BOB KATZ: The New Loudness War, Automated Mastering, and Why You Only Need One Pair of Monitors

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Creative Live, the world's best online classroom for creative professionals with classes on songwriting, engineering, mixing and mastering. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is also brought to you by isotope crafting innovative audio products that inspire and enable people to be creative. And now your host, Joey Sturgis. Joel Wanasek and Eyal Levi.

Speaker 3 (00:00:23):

You're listening to another Mastering month edition of the Joey Sturgis Forum podcast. My name is Eyal Levi and I'm starting this show early because today our guest, Bob Katz started talking to us before we were ready for him to start talking to us. So we figured we would just put this intro on to get the show started. And without further ado, I present you the Bob Katz edition. Is there any questions we can answer before we get going about this or,

(00:00:54):

Yeah, I'd like you to give me a little background on your podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:00:59):

Okay. Joey, you seem to be the best one at explaining it.

Speaker 4 (00:01:06):

Okay. Basically what we try to do is explain what we feel is better information and better education to this generation because we think that there's a lot of places that aren't doing it correctly. Kind of like full sail, for example.

Speaker 3 (00:01:26):

Now that's very interesting. You want to name names then?

Speaker 4 (00:01:31):

Well, I'm not afraid to come out and say that because I know a lot of people who've gone there and there are some people that come out there very knowledgeable and get great jobs and do great things, but I think it requires them to be self-motivated in some way. They need to, they're not going to get everything they need from that school. The school helps them do a lot of different things.

Speaker 3 (00:01:53):

We're already on a topic, we're already talking.

Speaker 4 (00:01:55):

Yeah, we are.

Speaker 3 (00:01:56):

Yeah. So what the heck, without naming names of schools and not that we want to talk about schools throughout this whole podcast, but as long as we have the topic, do you think that of the graduates from any school, that there's more than one or two a year that are worth hiring?

Speaker 2 (00:02:14):

No, and actually I think that if audio and music schools are, you can count art schools, film schools under this, anything culinary school, anything related to a creative field, if they actually focused on the 1% of 1% that had what it takes to go somewhere, they wouldn't be able to sustain themselves as a business. But the thing is that there's such a wealth of misinformation on YouTube now, and you couple that with traditional mentoring going out the window the way that it used to be in the old school. We just feel like it's our duty to kind of help the kids that are coming up because they're ruining audio with their lack of information.

Speaker 4 (00:03:09):

The standards for record labels right now are, I mean, not all labels are the same, but a lot of them are accepting stuff that I think is just garbage. And it's crazy because now you've got some record label giving a kid in his bedroom a budget to do an album, and he hasn't gone to school. He hasn't learned from any good sources. Now

Speaker 3 (00:03:35):

Give me a break here. What about Taylor Swift's 1999 or whatever it's called. I understand that that thing sucks wind sonically.

Speaker 4 (00:03:46):

Yeah. Well there's definitely different opinions on it, but I'd like to know your opinion on it. I

Speaker 3 (00:03:50):

Haven't heard it yet, so

Speaker 4 (00:03:52):

Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:03:53):

I'm going by other people's comments, but I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised either would be surprised. So you're talking about people working in project studios or their bedrooms or just getting started, not meeting standards. Let's start at the top. Let's start at the top. Top of the pops and how many of those, my good friend, the late Roger Nichols engineer of Steely Dan Roger had a saying. He said if they gave Grammys for the best sounding album, there would be a lot fewer grammars.

Speaker 2 (00:04:32):

Yeah, I totally agree with that. That makes me think of that Metallica record that came out. Which one was it?

Speaker 3 (00:04:41):

The Guitar hero one,

Speaker 2 (00:04:43):

The one that was crushed total distortion,

Speaker 5 (00:04:48):

That's magnetic. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:04:49):

Before Ted Jensen even got it, they basically destroyed it before he got it and he had to actually write an open letter disavowing

Speaker 5 (00:05:01):

It

Speaker 2 (00:05:03):

Because he was getting so much flack for it. And actually, I have noticed a lot of my friends that are in, we all kind of work in heavy music and metal and hard rock, but a lot of the guys that I know who are more in the pop and r and b worlds say that the amount of hacks in recording that they have are unbelievable. So it kind of doesn't surprise me that stuff at the top doesn't always sound too great.

Speaker 4 (00:05:41):

Yeah, I think you find in different genres too that there's a different amounts of work being shifted to different roles. Like in pop music, I think a lot of the sound of the mix actually comes from the producer and the mixer gets the session, opens it up, throws a couple compressors and EQs here and there. It doesn't do a whole lot of changing, really just kind of makes it all gel together. Whereas with something that we would do, we would just get di and we would have to come up with a guitar tone from scratch because the existing guitar tone would be terrible. Well,

Speaker 3 (00:06:15):

Lemme tell you a story. We have a mix room and I have a really great mixing engineer who works under my supervision and we were competing for a mix job and we had what unequivocally was a really, really great mix going, and he went to a competitor and I got to hear the competitor's work. He threw a bus compressor on and just did automatic mixing of the whole thing and it really sucked. I mean, you could even hear the sucking and the pumping, but seriously, I mean, I'm not talking about sucking or pumping for good taste. I'm talking about sucking or pumping as an artifact of getting a mixed on quickly and dearly and making more money because you maybe had a flat rate and charged for, you didn't have to charge by the hour and it took you less time to get it done. I'm talking about real bad mixing, but the client bought it, he wanted it and it was because I think because that mix was louder on the average than our mix. Okay.

Speaker 4 (00:07:32):

All right. Yeah, and that's the bigger problem actually here that we have,

Speaker 3 (00:07:37):

That ultimately chalks down to the client themselves, which is fine. They made their decision, they found what they preferred, but they, because there are fewer and fewer experienced and professional producers in this world who know what good sounds, sounds like, it gets in many cases down to the independent artists and there are far more of them to make decisions judging on their poor speakers in many cases and poor decisions, which I can't do anything about that.

Speaker 4 (00:08:11):

Yeah, I agree with you, but we're kind of at the mercy of that, aren't we?

Speaker 5 (00:08:15):

Yeah, it's like a group think too. I mean, there's so many different people that they see a trend emerge or somebody does something that they like. So immediately they jump on the train and say, okay, well only this drum sample, for example, and metal can work for a kick drum. So then every kid has that drum sample and then everything starts to sound homogenous and it's usually not for the best.

Speaker 2 (00:08:35):

This actually loops back exactly to what we were first talking about as to why we're doing this podcast, things like that. You'll see an independent artist who knows maybe 15% of what went on in the recording, making decisions based off of listening to a mix. Mix through an iPhone speaker or no, for real, I'm not exaggerating. Something like that. Telling you notes on the low end based on an iPhone speaker. Look, I'm not Turn up the base.

Speaker 3 (00:09:09):

Turn up the base,

Speaker 2 (00:09:11):

Exactly. Oh wow. It's rad in my car. That's exactly what we're dealing with. But then these guys have massive online followings who basically hang on their every word. So they'll get asked about this stuff by the kids that are coming up and they'll give them info that they think is right and that will spawns literally thousands of horrible, horrible productions and mixes

Speaker 3 (00:09:40):

That end up, sorry for interrupting.

