Mastering in Music

John Paul Braddock, Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, Matthew Shelvock, Rob Toulson, John Paul Braddock, Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, Matthew Shelvock, Rob Toulson

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000281460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Medios digitales

Mastering in Music is a cutting-edge edited collection that offers twenty perspectives on the contexts and process of mastering.

This book collects the perspectives of both academics and professionals to discuss recent developments in the field, such as mastering for VR and high resolution mastering, alongside crucial perspectives on fundamental skills, such as the business of mastering, equipment design and audio processing.

Including a range of detailed case studies and interviews, Mastering in Music offers a comprehensive overview of the foremost hot topics affecting the industry, making it key reading for students and professionals engaged in music production.

Part One

Mastering: practice

1

The creative mastering studio

Alexander Hinksman

INTRODUCTION

In September 2014 I began a doctoral study programme to explore audio mastering as a new creative culture of post-production. Between April 2015 and June 2018, I interviewed 20 of the world’s leading engineers in the field. Each mastering engineer gave rigorous insight into the cultures that underpin their creative processes and my study took seriously these practitioners, like more conventional ‘producers’, as creative participants in modern aspects of recorded music production. My thesis recognised and further established that although theoretical studies and debates around mastering have remained largely absent, particularly throughout the academic sphere of Media and Cultural Studies, the aesthetic of commercial and mainstream popular music had come to be a subject of the mastering engineers’ creative methods. I explained that mastering engineers continue to imbue the consistent timbre and entire playback time of popular music recordings – single or album – through essential processes that are relative to each engineer’s agency when using select combinations of creatively affordant signal processing tools in unique studio environments. For the chapter you read today, I have chosen to draw from aspects of my research that focus specifically on the spaces occupied by mastering engineers. This is because for years, many academics and documentary filmmakers honed in on the culture of spaces where the recording or mixing of 20–21C popular music took place. This rich scholarship worked to bolster the cultural significance of such locations. Discourses around reputable studios, such as those explored by Cogan and Clark [1], actively constructed renowned ‘temples of sound’, where alchemic creative practices were performed through the tracking and mixing stages of production. The mass media also established recording studios as creatively significant and iconic locations bound to artists or producers with star status – places ‘where the magic happens’ [2, pp. 64–65] (see also [3,4]). Similar groups of academics and the mass media also observed how conventional record producers evolved from technicians to creatives in demand for recording and mixing. The recording process clearly shook its ‘lab coat’ image over the course of the 20C [5, p. 220]. Today, scholars such as Matthew T. Shelvock [6], Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson [7] and myself exist as part of a growing collective who recognise how analogous aspects of the mastering industry and its development remain comparatively overlooked – how some of the studios that mastering engineers have used to perform sonic adjustments on hit records are absent from wider industry discourse or theoretical studies and debates around popular music production. As part of my resolve to explore studio spaces used for mastering in this chapter, I will account for why this neglect may be so. Moreover, I will offer nuanced perspectives on the concept of mastering studios being better understood as creatively significant places.

THE CREATIVE MASTERING STUDIO

Irrespective of many reputable mastering engineers having moved office at various stages of their careers, an issue I will unpack later in the chapter, the need for mastering engineers to be aurally attuned with the sonic characteristics of their listening space would prove to be an incontestably popular demand. Many of the mastering engineers I interviewed confirmed how efforts are typically made to adjust the acoustic properties of studios in order to construct, in Geoff Pesche’s terms, ‘controlled environments for listening’, as opposed to recording. Pesche, of Abbey Road Studios in London (UK), prompted me to compare the swapping of mastering rooms with divorce, insofar as moving somewhere that sounds totally different, having worked in the same room all the time, would require the engineer to reattune. Adam Gonsalves (Telegraph Mastering, Portland, OR) positioned mastering as ‘the final critical chance at QC from somebody who does this all day in a room specifically prepared for the task’. Robin Schmidt (24–96 Mastering, Germany) twice upheld that operating consistently within the same acoustic environment is vital bedrock to the mastering process; ‘you press play and you know exactly what you’re listening to’, he said. From our interview 2015, I gleaned that Schmidt had previously hired an acoustician to design his room in Karlsruhe. Also speaking in 2015, Greg Calbi confirmed Fran Manzella as the reputable acoustician behind the majority of mastering rooms inside Sterling Sound’s former and sole location at 88 10th Ave New York, NY. ‘He’s a genius’, stated Calbi. Following my interview with Calbi, Sterling Sound publically announced their impending departure from 88 10th Ave and their appointing of Thomas Jouanjean’s Northward Acoustics to design their new facilities in Edgewater, NJ and Nashville, TN. By 2015, Jouanjean had designed the main studio at Stardelta Mastering – a rural Devonshire (UK) facility owned and operated by Lewis Hopkin, who I later interviewed in 2016. By 2018, Jouanjean had also been commissioned to redesign the mastering suite at Adam Gonsalves’ Telegraph Mastering. Hopkin described Jouanjean, his choice acoustician, as ‘a fantastically knowledgeable guy’.

