Audio Mastering: The Artists

Discussions from Pre-Production to Mastering

Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317480044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Théorie et appréciation de la musique

Audio Mastering: The Artists collects more than twenty interviews, drawn from more than 60 hours of discussions, with many of the world's leading mastering engineers. In these exclusive and often intimate interviews, engineers consider the audio mastering process as they, themselves, experience and shape it as the leading artists in their field. Each interview covers how engineers got started in the recording industry, what prompted them to pursue mastering, how they learned about the process, which tools and techniques they routinely use when they work, and a host of other particulars of their crafts. We also spoke with mix engineers, and craftsmen responsible for some of the more iconic mastering tools now on the market, to gain a broader perspective on their work.

This book is the first to provide such a comprehensive overview of the audio mastering process told from the point-of-view of the artists who engage in it. In so doing, it pulls the curtain back on a crucial, but seldom heard from, agency in record production at large.

Part One
North America

Gateway Mastering

Bob Ludwig and Adam Ayan

Established by mastering legend Bob Ludwig in 1992, Gateway Mastering remains one of the most successful independent mastering houses currently in operation. Ludwig’s list of credits is legendary, including work on records by the Kronos Quartet, Steve Reich, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Phish, Megadeth, Metallica, Gloria Estefan, Nirvana, The Strokes, Queen, U2, Guns N’ Roses, Tool, Simple Minds, Bryan Ferry, Tori Amos, Bonnie Raitt, Beck, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, the Bee Gees, Madonna, Supertramp, Will Ackerman, Pet Shop Boys, Radiohead, Elton John, Disney’s “Frozen” soundtrack, and Daft Punk, to name a few. Ludwig is joined in his work at Gateway by 40-time Grammy winner Adam Ayan, another engineer whose stature in the field probably can’t be overstated. We spoke briefly with Bob Ludwig by email before connecting by Skype with Adam Ayan.

Bob Ludwig

Q: Would you go out on your own as an independent mastering engineer in today’s environment?

If I was starting out, by all means it would be far preferable to be employed by a company. Being in a group of other engineers, one can learn so much from interacting with them. I can’t imagine what learning mastering in a vacuum would be like. When I started with Phil Ramone at A&R Recording, I think I learned more from their superb maintenance staff than even the other engineers. Interacting with others is a font of knowledge from which to draw knowledge.

Q: How has mastering changed since you started? Does anything in particular seem lost or gained in today’s professional climate?

Mastering started as a transfer process from tape mix to a reference lacquer. Then it evolved into doing more and more creative sound changes while doing the lacquer cutting, and finally it graduated to today’s process of doing a two-track to two-track remix. When mastering was a part of the great studio systems, like Sony Music Studios, A&R Recording, The Hit Factory, etc., one refined one’s skill over the course of a career. With that gone, it is difficult to become a well-rounded engineer.

Q: Did you have any important teachers early on in your mastering career? Do you remember anything of particular significance that they taught you and that you pass on today?

Phil Ramone was my mentor. He taught me what a good sound was and how to best handle clients. He especially taught me how to remain cool under intense pressure. A&R Recording was the first independent recording studio to buy the Neumann computerized lathe. No one could figure it out, so Phil locked me and Aaron Baron into the room until we figured out how to make it work. I learned by comparing what I was doing with the union engineers at CBS, Capitol, Deutsche Grammophon, and RCA. Mastering has evolved so much from then. Me, Lee Hulko, Doug Sax, Bernie Grundman, and Steven Marcussen were pioneers in seeing how far the mastering envelope could be pushed.

Q: What, in mastering, do you think engineers very early on in their career should know?

Get the technical side of the job down so thoroughly that you don’t have to think about it. Be able to master, listening to music with the right side of your brain, and keep the time where one has to use the left side of the brain to as little as possible.

