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Music Mastering
Personal Music
Mastering is a process I take a lot of care with, but also derive a lot of joy and satisfaction from. Most of my personal releases are intended to make the most of the album format and single listening, full attention experiences. So I take a lot of care ensuring that each track's overall loudness is meaningful and motivated from song to song, as are the spaces between tracks.
Additionally, especially for my own music, I champion a dynamic master against one with squashed dynamics. I believe that sacrificing dynamics is the equivalent of sacrificing an entire dimension of the sonic experience.
For a Christmas Carol, I wanted to evoke a high definition classical recording, but also give it the veneer of a gritty, gothic time period. I achieved this by using Universal Audio's ATR-102 Mastering Tape Plugin, selecting a tape brand with high coloration and a high input. This gave it brittleness and also tamed extraneous dynamics without resorting to brickwalling.
The mastering concept for the Hobbit theater underscore album was much the same as the composition, to evoke a bygone era predating classical music and modern recording. To further explore this, I compressed the master with a Fairchild 670 plugin and used a digital emulation of the Studer A80 and cranked the bias to 10. This not only added a tasteful amount of distortion but compressed the transients in a very pleasing way that recalled 60s albums.
My mantra for the Missing Persons soundtrack was "a modern soundtrack for a modern movie" and the master reflects this.
A more percussive score than my usual output, the transients were tamed with an SSL Bus Compressor plugin, utilizing the "glue effect" while maintaining transparency and minimal coloration.
Motivated dynamic flow was particularly important to this score because of it's high contrast of intense emotions.
The Elephant/Man soundtrack was a particularly fun project because it was meant to evoke Victorian England without adhering strictly to period accuracy. It utilizes a more impressionistic approach that dips more into the realm of ambient orchestral than classical.
To seal this approach, the master uses very minimal processing and most uses clip gain from track to track to create a motivated dynamic flow and the track dynamics are untouched. This yields a clean sound that likewise leaves the time and place suggestive.
The Hobbit Vinyl Master
My underscore for There and Back Again: A Hobbit's Tale was pressed onto a personal, one of a kind vinyl record and I took immense care with a bespoke vinyl master to ensure a successful translation to the medium.
The music itself I felt was very vinyl friendly, since it utilizes acoustic instrumentation, has an overall very mellow, dynamic, undistorted sound and clocks in less than 30min.
Aside from the measures taken for the digital master, I used a multiband imager to ensure bass frequencies were effectively mono, since stereo bass can cause playback issues. I lowered the overall gain to ensure it didn't exceed -3 dBFS, rolled frequencies above 12 kHz (smooth rolloff) and below 20 Hz (steep rolloff).
Audio samples coming soon
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