Speaker 2 (00:09:42):

Oh, it's

Speaker 3 (00:09:42):

Okay. I do a number of seminars and one of the sections of my talk is called the NS 10 phenomenon, and I'll play some mixes where the mix engineer was really, really, really trusting his Ns tens and showed the audience how the bass drum is 10 db too loud in the bass. Well, if you can hear the bass instrument in there somewhere, it's a shock because it's pretty rare to even hear that. And that happens a lot. We have the potential now there are many more high quality loudspeakers available for mixing than ever before. 20, 30, 40 years ago, I think engineers often had an excuse to make bad mixes. I would listen to them on my high quality reference speakers and the percentage of bad mixes back many years ago was very high because there weren't available a large number of good speakers. Mixes were done on Atones quite frequently or on, yeah, God or the Altec six oh ones or the UREI eight thirteens, which if you want to hear an eight 13, something like that. Anyway, and I installed a pair of eight thirteens in a studio that I was hired to build. Boy did they rock the house. The point is that bad mixes today are caused by many phenomena, but the lack of good speakers is no longer an excuse. And if you want to name names and you guys are not sponsored, if you are sponsored by any loudspeaker manufacturers, fine. But we could talk about if you want to make recommendations,

(00:11:36):

Have at it. Alright, let me start with now. These are not your father's Gen X and I'm not a giant GenX lover, but for mixing the 80 forties are quite linear. You don't want to play them loud, but they have a fairly neutral sound character, dine audio BM 15 A, nothing smaller, please. What else do we have here? PMC makes fantastic loudspeakers. There's a new loudspeaker from a new company called K. I haven't heard it, but I know the designer. It's very promising. Barefoot are making some good loud speakers.

Speaker 2 (00:12:17):

Those are fantastic.

Speaker 3 (00:12:18):

I haven't heard them, so I'll reserve the topic. I've done some mixes. I'm a mastering engineer, but sometimes I'll mix. I've done a mix on a pair of atoms. They worked, I don't remember the model number. I wasn't incredibly thrilled, but they were fairly

Speaker 4 (00:12:37):

What?

Speaker 3 (00:12:37):

Although there's too many different atoms, so we can't make a generalization. I've heard some that really did not have a good overall tunnel curve.

Speaker 4 (00:12:47):

Well, you've got your consumer market and then you've got your pro market.

Speaker 3 (00:12:51):

Well, that's true. And some of these now the consumer and pro markets are tending to overlap now in the last 10 years. So I just named 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe five, and I'm sure we could name some more. So there's no excuse anymore. It's just that the people, let's put it really clear, the wannabes who would like to do their own mixes and go out and buy a $500 pair of Beringer loudspeakers at Guitar Center, is Guitar Center still around there? Oh yeah. Okay. Are fooling themselves. I think that the, let's find a number, a dollar number for the minimum budget that you guys, and I think a mixing studio who wants to work adequately and make a mix that they can trust needs to spend on loudspeakers and amplifiers in order to mix how much,

Speaker 2 (00:13:49):

Lemme throw in one caveat for the audience because I know that in response they're going to say, well, this one guy mixed this number one album on headphones, so who cares? So we'll say that exceptions like that don't count. In general for me, what my setup was five grand,

Speaker 3 (00:14:14):

Six grand. Okay. What did you spend it on?

Speaker 2 (00:14:17):

Gen X?

Speaker 3 (00:14:18):

Which ones?

Speaker 2 (00:14:19):

I have actually 80 forties.

Speaker 3 (00:14:22):

Well, there you go. And what did I tell you?

Speaker 2 (00:14:24):

What

Speaker 3 (00:14:24):

Did I tell you? And do you have subs as well?

Speaker 2 (00:14:26):

Yeah, I have a GenX sub and I got it for a really good price. Thank God. It is kind of price.

Speaker 3 (00:14:34):

You got what you pay for folks.

Speaker 2 (00:14:36):

Well, it was really good. I'm very happy with that. I used to have really, really bad monitors that were in that $500 range and

Speaker 3 (00:14:45):

See you learned from that?

Speaker 2 (00:14:47):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:14:48):

Absolutely. And that's another important point is everyone in the audience of this podcast who's listening has the potential to do better no matter where you are in the current spectrum. And many people started out at a medium to lower level in terms of the quality of the equipment that they bought. They wanted to jump in in the beginning. It's just that you need to not have the illusion that the tools that you are using are telling you what you need

Speaker 4 (00:15:16):

To know. We also talk about having multiple sources of information, so listening on different types of speakers to make your decisions instead of just relying on one setup.

Speaker 3 (00:15:27):

Well, I have an opinion on that.

Speaker 4 (00:15:29):

What's that?

Speaker 3 (00:15:31):

Okay. In my mastering room, I have only one pair of extremely accurate speakers and I know how they will translate to everywhere. I rarely need to listen to another one. And the people who have multiple loudspeakers and want to hear on them are often fooling themselves because each one was designed for the flavor of the month. I'm rather skeptical about the idea, but I'm a mastering engineer. What can I say? We only have one pair of really, really, really good speakers in our mix room and it works really well and it translates and we know what they do.

Speaker 2 (00:16:10):

So what's the price point though on the speakers and the master?

Speaker 3 (00:16:16):

It's with all the associated equipment and everything. I don't think I could put a number on it. We're talking a lot of money.

Speaker 2 (00:16:22):

I think that that's, and not just that, you've been at it for quite a while, so I think that I agree with you, but at the same time, I think that lots of these guys, and the reason that we do it is because I'm not, for instance, I'm not sure that I a hundred percent trust my speakers, so I feel like

Speaker 3 (00:16:48):

You're talking about the 80 forties

Speaker 2 (00:16:50):

Or my room or myself sometimes. So I feel like if I can get a little bit of perspective and especially some perspective on what the consumer is going to be listening on and how it translates to that.

Speaker 3 (00:17:06):

Well, the consumer is listening on such a wide variety of loudspeakers that that idea goes out to lunch. Why don't you say the perspective on what one consumer who might have the same loudspeakers as the alternates that I'm listening to might be listening.

Speaker 2 (00:17:22):

Fair enough.

Speaker 3 (00:17:24):

As far as I would go enough, but now you're talking to a purist, so this is my opinion, these are my opinions, and that's why we're having our conversation and we can disagree as well.

Speaker 2 (00:17:36):

Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 3 (00:17:37):

What I'm getting to is that if you want to produce really great mixes, I think that your approach could be something like this. Take your 80 forties, make them sound as good as possible. Bring in an acoustical consultant, have them measured, have them set up as linearly as possible. Get them positioned in your room the best they can. Treat your room the best it is and get them and the subs to mate the very best possible mixed with those. Learn those. And I mean, not just learn them, but learn every part of it that you can trust and the parts that you can't trust, keep trying to improve until you can trust them. Because for the price performance point, the 80 forties are very linear, but don't have any other headphones or loudspeakers in that room because every time you switch to them, you start getting doubts, you start hearing, well, these speakers do better at this, so maybe I should put in a little bit more 200 hertz, because that sounds better on the X, Y, Z speakers. But wait a minute, the A, B, C speakers sound worse when I add the 200 hertz. And all you're doing is confusing yourself.

Speaker 5 (00:18:48):

I can relate to that because I have a pair of tens and a pair of focal twins and I 99% of the time mix on the focals, but sometimes I feel like they're a little bit softer in the one K range where the tens, I mean it's all one K and around that area bell curve. So sometimes I use them to just kind of like, how's my upper mid range translating?

Speaker 3 (00:19:10):

And I just kind of peeking, oh god, geez, I never have to do that either in the mix room or the mastering room, and that's what your goal is. But now what do you do with all those all alternate speakers? Put them in a living room and feed them the output of your mix room. Take a break, walk in there, listen to your mixes on all those alternate speakers just to see how they're translating. But don't be tempted to move a fader or an equalizer in response to it. Just get an idea and then come back in and mix.

Speaker 2 (00:19:40):

Yeah, that's actually all it is.

Speaker 4 (00:19:43):

Yeah, I think that was our main point. Yeah, just translation. You can go in your car and you can listen to it and you can be like, well, the guitars don't have enough of this frequency, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be making the changes on there. You just be getting an idea of what is happening with your mix on different missing

Speaker 3 (00:20:02):

Sources, all of that to compensate for defects or weaknesses in your main speakers, in my opinion.

