The Games We Play

When we master on our own, or for a friend, there are a couple of tendencies to watch out for. We all get into group-think games that can really throw us off.

Who’s Loudest?

There is a commonly held belief that “louder sounds better.” Without delving into exactly how much truth there is in this, we can acknowledge that there has in fact evolved a loudness race on CDs. Meanwhile, we’re all limited to 0 dBFS (or actually, up to +3 dBFS if we don’t mind massive distortion!). So, a number of manufacturers have come out with boxes/plug-ins that essentially allow us to “pack” or ”hypercompress” our levels right up against 0 dBFS.

Meanwhile, artists have bought into this idea big-time. I’ve mastered stuff where the client insisted that I make his mix louder than a number of other recordings he brought along for comparison.

How do you hyper-compress a recording? One way is to use a multiband compressor/limiter with some sort of look-ahead feature that analyzes the upcoming signal. You pull the threshold up toward 0 dBFS while tightening the ratio to head off overshoots in each band, and make each part of the spectrum AS LOUD AS YOU CAN MAKE IT so that there are as few low-level components as possible in the signal.

The result is a recording that may be relatively loud, but probably will be fairly unpleasant to listen to. I own a lot of major label CDs that fit that category all too well.

How can you make it better? Back off! These days I use a multiband compressor/expander to do a variety of things (more about this in a future article) that actually require me to TURN DOWN the levels. I then do a little gentle squeezing with a Waves L1 Maximizer to restore those levels, adhering to several principles in the process:

no overs in either the Maximizer or the multiband compressor/expander;
no more than about 3-4 dB of gain reduction in the Maximizer and something similar in the multiband compressor;
I’ve got to feel that the compressed mix “sounds better” to me at both reference level AND at 20 dB below reference, after repeated listenings, as well as in my car;
that I don’t feel at all fatigued by the sort of breathless maxed-out assault sensation that I get from so many hyper-compressed mixes that DON’T breathe properly.

When you do things like this, your mix may no longer be the loudest in town, but It may very well be the most popular, especially if you’ve got all the other stuff right. Me, I think this is the better way to go.

Second-Guessing The End-User, The Radio Station and The Car

The next mind game we play has to do with making it sound bad so it’ll sound great some other place. We rationalize, saying things like, “This’ll really work well in a car,” or “For AM air play, this mix will be fabulous!” We usually say these things when we aren’t really happy with what we’ve got and are trying to make something “kick-ass” or “really hot” and/or trying to please a fairly dubious looking client.

I’ve found it’s better to work on it until it sounds BETTER on all your speakers, under all reasonable conditions. I’ve grown to have real doubts about letting it get bad on my reference monitors in the hope it’ll sound good someplace else. And now that I’ve got REALLY GOOD monitors (more about them in a future article), I’m doubly suspicious of that tendency.

So I vote for Tom Bate’s words of wisdom: “Your work isn’t done until the mix sounds great on ALL the speakers you have at your disposal, not just your favorite ones.” Amen!

Especially for mastering, you have to get in a groove where you KNOW that the sound you’re producing sounds good in the studio AND will sound good in release.

My Friends Hear Better Than Your Friends, Or Me, For That Matter

We all like and need to play our work for other people. We often want their opinion. Sometimes we psych ourselves out by giving their opinions undue weight. I get hit with this a lot. Because I authored Golden Ears Audio Ear Training, people often think I must have ‘em. (Meanwhile, I figure my hearing is about average.) They bring their work to my studio both to hear it on my REALLY GOOD monitors and also to get my opinion.

What I’ve noticed is that my opinions are often given more credit than they deserve. I’ve done exactly the same thing myself, in getting opinions from others.

Here’s the deal. Such opinions are useful, but you’ve got to sort of calculate their validity, in terms of such as “how intense was the listening session?”, “how rigorous and well-controlled was the session?”, “how deeply involved was the listener?”, etc. Don’t psych yourself out – take those evaluations for what they seem to be worth in terms of actual listener involvement and engagement with the recording. Did Mr. Golden Ears listen a dozen times, on different monitors and different levels? Did he try things? Did he really get into the tune? Or did he listen carefully once and say “That’s pretty good, but I think the bass is a little light.”? Mr. Golden Ears may be right about the bass, so you probably should consider changing it, but you don’t have to obsess, based on that observation. Just dial that view in as one more thing to consider. You don’t need to go back and re-equalize everything you’ve ever done with a +9 dB shelf at 110 Hz. Enough said.

The Straight Skinny, For Fun And Profit

Mastering is an art, not a science. However, it involves a lot of technical craft and control, plus practice. To get started, you need to

get your monitoring really under control;
get your levels, at the mix bus, at the meters and in the room, really under control;
REALLY get to know the best recordings in the genre you’ll be mastering in, really get ‘em in your ears;
get to know as much as you can about the media you’ll be mastering to, and find out what happens to it after it leaves your hands;
get REALLY good with the signal processing devices you want to use;
practice, practice, practice.

To do all this well, you’ll need some measurement gear. As I mentioned, I rely on Ozone, Dorrough and TEF. Neutrik has come out with portable test set that includes a general purpose signal generator, an analog/acoustic analyzer and a digital analyzer. If this is too rich for your blood, you can start with a Radio Shack Sound Level Meter and the Goldline Oscillator/Meter set (which I also have and use). I suspect that if you aren’t a measuring fool, just like the Count on Sesame Street, mastering may not be for you. On the other hand, it’s not all that hard to get into it, once you start being curious about it all.

Happy masters!

PS: For a lot more detail on how to do this, I recommend Bob Katz’s book “Mastering Audio: the art and the science” (Focal Press). It’s a really comprehensive look at the whole business.

Dave Moulton is alive and well. You can, as usual, complain to him about anything at all at moultonlabs.com.

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