Mastering the Music

Last week’s recording session produced 17 tracks, of which 15 are good enough that I would willingly put my hand up for them, warts and all. It’s a fairly neutral mix, perhaps a bit heavy on the drums. Makes me think of Nesta setting up the drum mikes while saying how he’d been “getting into” drums a fair bit in the recent past, having just “discovered” them (after 20 years in the business). Overall, satisfactory effort in getting what we sound like down on disc.

My guitar is ‘out’ on several of the tracks, though I sometimes manage to play around the deficiency. For example, although the guitar in Bobby McGee starts with an arpeggio where the bass note is ‘off’ to something else (and hence Terry’s bass in the background also sounds ‘off’, much to his disgust), within four measures I have transferred to playing in the higher registers of the chord. And then I stay there for the whole piece. Which removes the worst of the problem with the key, but leaves my sound a bit saw toothed. And it doesn’t help the fact that the track starts wonky. Never the less, it leaves a pleasant aftertaste.

Benefits for The Negotiators include the shared experience of the day and the fact that we have the raw material for a demo (the stated purpose for the day). For each of us, our fans, friends and family, there is now a permanent record to replay. Hopefully, we did the music justice. Finally, for me personally, there was the additional benefit in seeing how the whole process fitted together, and seeing Nesta at work in the studio proper once we had laid down the tracks. This last allowed me, at last, to see how the mechanics of working through a wave editor interact with the process of engineering the sound (indeed, how one actually approached these aspects of production). I’ve had various wave editors for over a year, but never managed to get ‘into’ the packages. After last Saturday, however, it all made sense. I had finally got the big, if still blurry, picture of studio work.

In the last week I have been playing around a lot with Nero Wave Editor. It’s probably not the most modern or even the simplest of the software I have access to, but the interface makes sense to me. I have been learning by playing and trying things out and listening lots and going back again and again to try new variations. The trend has been to do less each time I tackle a piece. It is, however, still the case that the more I listen the more feel that I’m still doing too much. Of course, the less I do, the longer it takes.

Learning by experiment is a heuristic process with lots of redundant experience built in, yet it helps create a synthetic understanding of the whole as technique develops. It leads to refinement through time. I hope…

What I’m doing (putting the recording mix (thanks Nesta) into shape for release on CD – when it will need to be able to sound okay on any reasonably conceivable sound system. It is also when ‘buff and polish’ can be added to the individual tracks, levels harmonised, etc. Compression and volume normalisation also contribute to welding whatever the chosen tracks will be into a unified sound of experiences. The whole of the CD is greater than than sum of tracks it contains.

The one thing I have continuously read about record production is that ‘mastering’ is an arcane art, the domain of the experienced professional sound engineer (and access to their professional studios). There’s a lot of truth in this. But, this is (only) a demo, so I’ll take my crash course on the understanding that the labour involved will only be used if the end result is an improvement on the original mix. Which, after, about 20 hours and serious attempts at six different songs, is only true of one track so far.

But the method of what I do is now becoming more visible, allowing for efficiencies in time used in future attempts. Which allows more space for the creative spirit to work the subtle magic that I think is required.