Stephen Marcussen

Mastering... An integral part of making records that most people are uninformed about. Listen as preeminent mastering engineer Stephen Marcussen strips away the mystery, tells you about sound and tech and how a tip at the supermarket led to his career.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My
guest today is my good friend and mastering engineer Stephen Marcuson. Hey, Bob, Now,
you've worked with literally who's who the music business, everybody
from the Stones to Tom Petty to Stevie Wonder, I
go on and on, and then you're mentioning a new act.

(00:25):
You think it's gonna blow up, Ben Platt, anybody else
you want to throw in from my audience? Uh? Maybe
as we go along, I'll well, M it's literally too
many to mention. Let's start from the beginning. What exactly
is mastering? You know? Mastering is uh, it's this gray
art that people don't really understand. It's do you understand it?

(00:48):
I hope so forty years in right, I think I
got it. But it's sort of it's your last creative
stage of making a record. It's it's a chance to
take all of your work and put it together in
a cohesive manner. You can change the sound. You can
change tempos of tracks, you can enhance centers for vocals.

(01:12):
You can do any number of things to get a
consistent sound that flows from beginning to end. There various
tools you use whether it's you can play it back
on tube type tape machines, if you're fortunate enough to
see things like that. Uh, files come in mainly these days,

(01:33):
but occasionally we see tape. So you can pick and
choose how you look at a project. And I shouldn't
say you, I should say I and uh I put
it up. I listened to it just as it comes in,
and I think about what would do, what what I
could do to enhance this project and make it make

(01:57):
it deliberable to you know, a man us, I should
say numbers of ways to play it, whether it's radio,
whether you're listening to a c D, whether you're listening
to hires files, m fits. So it's I don't know
what m fits are. M fits are mastered for iTunes,
and I don't know there was an acronym on that

(02:19):
there is and it's uh it's interesting because m FIT
they tried to set a standard of quality to reduce
what they call inter sample overs and uh, well, let's
slow down here. What are inter sample overs? I'm not
going to get into interstatt a little bit. Well, when
you're working in a digital scale, there's zero within the scale.

(02:42):
You can have these inter sample overs, which are these
spurious peaks that essentially can clip. They don't, but they can.
So Apple decided to try to enhance their format. The
A C and badget M F I T and it
gives the mastering house, or Apple gives the mastering house

(03:04):
an Apple it to drop it on. You can measure
your inner sample overs, and they don't really want to
see hundreds of thousands, which you can on a you know,
a hot rock record. They want to see it brought,
brought down and contained within a reasonable amount. They don't
define a number, they just want you to use good judgment.

(03:26):
So an m FANT can typically be as much as
a dB, quieter than a c D or a digital
file source. So okay, let's just stay with there. If
you're mastering for iTunes, that's a downloadable track, do they
want the same track for the Apple Music service. That's

(03:47):
a very good question and the answer is yes. Um,
I'm going through something right now because all of these
services are looking at different features. Apple has the complete
my album feature, Spotify wants it to mirror the CD

(04:09):
UM and I literally got the email a half hour ago,
so I'm going to start dissecting it. When I'm done here,
but they they they want to have a standard that
is consistent with their platform. Okay, just going for left
field for one second. Prior to these streaming services, there

(04:32):
were the loudness wars, which will get back to. But
now since these I know they basically I don't know
the technical turn off the top of my head. They
basically average the sounds or everything is the same volume
normalized normalized, thank you, and uh does that affect the
loudness wars? It does? It's uh. Loudness is measured on

(04:54):
a left scale l ufs, and depending on you know,
who's releasing or playing your your your file, they like
to target a certain number. The lower the number four
point three is louder than seven point two. Our testing

(05:14):
has shown that if you bring a CD level down
a few dbs, and a few dbs is a lot.
Remember six d b s is twice the volume. So
if you bring it down three d b s, they're
normalizer isn't kicking in as much, and consequently your program
sounds better. There's you know, an example that comes to

