“I just finished the mastering engineers handbook and wanted to let you know I appreciate the information it presented.”
Jay-J
“Great job on the book!”
Brad Blackwood
Mastering Engineer
Ardent Studios
Jay-J
“Great job on the book!”
Brad Blackwood
Mastering Engineer
Ardent Studios
Mastering Engineer
Bob Katz
Co-owner of Orlando-based Digital Domain, Bob Katz specializes in mastering audiophile recordings of acoustic music, from Folk music to Classical. The former technical director of the widely acclaimed Chesky Records, Bob’s recordings have received disc of the month in Stereophile and other magazines numerous times, and his recording of “Portraits of Cuba” by Paquito D’Rivera, won the 1997 Grammy for Best Latin-Jazz Recording. Bob’s mastering clients include major labels EMI, WEA-Latina, BMG, and Sony Classical, as well as numerous independent labels.
What’s your approach to mastering?
BOB KATZ: I started very differently from many recording engineers that I know. Number one, I was an audiophile, and number two, I did a lot of recording direct to two track. That’s my orientation. I am a very naturalistic person. I work well with Rock & Roll and Heavy Metal, but the sound and tonal balance of a naturally recorded vocal or naturally recorded instrument is always where my head turns back to. I find that my clients, while they don’t necessarily recognize naturalistic reproduction as much as I do, love it when I finally EQ a project and make it sound what I think to be more natural.
Now, there are exceptions. A Rock & Roll group that wants to have a really big heavy bass, well, I’ll go for that. But, at the same time, I’m more inclined towards projects that sound good when the EQ is natural.
What do you think makes a great mastering engineer? What differentiates somebody that’s great as opposed to somebody that’s merely competent?
Great attention to detail and extreme persnicketyness, stick to it-iveness, and discipline. The desire to just keep working at it until it’s as good as the sound that you have in your mind, and to keep trying different things if you’re not satisfied. I will bend over backwards to get something right, even if I have to do it off the clock. Not to say that I don’t charge for my time, but if I make a mistake or I feel that I could’ve done it better, the client will always get my best results.
As good as you have in your mind. Does that mean that before you start a project, you have an idea where you’re going with it?
I think that another thing that distinguishes a good mastering engineer from an okay mastering engineer is that the more experienced you are, the more you have an idea of how far you can take something when you hear it and pretty much where you’d like to go with it, as opposed to experimenting with ten different pieces of gear until it seems to sound good to you. That distinguishes a great mastering engineer from an okay mastering engineer in the sense that you’ll work more efficiently that way. That’s not to say that there aren’t surprises. We’re always surprised to find that “Gee, this sounds better than I thought it would” or, “Gee, that box that I didn’t think would work proved to be pretty good.” And sometimes we will often experiment and say, “Let’s see what that box does.” So it’s a combination of not being so closed minded that you won’t try new things, but having enough experience to know that this set of tools that you have at your command will probably be good tools to do the job before even trying it. Also, a real good sense of pitch and where the frequencies of music are allows you to zero in on frequency based problems much faster than if you have a tin ear.
It’s hard to be in this business if you have a tin ear…
True, but I know a lot of medium level people who get away without that degree of precision. There is another area and that is the ability to be a chameleon and get along incredibly well with all different kinds of people from all walks of life. If someone brings in a type of music toward which I’m not necessarily inclined, I’ll psyche myself up and do pretty well with it, but I think that there are other people out there who perhaps do that even better than I do. So, being a chameleon and being adaptable and versatile is what distinguishes a great mastering engineer from an okay one.
What’s the hardest thing that you have to do?
Make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It’s a lot easier to take something that comes in at an A minus and turn it into an A plus, than to take something that comes in as a B minus and turn that into an A. That is the hardest thing I have to do.
The next hardest thing is to teach my clients that less is more. When they’re preparing their work to send to me, and also when I’m working on it, we’ll often go in a big circle. I may know in my head that putting three different compressors in a row isn’t going to make it better, but when they suggest it, I’ll never refuse their suggestions. When it’s all done though, they usually realize that passing it through less is more. The exception being that Phil Spector kind of approach where you think that more is more, but in that case the purity of the sound is less important than the bigness and the fuzziness and all the other things that it does. That’s not necessarily my kind of sound anyway. I’d rather make something sound really good and clean than good and dirty if I can.
What makes your job easier?
This is almost becoming a ubiquitous answer but I have to say that if I get the highest resolution, highest sample rate, earliest generation, uncut, unedited by anyone (or if they do cut it, leave the heads and tails alone) version, then things are easier. Unfortunately I get more and more chopped up material these days.
