pre-amps/receivers, speakers/drivers, speaker crossovers, and electronic components/equipment design).² If you are new to this concept, any issue of Stereophile, Audiophile, or The Absolute Sound or their corresponding web sites offer both scientific and subjective equipment reviews. Although the language and descriptions can get flowery, possessing the correct vernacular remains helpful when communicating likes and dislikes about audio equipment, recordings, and sound. Additionally, it is important to possess an understanding of common lossy (data reduced) and lossless (data preserved)³ digital audio formats (lossy: .mp3, .aac, and .m4a; lossless and high-definition lossless: .wav, .aiff, .flac, .alac, and .dsd—used for Super Audio Compact Disc [SACD]).

In a recording and mastering context, the ideology behind audiophile recordings is also relevant. These are often live-to-two-track stereo recordings (utilizing either X-Y, binaural, or Blumlein⁴ microphone techniques) done in a highly regarded, acoustically correct space (studio, hall, or venue). Producers of these recordings embrace an ethos of using minimal devices in the recording chain outside of high-quality microphones and microphone preamplifiers, ideally utilizing no compression or equalization, so as to capture the purity of the sound and musical performance with minimal processing and electronics noise. If the music genre doesn’t support this purist approach, many music labels have been involved in having popular titles in their catalog remastered from original analog source tapes into high-resolution audio formats: .flac, .alac, .dsd or high-resolution audio (24bit with a sampling frequency at or above the Red Book CD standard of 44.1kHz—16bit, usually 48kHz, 88.2kHz, 96kHz, 176.4kHz, or 192kHz).

An example of two record companies that produce and release audiophile recordings are Chesky Records (started by brothers Norman and David Chesky, who also operate a high-resolution audio download platform HDtracks [hdtracks.com]); and Sheffield Labs (started by renowned Mastering Engineer Doug Sax and his brother Sherwood). Both of these labels produced and sell an audiophile test disc (The Sheffield/A2TB Test Disc [SL10508] and the Chesky Jazz Sampler and Audiophile Test CD [JD37]) to assist in developing listening skills and also to test speaker placement and room acoustics for audio image assessment in a listening room. There are many other labels dedicated to high-resolution/audiophile quality recordings (for example, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab and the Columbia MasterSound series specialize in half-speed vinyl releases), and research on the HDtracks website provides a good survey and understanding of the high-definition digital audio market. Become familiar with a few of these types of recordings, and keep them in a folder on your digital audio workstation (DAW) to compare against similar projects you’re working on.

A Note on Sampling Frequency (S) and Bit Depth (BD) in High-Resolution Audio

I will contextualize the high-resolution audio discussion by framing high sampling frequency audio with some objective scientific ideas. Note that the sampling frequency (S) determines the Nyquist frequency (N) or bandwidth of the audio using the relationship N=S/2.⁵ This means that digital audio sampled at: 44.1kHz produces a frequency bandwidth of 0Hz–22.05kHz; 48kHz audio, 0Hz–24kHz; 88.2kHz audio, 0Hz–44.1kHz, and so on. Remember that the threshold of human hearing is around 20kHz. Therefore, although the high-resolution file is reproducing more audio, and more audio beyond the audible spectrum, it is not audible to humans. Many people claim to notice a difference...