(05:38):
mind is there's a piano vocal track that gets played
up against you know, a slamming hard rock track. Well,
the hard rock tracks got stack guitars, it's got bass,
it's got bombastic drums. Yet the piano and vocal so
much louder because it isn't as loud physically in the

(06:01):
digital medium as the slamming track. So the normalizer doesn't
kick in. Normalizers can really bring your level down. You
know a lot of dvs. So in addition, getting technical
for a second, if it's normalizer brings it down, obviously
it's going to be quieter. How does that affect the

(06:22):
sound It's not beneficial. Let's go back to the beginning
of our discussion. Theoretically, especially in today's d I Y world, Uh,
could you just make a record on your laptop and
send it straight to a streaming service? People do every day.
That's very common SoundCloud, you know, people that put post

(06:45):
their music up on services like that. It's a complete
d I Y. In many cases they get a little action.
Then they want to actually master it or finish it,
remix it, depending also, you know, it just depends on
the kind of action they get. So I think a
lot of people that are you know, breaking in as
it were, go ahead d I Y at if there's uh,

(07:09):
if there's notice. They then maybe get get get noticed
by a professional and indie somebody that wants to you know,
join forces with them, and then they'll go rework the project. Okay,
asking something that's not quantifiable in a quantifiable way, what
percent can mastering effect attract? Yeah, you know that's that's

(07:32):
kind of an impossible question, but I'll attempt to answer it.
If you've got a track that comes in and you
were working in a studio or just in your own studio,
and your speakers weren't giving you reality, reality means the
balance of frequencies lows, mids, highs were you know, terribly skewed.

(07:55):
You take if you know, you take your track to
a professional mastering facility, you're in a room that your
engineers worked in for a period of time, in my case,
twelve years in my particular studio, I know the room
like the back of my hand. I put your track
up and I say, this is dull, or this is boomy,

(08:17):
or what what what? Whatever the correction needs to be.
You take my judgment because you've now come to me
for my services, and I say, well, we can open
it up. In the vocal now is coming out of
the track and clean and clear, and the bases and
muddy and you know whoofing out your bottom end. So

(08:38):
that really is a big change and well worth doing.
Um okay, so since I've known you almost forty years,
you're working precision. Then you worked at A and M
before you established your own facility. I didn't really work
at A and M A and M. I meant to
say work in a general term. That's where you your
worked reinspired. You did not work four AM and am.

(09:01):
You rented the space. But my question is all three
rooms are different. Is someone like you so professional? How
long does it take you to adjust to a different room.
Mastering engineers are nervous types. Uh. To make a shift
in just your chain, in your chain as your processing

(09:22):
to plug in a new new piece of gear can
be daunting because it could change something. And you know,
back to the gray area of mastering. If you put
something in that you think sounds good, and I can
be fooled. Anybody can be fooled by sound. Its sound
is an elusive dragon. But you put something in your

(09:44):
chain and you don't notice it immediately, and it changes
your sounds. So you go from room to room, moving
from the place I learned to work to A and M.
I took in my own loud speakers. Uh that they
were kind enough to let me place in a mastering
room and a lot of my own gear. So uh,

(10:08):
it's it's always scary making a change like that, going
from A and M to the first facility I I
built for myself. I fell in love with bing W
loud speakers and really bought them site, you know, without
having evaluated them. I knew that they were good speakers.

(10:29):
Then how did you fall in love with them if
you hadn't evaluated them? Good point, I had heard them
in places I had never worked on them. The you
go to a hi fi shop and you listen to them,
and you take your favorite CD and you go, oh,
I can relate. The center is a little off center here,
The vocal sounds this way, the sibilance is what it

(10:51):
should be. So, and I've listened to a lot of speakers.
Believe me, they were the only ones in a store
I could say that's good. Okay, let's go back to
the speakers. Forty years ago, there was a transition. There
was something called the aura tone, which was one speaker
meant to mimic the car dashboard. Then seemingly everybody went

(11:12):
to the Yamaha and as ten M and they might
take off the grill and put a little piece of
tissue paper over the tweeter. But obviously car radios have
become more sophisticated and less important. But every mastering room
you go to, everybody is using different speakers. It's it's
a taste. You know. Some people like a t C S,