For instance, I did a children’s record and Meryl Streep did the voice over in a number of places. Now they left her dry so if I needed to add reverb to put in-between sections, I could do pretty much anything I wanted. But there were three cuts where they mixed the voice-over with the music, and when I finally put the CD in, three of the four worked fine in context with the songs they came in front of and after. But on the fourth one, the original mix engineer chose to mix the music fairly low against the voice and after she finished talking, brought the music up to a certain level. When it was put in context in the mastering against the song before and the song after, the music was too low but the voice sounded at the right level when placed at the proper level to fit to the cut before.
I was stuck with a problem of the music being too low. So in my first revision I sent to them, I cheated the music up gradually after Meryl stops speaking, but not enough, because the cheat doesn’t sound as good as if I had gotten separate elements and had been able to cheat the music up underneath without raising the voice.
So, what am I leading to is that you run into certain situations that are special or different. The problem is that many mix engineers don’t know what is special or different. It’s good to consult with the mastering engineer ahead of time, and in this case I would have said, “Send me the elements. Don’t mix it, because when you finally put an album together in context is when you’ll discover that you may need the separate elements.” I think that the future of mastering increasingly will involve some mixing.
How important is mono to you?
I forget to listen in mono more often than I intend to. I have good enough ears to detect when something is out of phase; it just sounds weird in the middle. In fact, I’m usually the first person walking into a stereo demo saying, “Hey, your speakers are out of phase.” So I usually don’t have that much of a problem with mono, but I’m always using a phase correlation meter and an oscilloscope to make sure things are cool. If I see something that looks funny, then I’ll switch to mono. But, half the time I just look at the scope and listen and won’t switch these days.
Do you ever normalize?
“Normalize” is very dangerous term. I think it should be destroyed as a word because it’s so ambiguous. If you mean do I ever use the Sonic normalize functions so that all the tracks get set to the highest peak level? The answer is no, I never do that. Do I use my ears and adjust the levels from track to track so that they fit from one to the other, then use compressors and limiters and expanders and equalizers and other devices to make sure that the highest peak on the album hits 0 dB FS? Yes, I do. I don’t call that normalizing, though.
Tell me why you don’t do it.
I’ll give you two reasons. I advise my clients not to do it and I’ve written about it extensively on my Website “Seven Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Normalize”. The first one has to do with just good old-fashioned signal deterioration. Every DSP operation costs something in terms of sound quality. It gets grainier, colder, narrower, and harsher. Adding a generation of normalization is just taking it down one generation.
The second reason is that normalization doesn’t accomplish anything. The ear responds to average level and not peak levels and there is no machine that can read peak levels and judge when something is equally loud.
What’s your approach to mastering?
BOB KATZ: I started very differently from many recording engineers that I know. Number one, I was an audiophile, and number two, I did a lot of recording direct to two track. That’s my orientation. I am a very naturalistic person. I work well with Rock & Roll and Heavy Metal, but the sound and tonal balance of a naturally recorded vocal or naturally recorded instrument is always where my head turns back to. I find that my clients, while they don’t necessarily recognize naturalistic reproduction as much as I do, love it when I finally EQ a project and make it sound what I think to be more natural.
Now, there are exceptions. A Rock & Roll group that wants to have a really big heavy bass, well, I’ll go for that. But, at the same time, I’m more inclined towards projects that sound good when the EQ is natural.
What do you think makes a great mastering engineer? What differentiates somebody that’s great as opposed to somebody that’s merely competent?
Great attention to detail and extreme persnicketyness, stick to it-iveness, and discipline. The desire to just keep working at it until it’s as good as the sound that you have in your mind, and to keep trying different things if you’re not satisfied. I will bend over backwards to get something right, even if I have to do it off the clock. Not to say that I don’t charge for my time, but if I make a mistake or I feel that I could’ve done it better, the client will always get my best results.
As good as you have in your mind. Does that mean that before you start a project, you have an idea where you’re going with it?
I think that another thing that distinguishes a good mastering engineer from an okay mastering engineer is that the more experienced you are, the more you have an idea of how far you can take something when you hear it and pretty much where you’d like to go with it, as opposed to experimenting with ten different pieces of gear until it seems to sound good to you. That distinguishes a great mastering engineer from an okay mastering engineer in the sense that you’ll work more efficiently that way. That’s not to say that there aren’t surprises. We’re always surprised to find that “Gee, this sounds better than I thought it would” or, “Gee, that box that I didn’t think would work proved to be pretty good.” And sometimes we will often experiment and say, “Let’s see what that box does.” So it’s a combination of not being so closed minded that you won’t try new things, but having enough experience to know that this set of tools that you have at your command will probably be good tools to do the job before even trying it. Also, a real good sense of pitch and where the frequencies of music are allows you to zero in on frequency based problems much faster than if you have a tin ear.
It’s hard to be in this business if you have a tin ear…
True, but I know a lot of medium level people who get away without that degree of precision. There is another area and that is the ability to be a chameleon and get along incredibly well with all different kinds of people from all walks of life. If someone brings in a type of music toward which I’m not necessarily inclined, I’ll psyche myself up and do pretty well with it, but I think that there are other people out there who perhaps do that even better than I do. So, being a chameleon and being adaptable and versatile is what distinguishes a great mastering engineer from an okay one.
What’s the hardest thing that you have to do?
Make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It’s a lot easier to take something that comes in at an A minus and turn it into an A plus, than to take something that comes in as a B minus and turn that into an A. That is the hardest thing I have to do.
The next hardest thing is to teach my clients that less is more. When they’re preparing their work to send to me, and also when I’m working on it, we’ll often go in a big circle. I may know in my head that putting three different compressors in a row isn’t going to make it better, but when they suggest it, I’ll never refuse their suggestions. When it’s all done though, they usually realize that passing it through less is more. The exception being that Phil Spector kind of approach where you think that more is more, but in that case the purity of the sound is less important than the bigness and the fuzziness and all the other things that it does. That’s not necessarily my kind of sound anyway. I’d rather make something sound really good and clean than good and dirty if I can.
What makes your job easier?
This is almost becoming a ubiquitous answer but I have to say that if I get the highest resolution, highest sample rate, earliest generation, uncut, unedited by anyone (or if they do cut it, leave the heads and tails alone) version, then things are easier. Unfortunately I get more and more chopped up material these days.
For instance, I did a children’s record and Meryl Streep did the voice over in a number of places. Now they left her dry so if I needed to add reverb to put in-between sections, I could do pretty much anything I wanted. But there were three cuts where they mixed the voice-over with the music, and when I finally put the CD in, three of the four worked fine in context with the songs they came in front of and after. But on the fourth one, the original mix engineer chose to mix the music fairly low against the voice and after she finished talking, brought the music up to a certain level. When it was put in context in the mastering against the song before and the song after, the music was too low but the voice sounded at the right level when placed at the proper level to fit to the cut before.
I was stuck with a problem of the music being too low. So in my first revision I sent to them, I cheated the music up gradually after Meryl stops speaking, but not enough, because the cheat doesn’t sound as good as if I had gotten separate elements and had been able to cheat the music up underneath without raising the voice.
So, what am I leading to is that you run into certain situations that are special or different. The problem is that many mix engineers don’t know what is special or different. It’s good to consult with the mastering engineer ahead of time, and in this case I would have said, “Send me the elements. Don’t mix it, because when you finally put an album together in context is when you’ll discover that you may need the separate elements.” I think that the future of mastering increasingly will involve some mixing.
How important is mono to you?
I forget to listen in mono more often than I intend to. I have good enough ears to detect when something is out of phase; it just sounds weird in the middle. In fact, I’m usually the first person walking into a stereo demo saying, “Hey, your speakers are out of phase.” So I usually don’t have that much of a problem with mono, but I’m always using a phase correlation meter and an oscilloscope to make sure things are cool. If I see something that looks funny, then I’ll switch to mono. But, half the time I just look at the scope and listen and won’t switch these days.
Do you ever normalize?
“Normalize” is very dangerous term. I think it should be destroyed as a word because it’s so ambiguous. If you mean do I ever use the Sonic normalize functions so that all the tracks get set to the highest peak level? The answer is no, I never do that. Do I use my ears and adjust the levels from track to track so that they fit from one to the other, then use compressors and limiters and expanders and equalizers and other devices to make sure that the highest peak on the album hits 0 dB FS? Yes, I do. I don’t call that normalizing, though.
Tell me why you don’t do it.
I’ll give you two reasons. I advise my clients not to do it and I’ve written about it extensively on my Website “Seven Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Normalize”. The first one has to do with just good old-fashioned signal deterioration. Every DSP operation costs something in terms of sound quality. It gets grainier, colder, narrower, and harsher. Adding a generation of normalization is just taking it down one generation.
The second reason is that normalization doesn’t accomplish anything. The ear responds to average level and not peak levels and there is no machine that can read peak levels and judge when something is equally loud.