Adam Ayan

Adam Ayan is a Grammy Award-, five-time Latin Grammy Award-, and TEC Award-winning mastering engineer who works at Gateway Mastering Studios in Portland, ME. His credits are diverse and exemplary— including recordings for superstar artists such as Paul McCartney, Carrie Underwood, Katy Perry, Gwen Stefani, Lana del Rey, Shakira, Madonna, the Foo Fighters, the Rolling Stones, Kelly Clarkson, Barbra Streisand, Juan Luis Guerra, Rush, Rascal Flatts, Pearl Jam, The Animals, and Keith Urban, to name a few.

Adam has mastered several Grammy Award-winning recordings (40 to date!) and many No. 1 singles and albums and has well over 100 Gold, Platinum or Multi-Platinum projects to his credit. Many of the recording industry’s best producers, engineers, and artists rely on Adam’s ears and expertise to fully realize their artistic vision. You can find out more about Adam and his work at www.adamayan.com.

Q: How did you become a mastering engineer?

A: From the very beginning, I went to the University of Massachusetts at Lowell for their sound recording, technology, and music performance program.

Q: Were Alex Case and Will Moylan there at the time?

A: Will was, yes. Will started that program actually, in the ’80s, well ahead of me. I went in the mid-’90s. Alex wasn’t quite there yet. I think he came in as faculty a few years after I had graduated from the program, but of course I know both of them very well, and I stayed in touch with them. I know Alex well, and I know Will very well. Will was a professor of mine, and the director of the program when I was there. Both are great people, and in my opinion, they run the best program hands down for sound recording in the country.

I was a musician as a kid, and I really wanted to go to school for music performance. I wanted to be a rock star. I played in a lot of rock bands when I was a teenager, and when it came time to figure out what I was going to do with myself after finishing high school, I decided I really wanted to go to school for music performance. However, I had spent a little time in the recording studio as a performer and as a musician, and I thought, “Well, there’s this great sound recording program not too far from me geographically at UMass, maybe I’ll check that out and see what that’s about.”

Once I got into the recording program, my gears totally shifted to recording and audio, and then eventually to mastering specifically. It’s interesting, you’re mastering guys as well, and I’m sure you’ve felt over the years that not many people completely understand what it is that we do because we’re such a niche part of the industry. When I was in school at UMass, I didn’t know a lot about mastering, but I had asked Bob Ludwig to come and speak to our AES [Audio Engineering Society] Student Chapter during my senior year. I had asked a number of industry professionals to come and speak throughout the year, and every time I did, it was this great experience for me to get an overview of different potential careers in audio. I knew I really wanted to be in music production, and as I researched what mastering was, and then of course had Bob come down and speak to our student chapter of the AES, I realized that mastering was something I really wanted to do.

I then interned at a mastering studio in Boston and worked there for a little bit before getting a job as a production engineer here at Gateway in 1998. Of course, that was where, in both cases—in the studio in Boston and here—the rubber met the road. It was one thing to think maybe I wanted to be a mastering engineer, but then once I was having the experience in a mastering studio, I realized it was definitely what I wanted to do.

I don’t know about yourself, but I know there are a number of people in the industry that didn’t quite start out in mastering. They did tracking for a while, or mixing for a while, and found their way into mastering. That said, folks like Bob [Ludwig], Doug [Sax], Bernie Grundman, Ted Jensen, and a lot of those guys, started out in mastering early on, and that was really how I started. I did some multi-track recording, and I did some mixing, but very early on in my career I was working in a mastering studio. By the time I was about 25 years old, I was mastering records here at Gateway. So mastering has been the primary focus of my career since the beginning.

Q: How did you learn to master? Like you said, a lot of people aren’t fully aware of what it is exactly a mastering engineer does. How did you learn that craft?

Well, I learned by being in the mastering studio and having the experience I gained in Boston. More specifically, I learned through experience here at Gateway. Within about a year of working as a production engineer, being a guy that did editing and cut production masters for Bob’s projects, I heard he wanted to have an assistant in the room. I really wanted to be that guy. So that was really where I learned the art of mastering, as Bob’s assistant for a couple of years.