Speaker 4 (00:20:08):

Yeah. But I think the main underlining point is what is it about a mastering engineer that makes him great? And I think one of the biggest points is the translation, knowing what your decisions are going to do and how that's going to translate across all the different sources of speakers.

Speaker 3 (00:20:29):

And knowing when not to try to compensate because my MacBook Pro, oh my goodness, not enough base. Watch out folks.

Speaker 5 (00:20:41):

It's like good engineering. Get it right at the source only for listening. I think a good analogy from what you're

Speaker 3 (00:20:46):

Saying, Bob's point, Bob Katz is over here, is take all those alternate speakers out of your room. Now I do have an interesting perspective on the headphone thing. It's not that I like to spend money and maybe I can find a pair of under $500 headphones that are really, really good. I haven't yet investigated it, but I recently added to my collection, they're pronounced Odyssey and they're spelled A-U-D-E-Z-E, and the model that I chose is the LCDX. It's extremely linear, extremely accurate, and it'll tell you what your bass is all the way down to the center of the earth. So if you can't afford loudspeakers, that can go down to the center of the earth. You could put on these odyssey and get an idea of whether you're having an issue with the bass drum or the bass. But I wouldn't mix on them because mixing on headphones has tremendous issues that we all know about and probably should be on another podcast, so I won't get into that, but at least they could be a secondary reference when you're allowed to speak. When you couldn't afford the five to $6,000 minimum that perhaps that we could talk about for loudspeaker and amp, what would the dollar value you would put for the minimum that a mixing engineer should spend?

Speaker 2 (00:22:14):

That's a good question. So I've set mine, well, first of all, in the box or out of the box,

Speaker 4 (00:22:20):

Whether

Speaker 3 (00:22:20):

You're mixing in or out of the box or Oh, you mean for monitors?

Speaker 4 (00:22:23):

I mean, I actually work on a pretty humble setup. I'm on Adam a seven X's. I think they're like 600 a piece or something like that. It's actually a pretty, I don't have a super high quality setup. I don't have, my room's not super treated, but I've always kind of worked in that environment and my clients like my work, so I just keep going.

Speaker 3 (00:22:46):

Well, maybe that's an excuse. What's your procedure? You listen on those and you work with them. Do you have alternates in your room?

Speaker 4 (00:22:57):

My alternates, I use a pair of Bose, C twenties I think is what they're called. Yeah, it's like a very small pair of consumer computer speakers. And those are just for me to get perspective in terms of what is this going to actually sound like for a person who's sitting at home listening on YouTube. And then I do most of my decisions on the Adam A seven Xs, and I'll do a car stereo check just to make sure I've got low end Good. I don't have any subs in here. Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:23:27):

Why not?

Speaker 4 (00:23:29):

I just, I don't know. You're

Speaker 3 (00:23:31):

Doing hard rock, aren't you?

Speaker 4 (00:23:32):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:23:33):

My God,

Speaker 4 (00:23:34):

I've never worked with subs. And for me, it's always been weird when I go into a room that does have subs and I put in a mix and I listen to it, it kind of strikes me off guard.

Speaker 3 (00:23:44):

Well, you haven't been in my room.

Speaker 4 (00:23:47):

Yeah, so maybe your room's amazing, but I don't at the same time, I don't have your room. So I work within the boundaries I have

Speaker 3 (00:23:55):

Understood, which you must be one of the two.

Speaker 4 (00:23:59):

I'm Joey. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:24:00):

Joey. Okay. Joey, I respect you. But in our mix room, and this is just the other perspective, I've got a pair of Genelec 82 60 as these are big, they weigh 60 pounds a piece. They don't need subs and measured and also wise, they go down flat to below 30 hertz. And this is a very tiny room. It took a lot of work to get them to be pretty neutral in there, but the mixes translate and we know what the base drum to base ratio is in there. How can you tell what that is with those little atoms?

Speaker 4 (00:24:39):

I am using analyzers. I'm using, like I said, the car test. I'm also kind of working within a pretty narrow niche of music to where based on the decisions I'm making during the production, I kind of know where it's going to end up a huge, oh

Speaker 3 (00:24:53):

Boy. And this is advice that you recommend giving to the students who are listening to the podcast? No, I would hesitate. I mean, it's okay for you if you've been working with it for a long, long, long time. I mean, there are engineers who use speakers that would drive me out of the room who get great results, and I was quite shocked when I saw their setup, but somehow they managed to overcome.

Speaker 4 (00:25:19):

No, I'm not telling anyone to copy me because I know that my thing is completely unique to me only.

Speaker 2 (00:25:24):

Yeah, I actually think, Joey, you said excuse. I actually think of Joey as an exception.

Speaker 3 (00:25:31):

There you go. He said, unicorn,

Speaker 2 (00:25:33):

Joey, I actually think of you as a low end master when it comes to this style of music. Like we were saying earlier, there will be a bunch of people who will copy that setup and not get the same results. So I definitely do see you as an exception. There

Speaker 3 (00:25:51):

You go

Speaker 2 (00:25:51):

To what a lot of guys should do because they just don't have the same ears or the same brain.

Speaker 3 (00:26:00):

Okay, I'm going to throw out a hypothesis here, Joey. I give you $6,000 to improve your monitors and your amplifiers, and I'm going to predict something and you tell me if you think it's true or

Speaker 4 (00:26:14):

Not.

Speaker 3 (00:26:15):

You put those in, you get them set up, you bring in a professional acoustician for a day and you can pay his day rate for their day to get them positioned, ideally to put traps in the room where needed to get the base responses a little more linear. And arguably these sound really, really accurate and you play a lot of rock on them and they sound great. And now you go into your mixing, and what I predict is you're going to mix faster, better, more accurately with fewer doubts, and you're going to get better results. That's my prediction.

Speaker 4 (00:26:51):

I don't know if I agree a hundred percent. That's the test.

Speaker 2 (00:26:57):

I'd like to see that experiment put to the test.

Speaker 4 (00:26:59):

I would like to do that experiment because here's the thing, I feel like I've gotten comfortable with something that's wrong for me. At the end of the day, I still get the results and I still have the clients. So I guess

Speaker 3 (00:27:12):

In

Speaker 4 (00:27:12):

One,

Speaker 3 (00:27:12):

Send me a mix and I'll give you my comments on your mix,

Speaker 4 (00:27:16):

I'm sure. Yeah. And I'm sure your perspective and your opinion on my work would be completely different than my clients, which is fine because we do different things. But I agree that it would be great if I could have a situation where I've got a nice building, nice facility treatment's, good, great speakers, but you also have to factor in that this genre of music is not really paying a ton, and music sales are declining. I know that's probably another excuse, but

Speaker 3 (00:27:46):

I totally know what you mean. And that's another topic perhaps for another blog.

Speaker 4 (00:27:51):

Exactly.

Speaker 3 (00:27:51):

But what style is it, Joey?

Speaker 4 (00:27:56):

I mainly work in metal core, so it's like metal music, but with melody and singing and kind of more rhythmic based.

Speaker 5 (00:28:04):

Joey's famous for pretty much inventing the genre. He's one of the top three guys in the world at that style of music, argue maybe.

Speaker 3 (00:28:11):

I don't know what metal core is. And the thing about genres is they're always evolving.

Speaker 5 (00:28:17):

Emo kids, Bob Emo kids.