(11:35):
some people like homemade speakers. You know, there are many
facilities that incorporated a woofer here in the mid range
here and put them in big, big cabinets. It's really
a taste. Okay, let's go just a home audio for
a second. You know, the big thing on home audio
is these digital testers. Now, Okay, you buy something and

(11:56):
it comes with a little microphone. Whether that's good or bad,
that's not really my point. Are you so sophisticated that
you could set up a room just by ear? That's
how I did my last room, and I think it's
my best room yet, I mean, I don't think you
could get a better place to listen to music loudsoft, direct, indirect,

(12:21):
the back of the room, the front of the room.
And I've worked with acousticians George Ocksbird namely for decades now,
and I brought him in just to help me. Um.
Just you know, you're building a new room. You've got
a lot of things on your plate, so it's good

(12:41):
to have professional help there. But by and large, you
set the room up to please yourself. Uh. You know,
I've got good equipment. I built a phenomenal room. George
designed the room. It's trapped properly. It's incredibly for the
people who don't know what it's contained, the low ends contained.
It doesn't boom. It's uh, it's natural. It decays naturally.

(13:06):
It's not splashy. There are no reflections from left to right.
You know, imagine a loudspeaker playing loud in a barn.
That wouldn't be a good room. Uh. You put a
loudspeaker in a room similar to what we have here,
you can see their sound dampening on the walls. It
just breaks up reflected sounds so that you can, you know,
focus on the direct sound in my case, the direct

(13:29):
sounds coming out of loudspeakers. Okay, Now, there's been a
big transition in the Internet era. Back prior to the
year two thousand, there were a limited number of professional
mastering engineers. Literally you could count unless than five fingers
people in Los Angeles, and there were people in New York.
But suddenly, since the digital revolution, everybody thinks they're a

(13:52):
mastering engineer. There's a good amount of that. Okay, and
I know I'm trying to think of way Roy would
ask this question, But is basically all the newcomers, or
any of them, any good. There's always going to be
somebody younger, hungrier, and better. So I'm glad I asked that. Uh,

(14:14):
whether or not they're discovered remains to be seen, but
don't discount anybody that's young and trying hard. Okay, let's go.
There's Lander. Why do you explain for the people who
don't know what lander is. I'm not fluent in lander,
but to the best of my knowledge, lander is a
computer algorithm that looks at your sound, analyzes your sound.

(14:37):
You say you want it to sound like X y Z.
I think you can actually plug that criteria into the computer.
It will look at the frequencies, it will look at
the level, and it will make sonic adjustments to your track.

(14:58):
But let's to be over, I should have put it.
Lander is essentially automated mastering. Right. I think there are
actually a couple of programs out there that are doing
automated mastering. I think there's another unit in Florida. I
don't really keep up with that. Would any professional use
one of those automatic I mean professional act Would anybody
use one of those services? I would doubt it. Okay,

(15:21):
let's go back to the beginning. Now, you've had quite
a peripatetic life. You were born in Africa and a
country that no longer exists. Well, it exists, it's just
changed its name. Okay, So how many years did you
live in what was then Rhodesia. I left Rhodesia at
a very early age. The pattern was we we left

(15:43):
Rhodesia moved back to Northern Europe. As my parents were
Northern European British and Danish. Realized that what they had
experienced in Rhodesia was very different than being in Northern Europe.
Northern Europe where Denmark and England, and they sort of

(16:05):
followed the sun, if you will. So living in Rhodesia,
it's it's beautiful. It's like California. The climate's magnificent. You
can grow anything. It's a marvelous place. California was in
my in my parents sites, and so we we flew
to well, let's just go a little bit. So you
were in Rhodesia to what age three or three and

(16:27):
a half, okay, and then you moved to northern Europe. Correct.
We floundered there for about a year, six months in
uh in England, six months in Denmark. We arrived in
Los Angeles on my fifth birthday. Okay. They were literally
following the sun, they were, and that was their last destination.
They never left, okay, but they sent you different places.