I started by just hanging out with Bob in the room and seeing what he was doing. Bob gave me a little bit of a tutorial and information about what he was doing. This eventually led to me setting up for him in the morning before he got in, and then setting up and EQing (equalizing) tracks before he came in to start a session. That was really where the real learning of the art came into play for me, because I could set up the technical stuff I had under my belt at that point, and I could start EQing tracks.

He’d come in and say “Oh no, I would have done it this way, or that way,” or “That’s too much top, or too much bottom.” Or whatever the case was. Eventually, though, he would arrive in the morning and say, “Oh, that’s exactly how I would do it.” So that work refined my ears and my skillset on the creative side of mastering to the point where we both realized that I had developed the aptitude and the temperament to be a mastering engineer. Bob said, “Why don’t you start taking on and developing your own clientele?” So it was really through that assistant-mentorship role, specifically with Bob as my mentor, that I learned the art of mastering.

Q: What a way to learn!

I like to say it’s like I got an Ivy League education in mastering!

Q: So what is mastering?

I like that question. It is a difficult question to answer, though, as you know. The way I describe it, in a nutshell, to somebody that asks me that question, is to say that mastering is a two-step process. The first “step” is the end of the creative process of making a recording, and that’s of course what I do every day as a mastering engineer. The other “step” is prep for manufacturing and digital distribution. Because the creative side is what I do every day, and is the more interesting and exciting part of what we do, I would define that as the ability to make a recording sound as best as it can, and for it to translate well to the end listener, the fans of the band, and to whoever made the recording in the first place. My job is to make every recording that comes across my desk sound the best that it can and to help bring out the emotion and message of the music that the artist is trying to convey with their recording to the listener. Of course, that’s what everyone is doing in the recording process, but we’re specifically at the end of that creative process. We’re the last step.

Q: Were there any sessions in particular that stand out as being really important learning experiences for you?

Collectively, each and every one of them was a significant learning experience, in one way or another. One that just jumped into mind when you asked the question was a greatest hits record for the band Megadeth that I was assisting Bob on. It jumps out for me because it was a greatest hits record, not a typical studio album. It was a series of snapshots in time, with tracks that may have had different record producers, different mixers, different engineers, etc. Of course, as a mastering engineer, our job is to make it all sound great but also make it sound cohesive. As you know, with a greatest hits album, or a compilation, what we work on is much more varied than usual. I remember that one session being a struggle. As an assistant setting up, starting to EQ some of the tracks for Bob, and working with him on it, finding a common ground for all of the tracks was hard, and we had to accept the fact that some of them were going to live as they were. That one [session] sort of jumps out at me in a number of different ways as one where I learned a number of things that are mindsets and toolsets that I carry with me still today.

I remember with this one track, I was having a really, really hard time getting it to sort of stand up, or be loud, or have any bite to it, and I kept going for compression and limiting. Then I had Bob looking over my shoulder and saying “Well, why don’t we just try opening up the top end, it’s really dull. I realized that having proper frequency balance was just as important for loudness as using a ton of limiting and compression. Those types of things, and that session in particular, jumped into my mind immediately as one where a lot of lessons that I learned in every session, every day, came together.

Q: What are the things that you typically listen for, or what sort of areas are you going to address, when you master, regardless of genre?

That’s a good question. I’m one of these guys that jumps right in and starts working. Some mastering engineers may like to listen to a track down flat and see how it hits them before they start doing anything. I usually jump right in and start working. For every track, of course, the first thing I’m going to focus on is any corrective EQ, or any corrective measures, I have to take with the mix. In other words, if things jump out as being just plain wrong, those are the things I need to address first before I can delve into the craft or more creative part of what I’m doing. If there’s too much bass response in the track overall, if it’s boomy, the first thing I’m going to work on is getting that in line, fixing that, and making that work before I delve into anything else. So corrective EQ, or corrective measures, are the thing I look for first, which generally of course means that I start by creating a good overall balance, in terms of frequency response, that is appropriate for that recording. That would be the first thing I’d be looking for.