Speaker 3 (00:28:20):

Oh my God, you listen to country music today and it sounds like the rock music of 30 years ago. But anyway, what I'm leading to is that I don't know your genre per se, although, and I'm going to name a couple of bands in the hard rock genre that I work with who are melodic and dynamic and have lots of range and tons of, for want of a better term, metal influenced approaches. These guys are also, excuse the expression audio files. It's amazing. This group that I've done, the second album, both two albums for so far called Lizard, L-I-Z-Z-A-R-D, and they're from France, and their album has tremendous range, almost orchestral quality and very strong hard rock quality. Gosh, it was mastered on a really good system. And the mix that they sent to me, which was mixed in a top end studio in France was recorded and mixed on 24 track analog, as a matter of fact, sounds fantastic, was very linear.

(00:29:32):

I just had to do very little work to it. So I'm not sure if it's possible to justify on a genre specific basis that one could use inaccurate speakers. You can simply, I think, justify it by saying quote unquote, I'm used to it. These work for me. I wouldn't recommend them to anybody else. They're translating and I'm getting good jobs. And that's as much as you can say. And I'm afraid to say that the excuse of saying my clients like it doesn't always hold because we know about the client who has no ears and preferred the really sucky sounding mix. So I'm not saying your mixes are sucky, I'm just saying that we can't lean back on my clients. Love it. Excuse. But I suppose if you had thousands of clients and you were very famous, maybe we could, I'm not a big fan of Rick Rubin's approach to sound, but he has thousands of clients and very happy ones too.

Speaker 4 (00:30:38):

Yeah. But there's also, there's people who progress the industry like you do with mastering, and then there's also people who just, it's just a part of their daily routine. A lot of the stuff I work on doesn't get sent out to mastering engineers. And maybe you have an opinion about this. I know we've talked about this in other episodes. I end up mastering all my own stuff, but I kind of prefer that because I don't really know. I haven't really built a relationship with any mastering engineers that I trust and that I would be like, here's my work, make it sound great, and just let them go,

Speaker 3 (00:31:13):

Ooh, you just opened up something. I'd love to hear your work. I'd love, love to hear your work. And I know the budgets may not afford it, but that's terrible because it's a vicious circle that just perpetuates. But anyway, what I'm leading to is I'd be very interested in seeing or hearing a mix of a song before and after you mastered it, and we'll have a friendly competition, so to speak, and I'll master it.

Speaker 2 (00:31:41):

And that would be killer competition. I would love to do that. Yeah, that would be a killer competition.

Speaker 3 (00:31:48):

And in the end, you might say, Bob, your master doesn't have enough balls. And I might say, well, okay, I'm sorry because I'm still kind of learning in the heavy, heavy, heavy field because my inclinations are more acoustic, I must admit.

Speaker 4 (00:32:06):

Right? But

Speaker 3 (00:32:07):

It would be interesting to see where it goes, and also the loudness war and how that to make it and all that other stuff that we could talk

Speaker 2 (00:32:16):

About. Actually, if you're serious about doing that shootout, I think that that would be phenomenal

Speaker 3 (00:32:23):

Just for fun, for goodness sake. Yeah,

(00:32:26):

No, our listeners would love that. But I did have extraordinary success with a contest that had a lot of heavy mixes that Sennheiser put on to promote their free drum sampler. I think it's called drum mica. I could be wrong. Geez, the Sennheiser sampler sounds good. It's almost like a left-handed compliment to talk about drum samplers. But the only rule in the contest besides using recordings that they supplied was that they had to use the Sennheiser drum set, but there's so many variations. So I had a lot of success. I helped a lot of the mix engineers who were mixing. One of the things that I, as a judge for the contest, one of the things that I asked the asked Sennheiser to do was let me hear the first mixes from the 10 semi-finalists, and I'll give them comments as to suggestions on how they could improve their mixes.

(00:33:30):

I did that, and then I picked the two or three finalists, and they all were extremely grateful to the suggestions that I gave for the mixes. In some cases, I asked for stems because some of these were kind of novice mix engineers, so I semi remixed in the mastering suite, which is you have to have balls to claim that you can fix a mix and make comments about it. But I reached this point in my career where people do come to me often to help them get their mixes done, but what I'm leading to is that these were hard rock mixes, and no one said to me, Bob, it's not loud enough. Although many of the mixes that I criticized, as I said, were oversaturated and distorted to the extent that I couldn't do anything with them in the mastering. And I made suggestions, and believe it or not, all of these mixed engineers turned it down. And what happened was great sounding masters, and they can be heard at the Sennheiser drama.

Speaker 2 (00:34:43):

I actually just went and found the drama site. I just had no idea that even existed. Actually, we actually know a lot about drum samplers.

Speaker 3 (00:34:54):

This one's free, and it's supposedly really, really good. And all the drums that I heard sounded different. So there was a wide variety of drums and the treatment which they gave was different. So it's not like you feel like, oh my God, I recognize that sampler. No, I don't think that would happen as easily with the Sennheiser.

Speaker 2 (00:35:15):

So let me ask you actually about the whole mastering with stems thing. Does that happen very often these days in your normal work?

Speaker 3 (00:35:27):

Good question. Depends on the level of clientele that the mastering engineer tends to get. Now, as the years have gone on, I've gotten seen labels go by the wayside and gotten more and more independent work. So depending on the experience and level of the mix engineer, I may or may not get stems or need stems. I certainly would not recommend stems arbitrarily. I'm not going to tell a mixing engineer that whose work I haven't heard and who I don't know from Adam, you should send me stems. I think that that's arbitrary and egotistical, but I offer as a free service to listen to a mix and to give comments as to whether I think the mix is ready for mastering and if I think that they're having trouble with a given instrument, and it's usually the bass, as Captain Kirk said, bass is the final frontier.

Speaker 2 (00:36:27):

Absolutely is.

Speaker 3 (00:36:29):

I'll make suggestions. There's this great ban from Australia doing very strong hard rock. This band on this record, the bass was tuned with drop tuning down to low D. That is so hard to manage. If any of you have worked and in your genre, in your middle

Speaker 2 (00:36:52):

Drop G way lower than that,

Speaker 3 (00:36:54):

We're like tuning in G and A and

Speaker 2 (00:36:57):

An F.

Speaker 3 (00:36:59):

Okay, well, okay, there you go. Maybe it wasn't even D, whatever it was C or whatever. The point is, when I got his mix, it was just all lumpy and you couldn't hear a thing. You couldn't hear the bass instrument properly. The bass drum, bass relationship was poor. So I suggested the following stems, lead vocals, background vocals. I think that the bass drum was separate. I may have asked for the bass drums separate and the drums and the bass instruments separate and the rest of the instruments. So it was like five or six stereo stems, probably didn't need the vocal thing, but after getting the bass sounding really great at a good level, the vocal might need it to be tweaked up or down a quarter DB or something if you know what I'm getting at. So it was all in context. It's not that I was trying to be an egotist, and I worked very well with the engineer and what I sent to him. Well, you had to pull him off the floor because just by mastering, well actually prem mixing in the mastering room with these really accurate speakers, I was able to hear what this drop base tuning was doing and give it the right EQ that he was not able to address.

Speaker 2 (00:38:17):

I actually do think that how low modern metal and hard rock goes does present quite a problem with, for lack of a better word, shitty monitoring environments because everything is overlapping now. When you have guitars down in F, where does your bass guitar even go in the first place?

Speaker 4 (00:38:43):

Equal octave. Actually, a lot of those bands are doing now. The bass isn't the same octave as a guitar

Speaker 3 (00:38:50):

And doubling the line.

Speaker 4 (00:38:51):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:38:51):

Yeah. Oh yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:38:53):

Absolutely. Well, I guess what I'm getting at, this was an answer to your question as to how often do I ask for stems? I ask for stems when I think they're needed.

