Remote Mastering
Your mix hits hard, and you’re feeling it. Now, it’s time to make it sound that good on all speakers and digital platforms.
But before we can do that, we have to come face to face with one of the hard truths of recording music. The fact is, the music you hear coming out of a set of speakers is never a true representation of the actual event was recorded. This may sound funny at first, but think about it: the size and shape of the recording room, the type and proximity of microphone, the make/model and gain staging of the pre-amps and the A/D converters, and on and on and on all alter the recorded signal in some way. The recorded signal is never identical to the sound source. One could argue that the art of recording is about deciding which signal altering techniques and gear is most pleasing to your song.
Furthermore, no speaker system is flawless either. Every pair of studio monitors or headphones you can buy have Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) specs printed on the box. This measures, among other things, how “flawed” their reproduction of recorded sound may be.
But what if you want to hear the source signal as clearly as possible? Well, welcome to the backbone of our mastering philosophy.
Our Philosophy Of Mastering
One of the easiest ways to describe how we approach mastering your music is to talk about the equipment we use to do it. We custom build and constantly test, tweak, and upgrade our speakers, amplifiers, and signal chain. And we’re not talking swapping out different makes and models of monitor speakers here; we custom build the enclosures in our shop and hand select the drivers and amps used in our entire monitoring chain. Why go to this much trouble? To hear better.
-One of the first prototypes of our custom built speakers
A mastering engineer’s speaker system and electronics are the lens through which they “see” what the original recording sounds like. We constantly go back and forth between adjusting our monitoring technology and mastering techniques to get as close as possible to what the song sounded like when the artist played it. We think this way because we know the recording engineer intentionally uses imperfect tools to record. We do too. To explain…
We’re talking mathematically imperfect imperfect tools here. Pre-amp and tube distortion is an incredibly “imperfect” way to record a signal, but damn does it sound good when properly applied. There are many other examples of analog distortion characteristics that we find pleasing; electric guitar amps, for example. And mastering is not about “fixing” those imperfections. It’s about eliminating any discrepancies between the recording and mix techniques that overshadow the feeling of the song. If that tape saturation on the master bus enhances the artist’s vision, but slightly masks the overall clarity and transient impact the original recording captured, mastering techniques allow use to peel back the mud and push the clarity to the front. It allows us to reconnect the listener to the sound in the artist’s, recording engineer’s, and mix engineer’s heads.
The fruits of this labor are apparent on playback. The clarity of the recorded sounds, the lack of distraction from the artist’s intent, and the undeniable emotional and sonic impact as intended by the mix engineer comes into focus. That experience is not lost even when heard through the imperfect playback systems in our lives: modern cell phone speakers, car stereos, home theaters, etc.
We mix songs by assembling the instruments as harmoniously as possible, using the artist’s intent as a guiding light. We master records by assembling songs in the same way.
Check out the “Listen” button in the header to hear what we mean.
