The Long March...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
Things are moving at a punk-rock clip in Compilation Land. The mastering session is booked for Thursday, and jacket and pressing situations are firmly in hand. This is an interesting process; while I’ve made dozens of CDs (comprising hundreds of thousands of units) and Wax Trax! had vinyl made of the early SMG singles and such-like, I’ve never directly caused the creation of a vinyl record. Since I imagine many of you are curious about this process, I will document it thoroughly throughout.
The first step is the mastering, of course, where they create the digital master used for the download version of the album, the vinyl master (which necessarily has different EQ), and cut the lacquers. These look like records, but are aluminum disks covered in lacquer, and the cutting lathe cuts grooves in them. The result is essentially a record, although not near as durable as a finished vinyl record. The mastering lab will give me one as a reference; these can only be played a few times before they start to wear out.
The lab sends another lacquer to the pressing plant, and they coat this disk with silver nitrate, and then a couple layers of copper, then some other janky metal, and then break out the laquer, resulting in a negative impression of the lacquer. This negative can be used to stamp vinyl records directly (usually only about 700 or so) but more often is used to make a “mother,” which is a metal positive that can then be used to make as many stampers as needed by repeating the process above.
Once the pressing plant has the lacquers, they go in to a sit-and-wait situation, while they wait for the paper parts (the round labels and the jackets.) The jackets are being printed by Stumptown Printers in Portland, and the labels are being made by the pressing plant’s printer. I’m waiting to pull the trigger on those until the mastering has been completed to everyone’s satisfaction.
Regarding the mastering itself, if I was only doing vinyl, I would provide a CD-ROM with two audio files, side A and side B, with everything correctly spaced. Since I’m also getting a digital master for the downloads, I just give the engineer a CD-ROM with the files on it named appropriately (A1, A2, B1, etc…) and he will create the file necessary for the cutting process. These are all 48kHz 24-bit WAV files. Since this project will never be on CD Audio, we don’t have to bother with the typical 44.1/16 scenario, and can work at the higher quality rate. If I was doing a jazz band or a classical project, I would record and mix at 96/32, in the interests of future-proofing, but since that would generally be pointless in this situation, and just a big pain in the ass besides, we’re sticking with 48/24 for now.
So as you can see, this is a complicated dance that has to take place. I will say that other than the expense and the somewhat lower tolerance for error, it is really not all that different from having a CD pressed. I’m not going to attend the mastering session, since I know that mastering engineers find clients to be the Most Annoying Thing In The World, and would very much rather do their thing alone. If they wanted to hang out with musicians, they’d be normal engineers. I will try to snap a photo or two of the lathe and the mastering room when I drop off the files on Wednesday. We’re using SAE here in Phoenix, as Chad suggested (and in these matters, Chad Clark’s opinion carries some weight.)
EDIT: It was asked in private what the mastering cost; I don’t see any particular reason to hide that information. Assuming that he gets it right the first time, and we don’t ask for any changes, it will run right around US$1000.
27 comments
I've gone to mastering a few times, but mostly out of curiosity. It's not like I have any thing to say there. I like to tell people what I want and let them do their job, that's what I want from people who hire me. If we can't get it together after a couple of tries then I've got the wrong guy, I'm not going to stand there and tell them how to do their job. If I wanted to do that I'd master myself.
bb
"janky metal" = nickel. As I mentioned in a previous post, getting a test pressing, which is the end product of the master>matrix>mother>stamper process, is always a good idea. I find it unfortunate that the pressing plant didn't offer you this because it's a good way to hear if the various plating and duplicating procedures went well.
Hopefully everything is totally cool.
Cheers,
Alan Tomlinson
Oh, there'll be test pressings. Rest assured. I just forgot to mention it.
-CR
And the company I work for makes the nickel sulfate, chloride and sulfamate solutions used in nickel plating...
Nice reference to the Chinese Civil War there.
Which one?
-CR
Good.
Alan Tomlinson
@CR: "The Long March"
i.e. the one between the "Commies" and Nationalists.
I was just baiting you, my little Red friend. Achievement Unlocked!
-CR
It will be interesting to see how your photos of the cutting process compare with the ones Rick Smith did when Oblivion With Bells was being cut (The content, not the photography. No point to that.).
I've attended a few sessions at Sterling Sound. There are two reasons for this. The first is it's Sterling-fucking-Sound. The second is while I sit quietly 97% of the time, reading Hamptons Magazine, I get to throw in a couple questions here and there. As Grand Puba once opined, "The big kids don't play."
I try to go to all the mastering sessions for albums I've mixed; it's a "day off" for me, I get to hear what I've been working on in a different room on amazing monitors and I can poke the engineer for info about what I'm delivering in case there are things to look/listen out for the next time.
I generally keep my mouth shut unless I hear something really egregious like compression pumping or the limiter being hit too hard and the drums are getting pushed too far down.
Mastering is a magical place with a room full of Fairchilds, unicorns, a limitless supply of free bacon, and naked ladies. At least that's what I think and I will never do anything to tarnish my well established illusion.
What Wade said. I don't want any part of it any more. The times I sat in were mostly because I just wanted to say I'd hung out with Brian Gardener, who mastered my first three albums.
-CR
Free unicorn bacon and naked ladies? I obviously picked the the wrong audio vocation.
-Hugo
I thought it was lady bacon and naked unicorns. And it was never that cool, though the outsiders thought it so.
Cheers,
Alan Tomlinson
When I was much younger, I spent a few days in the studio with Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake, whom I greatly admired. While on a break, I asked them if they ever attended their mastering sessions. Froom looked at me with a small measure of disgust at my nerdiness.
"No, we hire someone great and we let him be great. It works out." (In this case, the someone was Bob Ludwig.)
In my work in a mastering studio for ten years, I did notice a pattern: the people whose records were amazing and authoritative (Bob Mould, Fugazi, Mary Timony, Bernie Worrell, etc.) invariably provided just a few notes about overall tone/vision and maybe a few details about this mix or that. And then they left me to do my work, saying something like "Make it good!"
None of them overestimated what mastering is. None of them underestimated it.
Attended sessions were often younger clients who were less experienced and curious. They wanted an education. Or they were people who really just wanted to hang out with me in a place with fancy gear and flashing lights, etc. Understandable.
And of course, there was a segment of the client base with micromanager tendencies who had lost the forest-for-the-trees concept. They believed that being anal-retentive leads to greatness. (It does not. Being great leads to greatness.) I'm withholding the names of these people, but you would not know the names.
I'm a friendly and social guy and I love to hang out. I'm very talkative and I like people. But the attended sessions were always more challenging and irritating for me --- I preferred to concentrate on the details of the music and the sound and making it "bloom."
Ultimately, in my own practice, I set a rule: I don't do attended sessions. In exchange, I offered limitless revisions (I had the confidence that most people would love their V1, but if not we'd do a V2 or V3 if necessary. Rarely happened.) My partner did the attended sessions.
There are certainly mastering engineers who genuinely love attended sessions and find them to be fun, etc. I suspect they're in the minority. (I might be wrong about this.)
Attended MIXING is awesome! Attended MASTERING is not. That's my personal take.
- c
Preach it, brother Clark. Preach it.
When I've done mastering for other people, I won't let anyone sit in. For my own, I don't even give notes, unless there is a technical comment. I pick the mastering engineer based upon his past work, and I assume that if I just let him do his thing, he'll give me something along those lines.
This is always the safe course of action. But then, to extrapolate Chad's comment, I am very much a "forest" person, and I prefer to leave the trees to people that know trees.
-CR
"Attended MIXING is awesome!" Horses for courses . . .
I always found mixing to be rather like watching paint dry, but that's why I liked working tracking, and ideally tracking string dates. De gustibus . . .
Bob, Bernie and Doug probably know everything there is to know, but I'm not sure talking with them while they're working is where it's at. Dinner perhaps.
Cheers,
Alan Tomlinson
>Attended MIXING is awesome<
For the guy mixing, and in pretty much ever way, it's mostly just like mastering, in my opinion. I don't want anyone around when I'm mixing. Tracking is the time for everyone to hang. Of course if someone great is mixing something I recorded then I'm hanging out, quietly, but I'm still doing it.
bb
Not 'attending mixing' for me would be like not making music, since the mixing is an integral part of the performance/creation of it that I need to do myself, while I am composing, sound designing and arranging, but as for mastering it's either DIY for the 'less important' stuff or close your eyes, detach yourself, let your baby go and leave it to a pro you trust, and who understands your music.
I'm the producer, so there's no way I'm not gonna be there for the mix. That said, I do tend to leave the room a lot. I'll tell the mix engineer what I'm looking for when it comes to any particular section, then I'll leave and sit in the lounge or whatever and let him do his thing, and come back in now and again to touch things up. I don't like to hover.
For tracking, I'll be in the control room 100% of the time, though.
-CR
I should add that most of my mix work is unattended.
I just don't dislike the attended mix as much as I dislike the attended master.
- c
Of course, what CR said is more accurately what I meant. I'm not going to sit and "help" someone mix. But you have to be close by in most cases, your right to complain is inversely proportional to how hard it is to get hold of you.
I just don't like it when someone sits in for the whole mix. Then no one has any perspective.
bb
Word.
If I'm producing, other than arrangement issues - I let people just go nuts with tracking. They can have a tracking BROdown and be all fulfilled. Mix is where most of the aforementioned producing happens and I usually don't want people there. There's just too much experimenting and it can't be done with the artist there.
If someone wants to sit in on the mix, I know a ton of great studios where they can pay $80 an hour to have a house engineer balance their levels and make stuff move. Hell, turn off the lights and get all Deathstar. ; )
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