March 30, 2004 - 1:00 PM

Interlude: Mastering Engineering

It was asked of me by Y, "what is mastering?" I'll try to give a short answer that provides some illumination.

In order to get music out to the masses, it must go through (ideally), 3 significant "engineering" steps. First is the recording of the music, where an engineer sets up microphones and routes the sound of live players to a tape machine or a computer where each part is recorded onto a track on the tape or in the computer. So, you would have the lead vocals on one track, each background vocal and harmony on separate tracks, each guitar part, each bass, each piano, each individual drum on separate tracks. This allows you to keep a good performance of one instrument while re-recording or "overdubbing" a bad take of another instrument as many times as you need. See, if you recorded the band playing together onto one track, if someone messed up, you'd have to re-record everyone, which can be a pain in the butt, especially because of the dynamics of musicians and how one person might give his/her best performance after 3 run throughs, while another person might require 6 or 7 tries, and another might not be able to do one full take without screwing up.

So you record all the parts onto individual tracks. Sometimes, after the initial recording session, you might come back and do some more overdubs, like getting string players to add some parts, or some new vocal harmonies or percussion bits to spice things up. The keeping of all these things on separate tracks allows for more flexibility in deciding how the finished song will sound. These tracks are then passed on to the mixing engineer. It's his/her job to blend all these elements so that it's not just a wailing cacophony of notes, but a piece of music that has a life and an identity. Sometimes the recorded tracks don't sound so good because the recording engineer didn't use good microphones, or placed them in the wrong spot, or the instrument itself sounded bad. In such a case, the mixer must use his gear to tweak the sound, whether it's an equalization of frequencies (make it brighter, make it bassier), or an adding of reverb, or a raising and lowering of volume.

The mixer weaves the tracks together to get the final mix. The final mix is boiled down to two tracks: Left and Right, or stereo. Some of the recorded tracks in the mix are panned 100%l to the left or 100% to the right, but most are sandwiched somewhere in between, and usually the vocals are fed to both Left and Right equally, which makes it sound as if it is emanating from the center. At the end of the day, this 2-track mix is given to the artist or producer on CD or DAT (digital audio tape), who now has a handful of songs in this format. But the songs might not all be at the same level of loudness; maybe they didn't use just one mixer, maybe they had 3 or 4 different mix engineers doing 2-4 songs each. So if you just stuck all those songs together on one CD, you could have a very bright-sounding happy song segue into a quieter, darker song followed by a very loud rocker.

Thus, these final mixes are taken to a mastering engineer. The mastering process is the final stop before CDs are printed for public consumption. Here, the order of the songs is decided (and yes, that is very important, or at least, it was...the death of the album as an artform is a topic for later discussion. Let's just point out that with many albums today, their purpose is merely to serve as a way to get a bunch of radio-friendly singles in one package out.). Then, any final sprucing up of the sound of the songs is done (or as much massaging as can be done to the 2-track mixes); this includes matching levels from song to song so that there aren't any jarring transitions, unless that's what the producer/artist wants. Voila, the final, mastered CD is ready to be duplicated.

Here endeth the quicky lesson in recording. I'll get back to part 2 of What Kind of Week It Has Been later tonight.

Now Listening To : Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet-The Juliet Letters
Random Thought : People keep coming back here because they like the way I smack their asses. *sigh*

What I Just Wrote Before - What I'm About to Write

The Five Most Recent Entries

Here's a hand-picked playlist of 40-plus songs for you to listen to: