Blown The F@#K Out! : Mastering Intentionally Distorted Music

People often talk about mastering, and mastering engineers, enhancing, improving, adding warmth or depth. But what about when audio art is created with the intention to make the listener hear rawness, distortion, hazyness, fuzzyness? These are all words we use to describe when an audio process or unit is either working incorrectly or is of low quality.
As musicians, audio engineers and music consumers we are all too aware of distortion, it’s uses and abuses and place in popular music. Rock n Roll, a style which provides the foundation for a large part of modern western popular music, is a direct result of “doing it wrong” with your gear and “playing it too hard” for example.
But what about when the recorded elements are not the subject of distortion, but the process or recording itself? How do we approach this? Do we take audio which has been destroyed to some extent and try and make it fixed again? Do we want our feedback and clipping to somehow sound “warm”? Is that even possible?
And to go one step further, how about when we are working with an audio recording where the output itself (sometimes known as the 2-bus or mix-bus) has been processed in a way which intentionally distorts the music found within?
Perhaps apt, with the recent passing of Lou Reed, one example of pioneering distortion beyond the acoustic realm is the Velvet Underground’s “White Light White Heat”, and its subsequent imitators and progressors in production value such as The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Pyschocandy”, that this discussion is being raised right now.
As a mastering engineer I used to think my job was to make audio “sound better”, after a few years of being challenged by a wide range of audio sources and aesthetic choices I realised my job is to make audio sound “right” or “fit for purpose”.
So when audio is meant to sound “bad” compared to “pop music”, what do I do? Well I do exactly the same thing I do with a pop/dance production, I make it sound the way it needs to be heard. Sometimes as audio engineers we can get a bit of an ego about our input on the music we work with, it’s an important that to curb in the back of your mind. When a track comes in all messed up on the 2bus, it’s all to easy to think “oh this is a poor production, let’s try and fix this”. Communication, as always, is the key here.
One example of this is a job where I was given a reference and asked to “make this new record, have the distortion of our previous tape demo, but the balance of a good sounding hardcore punk record”. My conclusion was that I needed to take the clean, raw premaster, balance it out so the tonal relationship felt good and then push it out of my analogue chain into my converters so the red light hardly drops. This is the kinda thing which would make some audio engineers cry, but it was the right thing to do! Furthermore because my converters are solid in tonal and dynamic response, I got that clipping sound, without too much of the bass getting swallowed up or a loss of stereo imaging.

The conclusion here is that us mastering folks aren’t here to make beautiful sounding music, we’re here to facilitate an artists vision, specifically how that vision is heard. OK I love making beautiful sounding records, delicate dynamics, shiney analogue top ends, real aural pleasures. But sometimes you gotta let it be blown the fuck out, let it hurt a little bit, give the listener that uncomfortable masochistic audio experience, if it’s what the artist wants!

Independent and DIY musicians/labels.. why bother mastering your releases?

So, first post, and it’s probably only going to make sense if I tell you a little about who I am and what I do. I live a double life, but these lives overlap as much as I can make this possible. My job, or career if you like, is working as an audio mastering engineer under the name Subsequent Mastering, a company I set up 4 years ago as an attempt to follow my dream of working with audio full time. On the other hand I co-run a DIY music space in my hometown of Nottingham called JT SOAR and play in a band with the other guys running this place called Plaids. I’d say my time is split pretty much 50/50 between the two endeavors, and it works out nicely as far as achieving a good balance in life, as audio engineering can be lonely work if you’re not working attended (I don’t).

Because of this splitting of my time between the above, I manage to get quite a balanced view of bands and artists from the DIY/indie side of the tracks, and especially how they present their music to people. I spend a lot of time listening to demos/promos and subsequently seeing these songs performed live. I am also part of a small community of DIY music promoters who are also working full time in audio industry locally and we often wax lyrical over a delicious pint of Old Rosie on our experiences working with DIY musicians.

It’s never been easier to get your music to people who might like it, brilliant inventions such as Bandcamp have made it really easy for any weirdo with brilliant ideas to reach other weirdos via the internet. The probability of your music reaching someone who really genuinely cares without having to pay someone else to find them is pretty high, and getting higher in my experience. This said vinyl; the staple format for underground music of many genres; gets more expensive and harder to source by the day, at least objectively high quality pressings we expect as consumers (NB I don’t mean “audiophile” products, I just mean not bad).

This understood, I can now pose my question: “Independent and DIY musicians/labels.. why bother mastering your releases?”, or perhaps it should read “why pay someone to..”

