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Mastering 101 pt. 1
Fotios Koulakos

Welcome to the first installment of mastering. My name is Fotios Koulakos, and I am a mastering engineer, as well as a guitar player, and all around gear fanatic. (I could talk plexis for hours!).

Needless to say, I’ve been a fan of Legendary Tones for some time now…I couldn’t even tell you when I first found LT. When Scott asked me to contribute articles on mastering, the opportunity to educate the readers of LT about this misunderstood, sometimes even ignored, yet crucial art became evident, and we saw the possibilities. So, thanks to the Legendary Tones staff, I’m thrilled to be here. Hopefully I can bring a unique perspective to the table, since my background is drawn from variety of sources including, studio recording, production, and composition, and not just mastering. As a professional, I’ll master any type of music gladly, but I get stupid giggly when it’s music driven and centered on guitar!

The ultimate end goal is to lift the shroud off of mastering, and establish its relevance. Remember, the mastering engineer is the last person to make any sonic changes to your recording before duplication/replication, so the importance of getting this step right is absolutely critical.

Unfortunately, mastering is still considered a “black art.”

While that might be good and fine in creating mystique, it doesn’t help in educating musicians on the relevance of this process. Most musicians are hazy at best on what it is we actually do. Some even say, “Mastering…huh… I don’t know what it is, but I know I need it.”

The musicians, who are on the roster of a record label, usually don’t get any discussion in this matter either. They are ushered into the studio, record under the overview of a producer, and that’s as far as they concern themselves. The label then has the recording mastered, manufactured (replicated), and finally distributed, where it ends up in the consumers hands. Once again, the artist is out of the loop as soon as recording ceases.

Now, for the independent musician, it’s NO different. Across the board, the common consensus is as follows:

1) record, produce
2) mix
3) duplicate/replicate CDs
4) $$$$

Now, a record label at least, gets the steps right, including mastering, so the artist only concerns him/her self with the business of selling, touring, and so forth. I’m not condoning ignorance, but at least under a label, especially a major one, one can rest assured that the recording will sound finished, even if the artist is unaware of the process involved. Things get UGLY for the independent musician, who goes through the above mentioned 4 steps by him/her self, and then realizes, THIS DOESN’T SOUND LIKE A “PROFESSIONAL” CD!!!

Panic sets in.

“Oh $#@*, I’ve wasted my time and money. This won’t compete with ‘professional’ releases,” blah blah, woof woof, and so forth and so on. The number one question that follows is: “What’s wrong with my recording?” Answer: NOTHING is wrong, it simply isn’t finished. It hasn’t been mastered!

So, what is mastering?

Well, let’s take a look at the steps that most musicians cover first, as this will lead right in to answering that question.

For reference sake, I’ll assume that the recording is spot on. Everything is clear, instruments are in tune, mix is perfect, EQ is pleasant. You get the idea, BUT….even so, the songs and recording:

1) Vary in volume from song to song (sometimes drastically)
2) Vary in tone (overall EQ) from song to song
3) The overall volume and punch of the whole recording is very low.

Now there are a host of other things that need to be done, and we’ll discuss those in upcoming articles, but, the above mentioned are usually the top three issues evident at first. Those are the panic inducers. Song sequence, noise issues, stereo field issues etc. come into play later when the top three are addressed. So again, what is mastering?

Simply put, mastering is the final process in which a recording is assembled, tweaked, and fine tuned to sound like a cohesive work from start to finish, in song sequence, tone (EQ) from song to song, as well as an overall consistent tonality and continual theme (as in everything sounds as it belongs on the same CD), and most importantly, the ability to be played on a variety of playback systems with similar, as well as accurate sound reproduction of your original recording session. That is referred to as being able to “translate” to a variety of systems. That’s the super brief overview.

Simple enough concept right?

Well, here is the trick-all of this has to be done WITHOUT ruining the artists/producers original vision. Mastering ultimately becomes a precarious balance between doing too much or too little. The single most important fact that you can learn about mastering is this: In mastering you are an audiophile…that is, you listen and make adjustments to the whole project, not individual instruments per se. You listen as a consumer might listen…to the overall effect. In the recording or production stage, you are working on placement, recording quality, effects, panning, mixing, and production in general. During mastering, the engineer looks at the entire sonic picture at once.