Of course most of what I do would fall under the umbrella of pop music, so vocals are really important. During the first or second listen I’d make sure that the vocals are hitting me just right. Are they present enough? Are they loud enough? Are they clear enough? Are they right where they should be? I work on very, very few instrumental recordings. Again most of the stuff that I do would fall under that pop music category in one way or another, whether it’s pop music being commercially released, pop, country, all of that So the vocal is so important.

Q: Do you have a preferred signal chain that you work with when you’re doing this?

Yeah, I do. For most mastering engineers, myself included, I think knowing your signal path really well is super important, and adding new things into it you do fairly cautiously, though I’m not hesitant to add new stuff into it. In terms of my signal path, what my preference has been recently, and it’s changed in the past couple of years, but because virtually every mix is coming in digital now, and that’s been the case for a long time, I’m finding that I’m staying all digital these days 99 times out of 100. If you asked me this question five years ago, I would say my preference was a hybrid signal path, even when given a digital mix. I would do a D/A conversion, I would use analog gear, and do a subsequent A/D conversion, use some digital plug-ins in-the-box, stuff, like that, but these days I’m finding my preferred signal path is all digital. I use both Pro Tools and Pyramix. Those are the two workstations I use every day. I use Pro Tools for playing back mixes, and for plugin processing, and then I use Pyramix for the other end, as the final step of my signal path, not including my monitoring of course, but the final step in terms of where the processed signal goes. All of it will go into Pyramix, and all the final editing, and the final master export, happen in Pyramix.

Q: Will you take us through your conversion and monitoring?

A: Sure. These days I’m using a Horus convertor, which is made by Merging Technologies, the folks that make Pyramix. I think they make the best-sounding converter on the market now, and so the end of my chain is Pyramix to the Horus for D/A (Digital-to-Analog conversion), through an SPL console; I have a DMC console, and Duntech Sovereigns are my monitors of choice.

Q: So you said that you’re mostly digital now. Do you have any bits of outboard gear that you’re still using nonetheless, somewhat regularly?

A: Not really, no. I do have a couple of TC devices that occasionally I’ll go into for various things. And I have some multifunctional devices, like the system 6000 or, believe it or not, the Finalizer. Occasionally I’ll go into one of those devices. In both cases, there are just a handful of algorithms or setups that I like in the devices, but it’s becoming even less and less common for me to use them. I’m staying in the box almost entirely now. It’s almost unbelievable that that’s become the case, and I feel like I’m getting better results that way.

Q: Me too.

A: Yeah, isn’t that interesting? For many, many years, I felt like using analog was a really important part of my signal path, and I challenged myself to do more in the box a few years ago when I had a couple of very intense, very time-intensive projects. It was like, “So, how am I going to get through these in a really efficient manner?” And I was like, “Let me see if I could do them all in the box.” Of course, if I couldn’t I would have dealt with it. But I realized at that point that everything in the box had become so good, and subsequent to those projects I found that anytime I was going out of the box I was getting lesser results than I used to. I think that some folks still really like analog gear, and I think there’s still some mythology around it, but I’m definitely a convert to digital.

Q: Getting a little bit more into the nitty gritty, I wanted to talk about de-noising and editing. Do you do either often, and how much is either de-noising or editing actually a part of your practice?

Let’s start with de-noising. I think it’s something that happens every day, to one extent or another. For me, de-noising on almost a daily basis just means removing some clicks and pops and that sort of thing. Occasionally you get something with a lot of analog hiss, and maybe I’ll go after that if it’s bothersome. My general rule of thumb with de-noising is that if there is something that is not a musical component of the recording, and it takes me out of the moment when I’m listening to it, then I need to address it. That’s my threshold of whether or not I need to de...