Let’s define mastering first, from a philosophical point of view:

Mastering is where the audio recordings become an audio product. This can be split up into a variety of tasks and thought processes, which vary in importance dependent on the outcome required and the audio supplied. These can be separated into two main categories:

1. Creating the correct output format to be replicated/duplicated.

This can be anything from making sure a track which is going to be cut to vinyl has the right amount of headroom to outputting the audio to the correct sample-rate to getting something super loud as it’s got to be competitive on Bandcamp, Spotify, Soundcloud etc…

2. Analyzing and correcting objective problems and errors in the supplied audio.

So for example: is the mix meant to be bright? it’s not because the monitoring is incorrect where it was mixed. Expecting the mix to go really loud? it can’t because that vocal is so bloody sibilant! Want that epic outro to blend into track 4 on your record? it can’t because you’ve cut the cymbal decay off.

Consider your mastering engineer to be a second set of ears and the last net to catch mistakes before it gets to the consumer. You can’t turn back, once the music is out there, it’s being perceived and judged by your potential fans/gig going punters.

So we can agree on all these things, but I hear you cry “I have ways around all these issues!”, I hear these statements a lot and I want to do a bit of mythbusting and challenge a few attitudes I consider to be bogus. I say this as BOTH an audio engineer and someone who works damn hard for DIY musicians of all ilks.

“The person who mixed it is doing us mastering (and he’s a darn slight cheaper than you too!)”

The person who mixed it CAN in theory master the release, they can set it to the right file format and export it from their computer. But what they can’t do is improve on the objective qualities of the mix or discover errors. Why? because the process doesn’t include enough variables: what about the monitoring? how can they hear stuff which has been wrong all along without changing the speakers and room it’s heard in, and furthermore the mixing engineer will mix until they think it’s perfect, it takes a second set of ears to go “woah hold on a minute, the vocal is killing that kick drum in the chorus” to which the reply is usually something like “oh crap, I didn’t notice, let me fix it and get a mix out asap..”

“Im not paying for snakeoil! I have a program on my computer which can do it, even better it’s got presets!”

It’s true to say some of these “do it all” mastering programs are pretty good.. in the right hands and ears. It bums me out a lot to think that bands will spend 700 quid on a guitar, 700 on an amp, 1000 for recording and mixing time and will happily run it blind through something and stick it out for the world to hear. A lot of this is down to mis-education I feel, and a lot of that comes from mastering engineers themselves.

Mastering is not some incredibly complicated rocket science thing. It’s actually very simple and quick, but requires a very high level of listening skills and specialist equipment, unfortunately it seems some engineers trade off this mystique, when in reality transparency yields better results in any creative task.

And possibly the point I would like to hammer home most here is that we’re not expensive! By we I mean mastering guys who work with niche/independent/underground/whatever musicians. Most of the work I do is connected to bands I am involved with, or music scenes people know I’m into. I don’t see any reason why I can’t do a better job than some dude with a 5 month waiting list and 100 dollars an hour can on your “80s hardcore punk meets 90s noise rock” band’s 7inch EP (exchange engineer and music as applicable). Objectively, in the budget of a project and against the top tier of earners in the mastering game, guys who master the more obscure or specific genres of music are “affordable”, otherwise we wouldn’t make a living off this stuff.

“Argh it’s just some little thing we’re messing about with, it’s not worth mastering”

If you’re bothering to make it, someone will bother to listen to it! why penalise that person before they have even been given a chance to make a judgement on your music. Some of my favourite music is just weird little projects people did, but man I wish that stuff sounded good enough to listen to on the train or walking through town.

I think we’ll leave it at that for now… but to sign off here are some top tips for finding the mastering engineer for your independent/DIY release:

1. Look at credits for music you both LIKE and listen to successfully in a VARIETY of environments. i.e. that album you stick on your record player after a few beers and lie in a star shape on the bed, that you also like to listen to on your headphones at work and on the bus.

2. Google the mastering engineer and send them and email. Don’t just read the prices and go “nah”, have a word with them, if you can’t get a deal out of them they most likely know someone to recommend.

3. Make great sounding records with less ballache.

I genuinely hope this helps, whack me an email on subsequentstudio@hotmail.com if you want to chat about anything in this article, or just about mastering in general.

Joe Caithness, Subsequent Mastering

NEXT ARTICLE: “Blown out to fuck”: Mastering intentionally distorted music