Speaker 4 (00:39:04):

That's a good policy. And the same thing for me if I'm doing mastering that I didn't record, people will always ask me first. They'll say, Hey, do you want me to send you stems? And I usually say, no, I just want to hear what you have first. And then if I feel like there's something that's not worth remixing for, but something I could change very subtly to help my master or help the song, then I'll get the stems. But I wouldn't want to do it every time. If I'm just mastering, I kind of don't want to open up that whole box. And I think,

Speaker 3 (00:39:40):

Oh, totally, totally. And in the case of that group, I actually scheduled a separate session where I concentrated on the mix aspects without any mastering, just get the help, the mix to take it to their final level, put what was needed on the bass instrument, and then I had

Speaker 2 (00:40:00):

And how often does this happen though?

Speaker 3 (00:40:03):

Okay, good question. I wish it were less, I'd say 20 or 30% of the

Speaker 2 (00:40:07):

Time. And is it an increasing percentage?

Speaker 3 (00:40:11):

Probably. And that's because of the number of project studio, novice mix engineers that are entering the field.

Speaker 5 (00:40:18):

Everybody's a mixer these days. Hence the podcast

Speaker 2 (00:40:24):

That I'm looking at the questions from our crowd, and there's a very topical question right here to what we're talking about. So let's go ahead and ask it. Jason Laine was asking, I would like to know, when do you use a heavy handed versus light touch approach to mastering? When do you change your toolkit? Depending on the mix, what's your first thought process when you hear a song?

Speaker 3 (00:40:52):

Oh, at this stage it's intuitive. My goodness. And my approach varies from totally hands-off to totally hands-on. There's no direct answer except I could give a seminar, play examples of mixes that I received and discuss what my approaches were for each one.

Speaker 2 (00:41:13):

I guess when you get, say, a stellar, stellar mix, which it sounds like it's less frequent these days, but I guess when you get a more stellar mix, what would you describe as I guess a less heavy handed approach?

Speaker 3 (00:41:33):

Oh gosh. I mean, I have analog and digital chains. If a mix requires a very transparent approach, I might stay completely in the digital domain because it doesn't need any additional color. Or it might be a hybrid of both the analog and the digital, or it might be heavily in the analog with very little or no digital processing. You just have to have an open mind to make sure that don't fix what ain't broke if they say or fix it, if it is.

Speaker 2 (00:42:10):

I actually think that that's a very, very good point that I hope that the listeners get out of this because I feel like learning things online and asking questions online, getting the answers that way through Facebook or forums or whatever, people will learn, for instance, go-to EQ frequencies that some guy used at some point. Yeah, no, I'm serious.

Speaker 3 (00:42:34):

Well, what I've said about that is that's like telling somebody to put salt and pepper on their food before you taste it.

Speaker 4 (00:42:43):

You don't know what it tastes like yet.

Speaker 3 (00:42:46):

And here's a real clue for your monitor system, let's just say material that you didn't record, but which you're mixing. If you find that you keep going to the same frequencies all the time, you need to suspect that your monitor system is not active.

Speaker 5 (00:43:05):

Right? Yeah, that makes sense. 4K, Joey, Bob, Joey, and I hate three to 4K, and we cut it out of everything when we mix, and it's something we discuss a

Speaker 4 (00:43:17):

Lot. But you have to keep in mind that Bob is getting stuff that has all kinds of different amp sounds, and whereas we have completely saturated overdriven distorted wall of nonsense for hell of hell,

Speaker 3 (00:43:34):

Maybe I don't want to give you a

Speaker 4 (00:43:36):

Texture master. It's very, very distorted, very balls to the wall. And that is why you get a lot of the 4K because it's just completely saturated. It's almost white noise. At some point

Speaker 3 (00:43:52):

You might ask, is there a tendency in current day recordings and mixes? I would say the degree of distortion is certainly gone

Speaker 4 (00:43:59):

Up and we're getting used to it. The people are finding it more acceptable is what I'm noticing.

Speaker 3 (00:44:05):

Yep, yep. Even I, as purist as I am, am using more distortion than I did 10, 15 years ago. In the mastering side,

Speaker 5 (00:44:14):

You see a lot with kids on the forumm, everything is saturation. Oh, you put saturation on your symbols, you put saturated on your vocals, you put saturated on your base. Everybody is always curious about saturation.

Speaker 3 (00:44:27):

Lemme give a very important point, which comes from my book, which is distortion is compression is distortion, is compression, is distortion is compression, odd infinitum. Okay, so saturation is compression. It's there is automatically compression going on. And it's because if you start with a sine wave and you sort of square it off, which is to give you the harmonic distortion, you can see that that's a compressed wave form as well. The peak to average ratio goes down. So when you compress, whether by saturation or other tools or with a compressor, you begin to lose something, which is a very important part of music, and that is the microdynamics. If that snare doesn't have enough snap along with its punch and pop, it's not going to feel as loud as clear and as impacting than if you didn't use that saturation tool. And the more that your monitors, here we go again, I'm preaching. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (00:45:43):

This is great away. Carry

Speaker 3 (00:45:45):

On. Okay, thank you. Thank you. The more that your monitors do not reveal the peak to average ratio of the music that you're doing, if your monitors are compressing, how are you going to know if the recording that you are working on has enough or too much compression?

Speaker 4 (00:46:05):

Yeah, I don't know if you want to get into this, but this is a question that's pretty loaded. It says Mattus Rasmussen says, could you comment on the current state of the loudness war since YouTube, Spotify, et cetera, have begun normalizing to a certain L-U-F-S-R-M-S threshold? Is there a point to still squashing the mix when mastering, or should we embrace the new changes and master more conservatively?

Speaker 3 (00:46:38):

I'll give you a two part answer. The first part answer is that we mastering engineers, consumers, all of us should be very happy that there is more loudness, normalization going on in the streaming services and so on. That's the positive side of it. And further on with the positive side, the answer is yes, we should embrace it because the better your recording sound before they get sent to the streaming utility or the download place or YouTube or whatever, the better they will sound when normalized because YouTube will turn it down if you over compress and pushed the level up. That's the positive side. The negative side is that what they call the target level, the target level is the LUFS or loudness level that they're shooting for. If your material is louder than that target, they'll turn it down. If it's lower than that target, they might turn it up unless the peaks overload.

(00:47:56):

Now, there's a lot that I'm sure the listeners to this podcast wouldn't understand at this point. It's all a big learning curve and I would suggest you get a loudness meter and begin to learn how they work so that we can be on the same wavelength here. But what I'm getting to is that the target level that YouTube chose is very unfortunate. Reportedly they have chosen a level of minus 13 LUFS. What that means is a loudness level 13 DB below full scale. Now, what this does is it's going to start another loudness war, and iTunes is using an approximate loudness level of minus 16 LUFS, which is three DB below YouTube. So you get this war and mix engineers and mastering engineers that are saying, oh, well, we've got to make it at the YouTube level, are going to say, well, we got to make it minus 13.

(00:49:06):

Now you might say, well, so what's wrong with that? It just means that iTunes will turn it down. That's all. Well, that's not exactly the whole story. The fact is that Apple was very, very smart when they chose this minus 16 level and they've had it for years and years. This is the level that your iTunes will be normalized to. When you go in the preferences on your iTunes on your Mac or your pc, and you turn on a feature called soundcheck, which is normalization, everything will be normalized to minus 16 LUFS. Now, apple was very smart in choosing this, and they've had it since about the second year that iTunes was introduced. That is the highest level that could be set for normalization that would permit the vast majority of music to be reproduced without requiring any peak limiting or clipping of the material. Meaning that if you do a great sounding mix and it has a peak to average ratio of 15 db, it will not be disturbed by iTunes. But if you bring it into YouTube, it's going to be two DB too hot. They will not be able to turn it up to their minus 13. It'll be turned down by two db and it'll play lower than competition on YouTube and you will feel inadequate.

Speaker 4 (00:50:43):

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 3 (00:50:44):

You will. Yeah. Impotence is a new thing. So you'll be tempted to go back to the drawing board and additionally compress your material so that it'll compete with other stuff on YouTube. And the whole goal of loudness normalization was to get rid of a loudness war, not to start a new one.

Speaker 2 (00:51:05):

So let me ask you then, because I don't understand all the math behind this, and I was trying

Speaker 3 (00:51:10):

To, oh, it's just arithmetic. Let me help you with that.

Speaker 2 (00:51:13):

Well, does your case system address this?

Speaker 3 (00:51:15):

It did, but the case system has been superseded by a good loudness meter with a zero level at whatever the target is. I'll give you a simple example. If your average level of your music is minus 16 LUFS and your peak level is minus three LUFS, the peak to average ratio is how much? I'll repeat the numbers. If your loudness is minus 16 LUFS and your peak level, the highest level that the material reaches is minus three. What's your peak to loudness

Speaker 4 (00:51:57):

13. Right,

Speaker 3 (00:51:58):

Exactly. And what that means, and that's just arithmetic, just simple subtraction. And when you bring that into YouTube, YouTube will be able to set it to minus 13 LUFS, turn up the gain. The peak level will hit zero DBFS, and the loudness level will be minus 13 and all will be well. But if your peak to loudness ratio exceeds 13 db, YouTube will have to turn it down or they will have to put peak limiting in. And right. As I understand, they're not doing that.

Speaker 2 (00:52:34):

Is there any sort of a petition or movement to get YouTube to conform to Apple's standard? Or is this just something that you predict we're going to have to live with forever?

Speaker 3 (00:52:49):

How far does this podcast reach we're finding out, okay. Hello out there in TV land. If you can get anybody at YouTube to please turn down their loudness standard, we'd really appreciate it. Okay. But there is going to be a little movement. We hope. I am chairman of a new a ES subcommittee on loudness and streaming. There's a lot of skepticism that will be able to influence a big company like YouTube or Google or even Apple. But we're going to try, we're going to look to see if we can find a common ground.

Speaker 2 (00:53:29):

Sweet. That's awesome. That's a very, very noble cause I think,

Speaker 3 (00:53:34):

Oh God, I'm going to lose my hair.

Speaker 2 (00:53:38):

It blows my mind. How do you go about influencing YouTube to change something? But I'm sure, sure

Speaker 5 (00:53:44):

It can call them and tell them to change it and they say, okay,

Speaker 2 (00:53:48):

Well,

Speaker 4 (00:53:49):

I think if anyone deserves to be in that seat, it's Bob.

Speaker 3 (00:53:52):

Oh dear. Thank you. I'm the catbird seat. Hi. You're with YouTube. Listen guys, I just want to let you know that Apple is using a much lower threshold. Apple our enemies. Oh no, we won't change that. We have our own standards. Well, we'll see. We'll see. I'm cautiously optimist.

Speaker 2 (00:54:16):

I would love to see that happen. Do you want to take some more questions from our audience?

Speaker 3 (00:54:21):

I love the questions.

Speaker 2 (00:54:22):

Awesome. Let me rephrase. If you want to say the answer to these is it's different every time. That's cool. Or just depends on what I'm working on. But I'll ask

Speaker 3 (00:54:34):

Some of these. I love 249.5 hertz. That's my favorite

Speaker 2 (00:54:38):

Frequency. Everyone write that down.

Speaker 5 (00:54:41):

Can I jump in here for a second? I got a good question. So we were talking about this new mastered for iTunes badge thing and what it means. Are you certified for that, Bob? And can you clarify to the audience what the new standard is, how to et cetera?

Speaker 3 (00:54:56):

First of all, the list of certified studios is not something that Apple publishes. It gets passed around underground and some of the major labels have a copy of it. I think it's an elitist thing because Apple is not the clip police in the end. Clip police. Well, that's actually Bob Ludwig's phrase. I love it. It's great. And I've taken it from him. So Bob Ludwig takes credit for that one. He deserves it. He's a great guy. If you're a certified master for iTunes Mastering House, you could put as many clips as you want in there and just say, I'm accepting it. So they don't have any rules except that you have to be on the list. And to go beyond that, if you're a mastering house and you're not on the list, but you have a client that wants to use you, you can make a mastered for iTunes master and then get put on the list.

(00:56:00):

So they just ask a few questions and say, how long have you been in business kind of stuff. But as I say, I think it's an elitist thing because they don't have a rule. It would be nice if they did have a rule and said, you can't have any more than one clip in the recording, and it would've been nicer. But then Rick Rubin couldn't have had all those hits. So what I'm getting at, oh dear. Well, it's okay. Wait a minute. Rick Rubin, if you listen to this podcast and you love good sound, give me a call please. I'd love to master one of your

Speaker 2 (00:56:33):

Hey, Rick Rubin, if you listen to this podcast, we'd love to have you.

Speaker 5 (00:56:36):

Ironically, I was listening to a podcast with Tim Ferris and Rick Rubin this morning while I was getting my kids food together for daycare. And here we are. Interesting. Is the food

Speaker 3 (00:56:49):

Going to be under daycare

Speaker 5 (00:56:50):

Or the kids?

Speaker 3 (00:56:52):

That's a good question. I don't know Rick personally, and I like the music that he works with a lot. I think that it's time for a change. I think that once normalization rears its ugly head and he begins to realize that the more he turns it up, the more the stations turn it down. I think there will be a change. I'd love to get some of his business. There's also philosophical thing. I like more open sounding material. He likes more crushed sounding material. The thing is that normalization, lets loudness. Normalization lets us coexist on YouTube and iTunes radio and Beats Radio. It lets us coexist. But I got off the track, what was the question?

Speaker 5 (00:57:36):

Mastering for iTunes, how to submit

Speaker 3 (00:57:39):

All that stuff. Sorry. There are documents at the Apple site. I'll read them and download the utilities that they provide free and learn how to follow those and read my book. I have a book. I've read it. I

Speaker 5 (00:57:53):

Have it. It's great.

Speaker 3 (00:57:55):

Called iTunes Music. Thank you. It covers all the technical aspects. And believe it or not, you don't have to follow them in order to be accepted. You can have a thousand clips in a minute or you'll get on the list if it's a record label that's asking to have the record be released, apple. So I don't understand exactly what the certified list does if Apple doesn't have

Speaker 2 (00:58:20):

Any list. So basically all you have to do is know how to download an application and fill it out.

Speaker 3 (00:58:25):

No, not that kind of application. There are three Apple scripts that Apple has produced to help you produce material and measure it and determine how many clips it has and what the average level is and so on.

Speaker 4 (00:58:41):

And you have to fall within a certain number of parameters for it to be considered mastered for iTunes.

Speaker 3 (00:58:48):

That's not exactly correct.

Speaker 4 (00:58:51):

Sort of.

Speaker 3 (00:58:53):

It's very loose.

Speaker 4 (00:58:53):

Yeah, sort of.

Speaker 3 (00:58:55):

There are loose guidelines, which I think if you follow, will increase the quality. I'll give you an example. There are people who have gone on record, I don't see much of it lately on the forums and so on, saying that they have little tricks to help their a c, the coated format sound better, little EQ tricks or compression tricks or whatever. And I think that's all nonsense because the best way to get a C to sound good is to make a master, which falls in the range in which the a c was designed to handle A. A C does not. Very saturated recordings and it adds distortion. So if you want to make a C sound good, don't,

Speaker 2 (00:59:44):

That's actually a really, really good tip because I've actually heard people say the opposite and well, not people.

Speaker 3 (00:59:55):

Oh dear. That's

Speaker 2 (00:59:56):

Completely wrong. So I'm glad. I'm glad to hear you set that straight.

Speaker 3 (01:00:01):

I could give you a technical reason, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):

I'd love to hear the technical reason.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):

Okay. Okay. Good coded media like MP three that we all know about, and a C, which is a more efficient coding medium. They all use masking techniques to allow you to get more information into fewer numbers of bits into the same bit rate, as we say. And they divide the signal into what are called bins, which are frequency sections. They're actually psychoacoustic bins, but I'll just give for purposes of illustration, there might be a 500 hertz bin, a one kilohertz bin, a two kilohertz bin. Now, in order to keep the bit rate down, all the bins must not be full. The codec will divide its work up until all the bins are full. And if all the bins are full, then it just distorts and overloads. And one sure way to fill up all the bins is to hyper compress your material to go beyond what makes it sound good. To use loudness making tools just for the sake of making it louder. And the great thing about this is that if you shoot for the iTunes minus 16 LUFS loudness level, you'll end up with something that'll also sound better when it's coated to a C, which is master. Correct.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):

So do you find that you have to print off the regular version and the iTunes version normally?

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):

Good points. Now, if I'm mastering extremely aggressively, and even if I suggested to my client that it was a bad idea because when it gets onto iTunes Prodigy or one of the other normalized services, they're going to turn it down anyway and it won't sound as good. But if they say, no, no, I want you to master aggressively, then I might find that the a c is sounding distorted due to these super hot levels. So I might make a master that I would turn down a DB or more to make a better a c coating. All of that seems really counterintuitive. Why not just make a good sounding master in the first place? But anyway, that happens on occasion. But I'm lucky I tend to attract clients who care about sound quality. The ones who don't care also come to me, and I'm happy to make a super hot master for them.

(01:02:47):

I think that as they begin to discover, the best thing that my clients can learn or that any artist can learn is to put your mix or your master, preferably your master into iTunes, just drag and drop it into iTunes, go into the preferences and turn on soundcheck, and then drop in some of the competing songs in your genre into the same playlist and see whether your material sounds as good as or better, hopefully better than the other material. If your material sounds worse than the others with soundcheck turned on, that's what's going to happen. When it gets put on iTunes radio, it's going to go downhill. It's going to be brought down. So dynamic is the new loud to quote my friend, Ian Shepherd.

Speaker 2 (01:03:37):

That brings up an excellent topic. This is something else I wanted to ask you about precisely because I've read up on your thoughts about loudness and destroying mixes. I'll just say that from my own experience. Sometimes I find that I have to do something for a client in a production or a mix that I disagree with, but they really, really want it. And in order to not lose the job or make them happy or their audience happy, I'll do what they want. The example of a snare, that to me sounds way too fake, but to them that's what they're looking for because that's what the bands they listen to sound like and they're 18, they don't know better.

Speaker 3 (01:04:21):

It's the demo.

Speaker 2 (01:04:23):

Exactly. So I guess at what point are you okay with crushing the hell out of a master?

Speaker 4 (01:04:30):

Is there a boundary where you're not going to cross, I guess, is what we're asking.

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):

Well, I turned down a job. If I keep on pushing it and say it can't, the good news is that's happening less frequently now than it was even two years

Speaker 2 (01:04:44):

Ago.

Speaker 3 (01:04:45):

I think that more and more clients are becoming aware of the issues that we're talking about, so it doesn't happen too often. And the number of times I turn down a job or say, I'm sorry, this is as loud as it's already reached, as loud as potential have gone down. And when it happens, when the client says, can you turn it up? Sometimes they'll say, Bob, only if you think it can be done. And I will try. I'll try to turn it up, and then I can send them the before and the after and say, here, I think that the after sounds worse and more times now than ever before, they'll say, you were right, Bob. Of course, they wasted two hours of their precious money and time when instead of taking my word for it, that it's already reached its loudness potential. I dunno why they don't trust the mastering engineers.

Speaker 4 (01:05:39):

Yeah, they hire you to do the job, but then they don't trust you to do it

Speaker 3 (01:05:43):

Anyway. So the good news, it's happening less and less, but still,

Speaker 4 (01:05:47):

Speaking of trusting people to master stuff, what do you think about Lander?

Speaker 3 (01:05:51):

It's not mastering, Lander is not masculine. Lander is making everything the same loudness.

Speaker 4 (01:05:59):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:06:00):

And processing it to do that. Look about, when did the finalizer get introduced? In around 19 97, 96. Somewhere.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):

Somewhere in that range.

Speaker 3 (01:06:13):

Okay. When the finalizer was introduced, mastering engineers, some of us began to lose clients because it was heavily advertised as, you can master this yourself, and some of the same phenomenons going on with Lander. All it we'll take is education and a little bit of experience. Once they found out that they couldn't master it, they sold their finalizers because they knew it just didn't help and they couldn't sound as good as what we could do for them. But the thing is that the bar has been raised, the automatic systems that Lander are doing. I haven't even heard Lander, to be honest. It's pretty bad, but Okay. I was going to say, I'll bet it's better than what they could have invented in 1990.

Speaker 2 (01:06:58):

Oh yeah. I'm sure. But it is pretty awful, at least when I've tried it out. I've tried it out just to see what it did and there you go. I wasn't expecting it to be good though.

Speaker 4 (01:07:11):

Yeah. Just an example I gave, I put a song that had a standup bass in it. It completely ignored the fact that there was a lot of interesting dynamics in the bass, and

Speaker 3 (01:07:22):

It

Speaker 4 (01:07:22):

Didn't account for any of that, and it sounded stupid.

Speaker 3 (01:07:27):

Well, I passed that on. The more the merrier there is the various distribution companies, CD, baby, and Reverb Nation. And what's the third one? Tune Core. Yeah. Tune Core is now advertising that incoming clients can use Lander at what, 10 bucks a pop or something like that to quote unquote master your music. Wow. Oh my gosh. That's terrible. Yeah, they're offering it. So I managed to get in touch with the head of marketing at TuneCore, and we're working on changing that so that they'll point out that it's just not giving the right advice.

Speaker 4 (01:08:09):

Oh, God bless you.

Speaker 3 (01:08:10):

Thank you. Yes. Well, but it hasn't happened yet. I'll have to remind him that he promised to do

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):

Something. Well, still, I think it's great that you're taking a very active role in trying to fix some of these problems that are destroying audio, but that we have to live with these online services. They're not going anywhere. So it's definitely,

Speaker 3 (01:08:35):

Yeah, your client's going to come to you and say, Hey, I want to take it to Lander after you're done with it. And they'll say, okay, I want you to master it yourself, and then I'll send in Lander and maybe it'll get even better choke them to death

Speaker 5 (01:08:49):

On the spot.

Speaker 4 (01:08:51):

I hope I don't live to see that happen, but it seems like things are going that way. Bob, has it happened to

Speaker 2 (01:08:58):

You? Of

Speaker 5 (01:08:58):

Course I

Speaker 3 (01:08:59):

Have.

Speaker 4 (01:08:59):

No,

Speaker 5 (01:09:01):

It's like the recording singularity.

Speaker 3 (01:09:04):

What is it? Einstein said that I am sure that the universe is infinite and stupidity is infinite, but I'm not sure about the first one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):

Yeah. I actually wanted to say that I really like the signature on your email. That Einstein quote made me think of it.

Speaker 3 (01:09:30):

There are two kinds of fools. One says, this is old and therefore good, and the other one says, this is new and therefore better.

Speaker 2 (01:09:42):

It's funny though. I feel like as audio engineers, we encounter both of those a lot, and it just made me think of the Einstein

Speaker 3 (01:09:52):

Quote. Oh, yeah. Oh, well, I don't know. I mean, we could even talk about where that quote gets applied. Oh, I got to get this vintage U 47. This is going to make a hit, or I've got to use this new plugin. This is going to make a hit. Either way. Either way, we're in trouble.

