[Greg Calbi, About Mastering]
Mastering is really a musical enhancement. It’s the equivalent, if you thought of photography, of going into Photoshop with the content already decided, in Photoshop you can frame it, you can enhance the colors, you can change the mood or the impact of that photo using Photoshop. In the old days it would be in the developing process, where they would use different chemicals, different lengths of time in the baths or whatever.
What mastering does, is it takes something that has already been done and someone interprets that if it’s done in just a little bit of a different way – sonically – it will have more impact. Impact is probably the word that best describes it because with impact you can plug that in to all different genres.
If it’s just someone with a nylon string acoustic guitar and a vocal and it’s sitting there sounding very muffled, in mastering you can take that two track, now you’re generally working with stereo only, you’re not working with the tracks, in mixing you’re working with all the different elements, in mastering you’re working with the final mix down in two tracks. Which is changing a little bit, but maybe I’ll describe that later. You’re taking those two tracks, with the equipment we have and the ears that we have, we can do this impact enhancement on that music no matter what it is. If it is a Jazz album, maybe the acoustic bass player was recorded OK but not great and his part is intrinsic to that but somehow in the mixing they didn’t quite get there.
I’m kind of like a judge, but I’m a judge that can criticize and judge but I’m also move it to the next level. This is why people will come from all different parts of the world and use us or send stuff from all different parts of the world because they send you something that is finished and you send them something back that sounds the same but it sounds better. That’s really what we do. That’s the most general way that anyone could understand the process of mastering.
On top of that you need to learn how to edit the project together in whatever format it’s going to be. If it’s a CD its 12 or 15 songs, we are able to put that in the sequence that it’s supposed to be, not a complicated job. If the songs are too long because the album is too long we can edit them. We are all expert editors and we can offer advice on editing. It someone has a song that they want to be a single and its five and half minutes and they want it to be four minutes we know what to chop out, if they don’t know, if they’re new to the business. Little things, like if you make an album generally you don’t make a real long song as the first song on an album.
Sometimes we get people here who have never made an album before and they want an eight-minute song as the first song. Well you know after 35 years of doing this, if you have eight minutes people sometimes don’t have the patience if they don’t love that song to get to the rest of the material. You might want to think twice about it. They are like, “Wow, really! I didn’t know that.”
So you know we kind of impart the experience of the content on to the clients as well as the sonic thing to. People who generally ask me what do you think the single should be, or something it’s not my job. But because I’ve been around it so long, I’m able to give little bits of advice on things that aren’t necessarily have to do with we do.
You can look at it in reverse – if an album is not mastered well – I mean you can have an album that’s mastered poorly in other words its either not mastered at all, or its mastered with someone with no experience. The general impression if you’re trying to move up in the business is that, that person didn’t have good people around them or doesn’t have that good of ear. I’ll give you an example, James Taylor. Why? I have no idea. Because in the very beginning his albums always sounded great, every James Taylor album since the very first album always sounded great; there hasn’t been one that didn’t sound great. But there are artists who come out with albums that just sound just horrible, for instance Oasis. Oasis is a phenomenal band but mastering engineers will look at the work and go what were they thinking. It is just impossible to listen to this really loud. Great sound, great impact but somehow the mastering was not quite right.
