The unknowable black art of mastering part 2
KeithHandy posted in Coding, Producing on December 15th, 2006
Blah blah blah linear frequency blah blah logarithmic amplitude blah blah bright pretty colors.
There’s no particular reason why they have to be in the colors of a rainbow, mind you, that’s just my own personal eye-candy; in fact it’s probably detrimental, because I wind up sitting here going “ooh pretty” instead of moving along to the next step. (No, everyone, I really am working! It’s mental work!)
Anyway, the kindergarten version of this … if I can translate it into kindergartenese … “mastering”, as we all understand (and as none of us are the least bit prone to confuse with “mixing”) is the process of taking an otherwise complete, already mixed-down recording, and running it through some final nit-picky EQ and other processing to make it “play well with others” … particularly YOUR EARS.
The top half is an analysis of an old, crappy-sounding song, and the bottom half is a clean, full, big-sounding modern song. Left to right is low pitch to high pitch, but since the pitch scale here is linear, it means it’s not spread out the way we hear it. Most of the important stuff to our ears is smooshed into the left part of the picture.
The stuff that drops way off at the far right is in a range that only small children can hear. It’s interesting to consider that since music fans tend to be far younger than mastering engineers, they can hear stuff that the mastering engineers can’t.
The useful thing about all this is that any recording can be matched to any other recording’s profile. So what the top song lacks in highs (notice how much faster it slopes downward), it can re-gain by modeling it after the bottom song’s profile. And it can do this without creating a shrill, ear-hurting “spike” because it’s aware of the peak levels across the spectrum for both songs. It’s not just a dumb treble boost — it’s a precise auto-tailoring to a model.
The intriguing thing about these graphs, for me, is how straight of a line they both seem to form. I’m not sure what to make of that. This is the first time I’ve ever converted the values to decibels before graphing them.