Speaker 5 (01:10:15):

1176 on everything

Speaker 3 (01:10:18):

With all four buttons pushed in. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:10:21):

Well, speaking of plugins, wanted to ask you about your plugin. You said that the case system has

Speaker 3 (01:10:30):

Case stereo, you

Speaker 2 (01:10:31):

Mean? Yeah. Well, you were saying that the case system has been superseded, has case stereo been superseded or is that something Oh, no, no, no, no. The

Speaker 3 (01:10:40):

Case Stereo is a plugin to enhance and bring out the ambience and depth in a recording, and the K system is a metering system.

Speaker 2 (01:10:52):

Okay, so it's just based on your last name, K for Kaz. Yeah. For better or worse, for better. Can we talk a little bit about your plugin? I'm actually curious about it.

Speaker 4 (01:11:08):

I'm curious, do you use your own plugin? Does

Speaker 3 (01:11:14):

The Pope shit in the woods,

Speaker 2 (01:11:18):

Seth Munson is asking, what are some ways to create magic in the center without harming the sides?

Speaker 3 (01:11:26):

Okay. Well, you can always go back to mano in a mixdown.

Speaker 2 (01:11:31):

I think he's asking pertaining to MS processing and master.

Speaker 3 (01:11:37):

I think we're going to have to elaborate on the question. What,

Speaker 4 (01:11:40):

Because

Speaker 3 (01:11:41):

It could mean in a number of things. I think that he's asking, what if a mix comes in for mastering that has a slightly weak center vocalist, and we want to try and bring that vocalist up without asking for stems.

Speaker 2 (01:12:01):

Could we talk about that? Yeah, it would be a situation like that or want to dial in, help the kick drum and the snare more without destroying the guitars on the side.

Speaker 3 (01:12:16):

We'll talk about all of those. The first answer I'm going to give is it's always better to fix it in the mix. Always. All of these tools and solutions that are becoming more and more prominent, including the case stereo and the MS processing approaches, can be compromises to the sound if they're used even more than just a little tiny bit. As soon as you start playing around with MS ratios in any frequency range, or especially in the whole bandwidth, you're going to affect, you're going to negatively affect something. So a good rule to talk about for MS is if you have to alter the ratio of M to S more than a db, you're probably going to cause a compromise. And I'm almost always very subtle, and I'll use it on occasion. Less and less. Less is more. So let's talk about this weak center vocalist.

(01:13:34):

If you bring up the entire frequency spectrum of the center, you're almost certainly going to bring up other centered instruments, like maybe the kick drum, maybe the snare, maybe the bass instrument, maybe a keyboard. So it would be best to be surgical about it to find the frequency range where you can cheat up the center and help the center vocalist a little bit without bringing up the other instruments. And that could be anywhere. That could be in the lower mid range, 200, 300, 400. It might even be in the presence range, three K, 4K, 5K, whatever, helps to bring up just that center vocalist without sacrificing, without changing the balance of everything else. And there's also the situation of focus. As soon as you start focusing on the vocalist, first of all, you're going to think it's too low, and secondly, as you bring it up, you're going to maybe forget the compromises that are happening everywhere else. So pay attention to everything that might be affected as you bring up certain frequencies in the M Channel. The other thing that happens is that when you bring up the M channel or the center, the sides as your questionnaire asked, tend to be sacrificed. The stereo separation goes down, and that's where my case stereo plugin can come in.

(01:15:16):

It can be used for many purposes, but the case stereo can be used to help improve the sense of ambiance and depth that can be lost if you start bringing up the center channel. So they can work hand in hand. If the kick drum is too loud or too weak, you could take 50 hertz or 60 hertz or whatever and cheat it upper down just in the M channel. If the snare is too weak, you could cheat it up or down with one or two kilohertz, but watch out for the compromises. And that's where a different kind of approach can help. And I'm going to recommend a different plugin from DMG. It's called the Essence. I help to design it, by the way, I don't get any royalties or anything from it, but it's an absolutely terrific single band compressor expander and very, very selective and very, very effective. And I have a few presets that come with the D mg essence, and one of them is just that. It's called snare drum enhancer.

Speaker 2 (01:16:26):

Perfect.

Speaker 3 (01:16:26):

On a full mix, because it works on the transient of the snare drum, rather than just taking all the frequencies and bringing them up or down, it has less of a compromise than just a pure MS approach. Notice I said, less of a compromise. Yes.

Speaker 4 (01:16:45):

It's still a compromise.

Speaker 3 (01:16:48):

These tools are becoming more and more invisible and in the right hands. If you use them very delicately and very carefully, you can subtly bring a B plus mix up to an A, but don't go expecting a C mix to be turned into an A.

Speaker 2 (01:17:03):

Right. I think that that's very key to say, because there's a lot of these tricks like MS processing or parallel compression that a lot of guys coming up are talking about relentlessly. That really should be done, like you said, very sparingly, and for that extra few percentage of improvement not to

Speaker 4 (01:17:27):

Salvage. Yeah. You've got people who don't even have a drum mix yet, and they're already doing parallel compression because they think that's what's going to get them the drum mix.

Speaker 5 (01:17:37):

It's a lot of running before you learn to walk. And for whatever reason, people think that complexity is going to make you better just by the fact that it's complexity.

Speaker 2 (01:17:46):

So let me ask a couple more questions from the crowd reading through their questions. I feel like a lot of this has actually been answered in the conversation, but Francesco, I can't pronounce his last name. So we'll just say, Francesco is just asking if you have a set order of things that you do, like eq, then multi-band tape, bus compression, et cetera, within your chain, do you have a set chain that you use or does it vary every single time?

Speaker 3 (01:18:19):

That's the same question as the salt and pepper around.

Speaker 2 (01:18:22):

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (01:18:24):

Yeah. No, no, no. My chain's very, now there might be, I would say, five or six possible choices of a chain that I use very often, and so I'll probably use one of those choices more often. But sometimes I'll have to think outside the box and come up with something

Speaker 4 (01:18:51):

Special. Is he doing anything with tape

Speaker 3 (01:18:54):

Me?

Speaker 4 (01:18:54):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:55):

Not real tape anymore, but I do have the OD ATS one, which I think is very pretty, very nice.

Speaker 4 (01:19:02):

And for people who might not be familiar with that, is that what exactly is that? Is a processor or

Speaker 3 (01:19:08):

It's an outboard analog processor that does analog tape really well.

Speaker 5 (01:19:13):

It's like tape machine parts in a box,

Speaker 3 (01:19:17):

Right? All that we're missing is the smell of the oil. There's that big red button you push that's like the record button. I've done testing on it, and as a matter of fact, I think that yes, in my third edition of my book, I did a comparison of the OD to a certain well-known plugin. It kicked their asses

Speaker 2 (01:19:44):

With great guests and great conversations. There's no start or stop, just pause. And Bobcat could definitely be classified as a great guest. Our conversation could have gone on forever and we just had to stop it. So this is the official stopping point. Thank you for tuning in to Mastering Month. We hope you enjoy not only the Bobcats episode, but that you enjoyed our tips and tricks with Joey Sturges, that you enjoyed Mixed Crip Monday with my Aura Applebaum that you enjoyed learning about mastering and the music industry from Jesse Cannon and that you enjoyed Brain Talk with Alan Douches. As always, signing off Eyal Levi for my two co-hosts, Joey Sturgis and Joel Wanasek.

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):

The Unstoppable Recording Machine podcast is brought to you by Creative Live, the world's best online classroom for creative professionals with classes on songwriting, engineering, mixing, and mastering. Go to creative live.com/audio to start learning now. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is also brought to you by isotope crafting innovative audio products that inspire and enable people to be creative. Go to isotope.com to see what might inspire you to ask us questions, suggest topics and interact. Visit.