WOEBOT

Mastering a Record.

The Beast. Acetate Box at the bottom left.

In my capacity as (cough) self-appointed authority on all things musical, I was invited by Kin Records supremo Nick Kilroy to attend the mastering of (coo) the second Junior Boys EP. The facility was Transfermation in Borough, which has a reputation second to none in this field. Our engineer and host was Noel Summerville, a cool hand who has in the past year or so chalked up clients such as The White Stripes (for "Elephant"), Squarepusher, Prefuse 73, Manitoba, really too many to mention meaningfully.

Notice the tone arm at the back for testing.

What is record mastering? It's the process by which audio is transferred onto acetates. Acetates which are used as a template by the pressing plant who produce as many vinyl copies of it as are required. The process is a crucial part of the chain which connects the artist's vision to the realisation of a finished artifact. It's taken very seriously by many musicians, it turned up in conversation that Beyonce had attended the mastering of her record at Sony, London.

The Producer, or Manager or Artist hands the mastering engineer a reel-to-reel, DAT or CD with the tracks on it. The engineer imports the tracks and EQs them, normalises them (the process of keeping all peaks balanced without there being distortion, bringing to memory the tale of LFO goading the terrified engineer responsible for mastering their epochal first twelve to master the bass preposterously high), and organises them into a sequence which corresponds to the available space on the acetate (be it 7", 10" or 12").

This makes a nonsense of hardline arguments about the superiority of vinyl (analogue) to CD (digital). 99.9% of material supplied to a mastering facility like this is in digital form, and I would guess the norm is as a DAT, which has a ceiling bitrate of 48khz (that's superior to the CD's 44.1khz). How can one argue, as Akin Fernandez of Irdial discs famously did, that analogue is "better" than digital, when at source the signal is so often noughts and ones? Of course, and here is the counter-argument, at even the worst mastering plant, the digital signal is buffered and EQ'd in an analogue environment (an exquisite spartan Neumann mixing desk at Transfermation) and the subsequent signal is transferred to the record in the age-old manner of analogue encoding.

Aw what a cute little hoover!

The method of encoding is as unchanged in essence as it was in the days of the 78. The sound is effectively "shouted" at the recording needle as it travels across the surface of the plate. We rather superstitiously kept quiet during the process of the transfer. After all, in theory, if we talked really loudly, our voices would be imprinted onto the grooves along with Jeremy Greenspan's svelte yet wounded vocals. As the groove was being cut I was amused to notice that a little hoover travels behind the needle, sucking up the scratched out plastic.

The measure of a really good master, Nigel informed us, was lack of surface noise. The less surface noise the better the transfer. He also explained to us the classic pay-off of acetate mastering: The longer the track you're trying to squeeze on the dubplate, the quieter the master will be. Customers, he told us, typically used to complain that their single wasn't as loud as a Motown 7" pressing. Motown's secret? Tracks coming in at 2 and a half minutes. One can hear this pay-off on two extreme instances of mastering: Elvis Costello's "Get Happy" which crammed 25 tracks onto each side the result sounding kind of thin (recently reissued on on a dubble CD Costello fans!) and Double Exposure's "Ten Percent" on Salsoul, the first 12" as we know it today which, as it fitted what once would have been on a 7" onto a 12" plate (more room, more volume!)

It's like summat out of a Soviet Power-Station innit!

When all was done Nick was left with two acetates (the blank acetate alone each costing around $50). You can't record onto the flipside of an acetate, they're one-sided in this sense, so if you're doing a double-sided EP you walk away with two acetates, which are (literally) bolted into a rigid brown cardboard box like the one visible in the bottom left-hand corner of the top image. This is why, as Simon pointed out the other day, many Grime 12"s have the same tracks on both sides, if you're only pressing one acetate, unless you want a blank B-side you've no option but to duplicate the A-side.

You can, in theory, put an acetate onto a normal record deck and play it, however, because the acetate is usually larger than 12"s (about fifteen inches?) on the whole they won't fit onto most record players. That is of course unless they're 10" acetates, which I guess is the default size for the sort of dubplates which circulate in the field of dance music (I once came across Grooverider's 10" acetate of DJ Hype's "Cops" at a stall I used to frequent back inna de day in Camden). The thing about acetates, and this was confirmed by my dear pal Steve Caruana who had a heap of Jamaican dubplates is that they wear out or even fall apart, they're not made of durable material like vinyl.

Mastering matters! Public Enemy scored their splash in some part as a result of the hugely loud mastering of their records which bust out of the airwaves a few decibels above their competition. Worse, bad mastering can suck all the contast and subtlety out of a recording and swamp it with hiss. Thanks to Noel and Nick for letting me witness this fascinating process.

Posted by Woebot at November 19, 2003 11:48 PM