Spending time with a cross section of mastering engineers affirmed to me that the conventional goal of any specialist asked to design a listening space or control room would be to construct the ‘flattest’ and most clinical listening environment possible in accordance with presenting circumstances; even the most sophisticated approach to acoustic design and correction will deviate from a hypothetically or mathematically optimal benchmark when unique structural or spatial limitations are imposed. I also learned that internal fixtures and everyday furnishings could affect the acoustic temperament of spaces used for mastering. Lewis Hopkin explained, ‘I knew Thomas [Jouanjean] had designed a pretty much perfect acoustic environment. We looked at plots on a screen and the response was as flat as it was going to be’ – for his particular room, a repurposed Victorian Baptist church, I add. Thus, whilst efforts can be made to achieve sonically and mathematically optimal benchmarks through artificial acoustic treatment, I suggest that each particular mastering room would likely offer nuance and subjectivity to the listening experience. With this being proposed, it is essential I draw attention to how, as Shelvock [6, p. 201] explained, ‘phenomenological evaluation of a record’s timbral and dynamic configuration informs every audio mastering session’. Standing by this notion, I affirm that we should consider each creative and critical choice made by mastering engineers as a function of the listening experience afforded by their unique but understudied environment. This idea is further informed by a history of music industry personnel making sense of recording studios as musical instruments in their own right. Susan Schmidt Horning [4, p. 90] cited early tropes that would reinforce this concept – Columbia’s ‘30th Street’ came to be regarded as the studio equivalent of a Stradivarius violin, for example (see also [8, p. xiii], [9], [10, p. 85]). In part, these sorts of impressions are born out of the view that recording spaces offer desirable and distinctive acoustic reverberances that engineers capture through tracking. The former Liederkranz Hall in New York City also garnered a reputation for its acoustics. In Schmidt Horning’s [4, p. 87] terms, the facility placed ‘new emphasis on the sound of the studio, not just the music being recorded’.

Assimilating all this, I suggest that if spatially and sonically acclimated mastering engineers remain in high demand, then their studio spaces deserve much greater recognition and study as culturally or creatively significant places. My argument becomes more justified when considering how imaginably hundreds of label personnel, engineers, and spaces with unique acoustics could be involved in the pre-production or tracking of any one album; numerous other engineers and spaces may then be involved in mixing. Additionally, fast Internet connectivity and digital multitrack production has enabled patchworked, networked, and digital audio workstation-based approaches to production in all areas of the market (see [11, pp. 186–209], [12,13], [14, pp. 9–13]). Thus, lengthy and costly efforts can be spread out over networks of tracking through to mixing, and at the bottleneck of the process, in a new era of more mobile producers, a sole mastering engineer will insist on reshaping these efforts or performing sonic adjustments as a function of their acoustic environment. Under these circumstances, I suggest that each song, track, take, or overdub that pertains to a patchwork project will share in a common thread that is subject to the physical space used for mastering. Moreover, entire discographies can share in a common geographical relevance through mastering.

Numerous other concepts were informed or brought to the fore through my interpretations of research presented so far. First, I noted that whilst mastering engineers may be prone to construct their role as one that offers creative interjections at the final stages of production, some of the interviews had prompted me to consider how such offerings should only be made in mathematically regulated environments. I suggest that this notion would reinforce popular interpretations of mastering as an amalgam of art and science. Second, by considering mathematically devised rooms as a high requisite for their creative work, this would foster the perceived necessity of hiring a specialist to master recordings at a professionally treated facility. It could be entertained that some of the mastering engineers I interviewed also and inadvertently presented more subtle ways through which the same necessity could be encouraged – Calbi describing Manzella as ‘a genius’ or Hopkin describing Jouanjean as ‘a fantastically knowledgeable guy’, for instance. All this being said, I observed how not all 20 of the leading engineers would have been in a position where they could have announced having chosen to hire an internationally renowned specialist to ensure the acoustics of their studio are treated or prepared to a more clinical specification. Thus, while some engineers may choose to promote the mathematically devised room as a high requisite for creative work, others engineers such as Jon Astley (Close To The Edge, London, UK) and Simon Heyworth (Super Audio Mastering, Devonshire, UK) may bind their creative proficiency to deep-rooted and personal familiarity with the unique acoustic properties of a more organic space.

In September 2015, I noted that the mastering room at Jon Astley’s home did not show regular indications of having undergone radical levels of artificial acoustic treatment. ‘I know [this room] very, very well’, said the engineer, who proceeded to explain that the room’s ornamental wooden paneling ‘tends to absorb quite a lot’. He added, ‘The windows are recessed, so you’re getting no zing from the glass and my chimney is a bass trap’. By my interpretation, despite Astley having expressed a clear awareness of undesirable acoustic phenomena and how such phenomena may be prevented, the engineer proceeded to convey an innate familiarity with and preference for the natural aural characteristics of his room. Astley confidently signified his favoured listening spot as an area just behind where I sat. ‘I know what’s happening [there]’, he said. Astley then encouraged me to consider how, once engineers have gotten used to their particular room, it may seem counter-intuitive for them to go about making further artificial acoustic adjustments. Ten months after I interviewed Jon Astley, Simon Heyworth remarked that his own home studio, situated in a granite-walled roundhouse, ‘is not an easy room’. Like Astley’s room, the unique space did ...