Mastering the mix

Most people know how the music they listen to gets recorded, and many of them understand that, once it’s recorded, it must be “mixed.” Guitars and vocals must be brought up or drums must be brought down in volume; sounds must be balanced. If you’re a reader of CD liner credits, you know there’s a third step in the process: mastering. Sacramento recording engineer Eric Broyhill has been cutting tracks with local bands since he was a teen, hundreds of them. Last March, he hung out his shingle as a mastering engineer at his Monster Lab Audio studio on 15th Street.

What is mastering?

Mastering is anything that deals with the final mixes that you’ve done at home or in the recording studio as a whole. That could be [equalizing] the mix, so, if it’s too muddy or too mid-rangey, you sweeten the mix with EQ. It could be evening the mix out with some compression, so it doesn’t distort your stereo when you turn it up really loud; or making your CD loud, as compared to other CDs, with limiting [which cuts off a signal above a certain volume level]. Really basic aspects of mastering are trimming the noise out of the beginning and end of a song, fading out the song tastefully, and putting the songs in order. And the strictest definition of mastering is really putting the songs in order and creating a master for duplication—creating a properly formatted CD with documentation that can be manufactured easily by anyone.

What happens if you put out a CD without mastering it?

When you master, you have a second chance to take a mix to a whole new listening environment, in which the [design] errors of your [mixing studio’s playback] environment hopefully don’t cross over; you have a second chance to EQ and compress [the sound]. … It doesn’t matter what studio it is—the hugest studios in L.A., they all have huge errors in their listening environments. There’s no perfect listening environment. Even if there were, they’d still be different than your car or your home. So mastering minimizes those differences. There’s still going to be huge differences, but hopefully the differences should be minimized enough so that at least it sounds balanced on everyone’s studio, and the song actually comes through.

How did you learn mastering?

I started by doing a lot of low-budget projects; you’re forced to do mastering on your own. From there, I learned enough to know what I don’t know, and I started taking my projects to be mastered over at The Plant in Sausalito [a well-known rock studio] under a mastering engineer named Mike Romanowski, who was very knowledgeable. He’d been doing a lot of work out of Nashville, and I began to learn a lot from him. But, really, it’s just a starting point, really learning more about what there is to learn. And then I started getting into that on my own. At that point, I knew I wanted to open a mastering studio. It’s also a way to take part in more projects, too, without spending so much time on each individual project. You could come in and just spend a day with several bands instead of, you know, seven days with one band.

How much time does it take to master a CD?

It’s about a half-hour per song, so a CD will take between four and eight hours.

How do you go about mastering a project?

Mostly people bring in data CDs, but some of them bring in regular audio CDs. I feed the information into a computer, and then I put it at the highest digital resolution possible, which is roughly 256 times a regular CD’s resolution. Then I do a lot of processing, some of it digital but most of it analog. I still go through an old analog EQ. I still go through an old analog tube compressor. But then I use a very state-of-the-art limiter to get it loud, that does it at a resolution that not even a computer can get. The process I go through is I load it in and then I get quiet here in this room and just listen to it. When someone’s come to me, they’re coming to me to have my suggestion on the recording. They’ll usually keep quiet and see what I do; I’ve had nobody try to micro-manage their mastering. I try, whatever my initial gut reaction is, to act on that; I try to realize what I’m looking for initially and then just go with that. With mastering, there’s not a lot of time to second-guess everything.

Do you like what you’re doing?

Yeah. A lot [laughs].