Here’s a simple analogy: in the studio you are like a painter, making sure every color and detail is just how it needs to be. This requires you to stand right in front of the canvas, so you don’t see the whole accumulative effect of your “painting and detailing.” This also applies to mixing, although to a lesser degree, because it forces you to stand back a little further and evaluate your “picture.”

BUT… in mastering one has to stand back far from the canvas and make overall improvements and adjustments to the WHOLE picture. This gives rise to a seeming paradox. A mastering engineer needs to take the “holistic” approach we’ve discussed, but still retain the painters “up close” perspective so as to not lose any of the original vision. This can get tricky, as we now are trying to play both sides against the middle.

Remember, any adjustment made in one frequency department affects everything within that frequency department. If we trim 100hz on the low end to tame a kick drum, that will invariably affect ALL things in that register. Now there are some cute tricks that we can do to isolate surgical zones, but still the overall message I’m trying to impart is that generally, adjustments now fall into the “all for one, and one for all” category. SO, the time for super isolated EQing is during recording and mix down. The closer your recording, EQ, and mixing are to your expectations, the more a mastering engineer can enhance it. Once again we EQ the whole mix. Keep that in mind when you are recording and producing.

I’m hot on the wagon to educate people on this topic because knowing what comes before, and, in this case after recording, puts musicians in a mindset to think of the whole chain of events, not just their own specialty. This leads to better recordings, and ultimately better CDs. Am I saying that every musician should spend years and years learning all of the technical details of mastering to improve their records? No, not at all. What I am saying, is that musicians need to at least have a comprehensive working knowledge of mastering in general, so they can make educated decisions during their recording which leads into mastering, and to be able to ask the right questions with regards to everything from choosing a mastering engineer, to specific services they need performed, as well as knowing what can, and cannot be done.

If you are getting surgery performed, do you need 12 years of medical school to understand what the surgeon will do. Of course not! BUT, you do need a basic comprehensive understanding of what to expect, or you might be in for a rude awakening due to unrealistic, impossible expectations, or even problems that might rise up. Well, it is exactly like that in this business. Musicians nowadays need to take more of a multimedia approach to their craft. Gone are the days of one guitar, a couple of stomp boxes, a loud amp, and you were an anarchic lord of misrule over everything decibel related. Now you have to be savvy and well informed on the WHOLE front. Ok, enough preaching, you get the idea.

Let’s now take a look at some of the techniques and processes used in a typical mastering scenario. I’ll make this brief as we are on a topic which could take up books, and still not fully explore all of the possibilities! In future articles, we’ll delve deeper into these tools and techniques, so stay tuned.

At first, we usually need to address:

1) EQ (overall and individual songs)
2) Volume and dynamic range control/altering, stereo image work (normalization, compression, limiting, imaging)
3) Noise control (gating, expansion, noise reduction.)
4) Artistic and aesthetic adjustments/services (song sequencing, time between, fades, cross fades, etc.)
5) Utilitarian services (PQ subcodes, subtexts, check for phase correlation, as well as following the protocol of presenting the duplication/replication plant with the proper format needed to create mass produced consumer/retail ready CDs.)

The concepts of the above mentioned topics are self explanatory, but there are unlimited ways to go about all of them, with no one way being right or wrong.

In part 2 of “Mastering 101,” we will take a functional look at some of these. Again, I will try to lay a useful foundation relevant for today’s musician, and then build on it. Once in place, future articles will cover gear used, techniques and concepts, protocol, room set up, and even tips on prepping your work for mastering, war stories (actual examples of some projects, and how problem audio spots were dealt with), all the way to tips for the musicians out there who wish to try their own hand at this, as well as a host of other topics. I sincerely hope these articles will help give you a well rounded working knowledge of mastering. After all, we are seeking the same result…To make better recordings, period.

Before I forget, feel free to e-mail questions, topic suggestions, or any other correspondence via the Legendary Tones forum, or click on the link to www.1stcallmastering.com on the LT site for more information.

Until next time…