(16:49):
I was sent to boarding school in England for my
formative years. And so when did you start boarding school
in England? I started when I was ten and a
half and I left England when I was I think
just about fifteen, maybe just fifteen. And was there anything
good there? It was everything good there. It was a

(17:13):
great time to be in England. Uh. From four it
was fantastic. We turned onto music and I went to
a very progressive boarding school and we one of my
classmates got a cassette, which was a portable way of
listening to music. It was mono, but we taped out well,

(17:35):
he taped albums and we would be out, you know,
in in the fields just with music and hanging out
with people. I mean, music was a really really big
part of my life. And this boarding school was were
a relative to London. It's forty miles southwest of London.
Did you go to London? Like? Positively? London was an

(17:56):
hour train ride from Frensham, and uh, we we get
to London as often as we could. You have to
remember we're boarding school. We don't We didn't have unlimited budgets.
Once you're in London, you know, we'll see these cost
money and you could bum around London and we did
and stayed, you know, dropped in on people that we knew.

(18:16):
But it was just a marvelous time to be in
London people, you know truly, you know, think of Austin
Powers and Carnebie Street and that's really what it was. Like.
Let's go back. Your father was a butcher, right, correct.

(18:38):
So he moved to Los Angeles and where does he
go to work? Uh? He went to work for a
supermarket chain. And uh, you know, my my parents really
didn't have much to be to begin with. We came
to America having left Rhodesia, um with not a lot

(18:59):
because Rhodesia was in a downturn, so selling your house
it wasn't you know, it wasn't easy for them to
literally uproot and come here. My father worked at a supermarket.
My mother worked as you know, they referred to people
like my mother in those days as secretaries. You can't

(19:21):
say that anywhere, um. But she worked for a company
called the American Gem Society, which was a standard. It
was a company put in place for standards and jewelry.
She worked the balance of her work life there. My
father ended up migrating from one chain to the next,

(19:42):
ultimately landing it a shop that I'm sure you remember, Jorgensen's,
which is a very high end grocery store. And I
was forced into an early retirement. Okay, but a couple
of questions. If you're going to school in England during
the winter, spending your summers in Los Angeles, I would
come back twice a year. I'd come back for the

(20:03):
Christmas break and I'd come back for summer. Now, the
English school year was divided differently than America. You got
a month off for Christmas and you only got seven
eight weeks for summer. So did you make any friends
when you were in l A over the summer. Well,
I had my friends that were here, but England was
a very, very uh changing experience. I left as a

(20:29):
fairly straight child and came back with my eyes opened.
And you come back to l A and you go
to high school in Lafe. I negotiated my way through
high school from boarding school. I had my eyes set
on being in the music business. How did that revelation
there was? I think it's the third Yes album called
Close to the Edge, and there's a picture on the

(20:51):
back cover of Eddie offered in front of a console
and you know, we we love music. I saw that
and I said, this is for me, this is what
I want to do. So I finished high school. You
say you negotiated your way What does that mean? Because
of the English education and l A Unified, there was

(21:11):
no way to access what where I really was in
my education. So they brought in specialists from u C.
L A to evaluate me and uh. I was actually
going to graduate when I was fifteen and a half,
but they couldn't allow it, so they forced me to
stay an extra semester. I I did the one semester.

(21:33):
I then did summer school to take care of some
required courses government in history, US government history, and then
my last semester I had to take the the early
course for the advanced course I had already taken just
to fulfill. So I made an arrangement with the teacher

(21:55):
that I wouldn't show up and take the final. Meanwhile,
I was working in to nine in grocery stores. Okay,
but then you do graduate, you have a dream of
being in the music business. What's the first step in
when um, I was working in a grocery store. I
then decided I wanted to be in the music business

(22:18):
and had to get out of that and had to
pound the pavement. I found, Uh, never a thought to
go to college. I went to college j C to
really fill time because I was at loose ends and
I had to get out of my parents house because
I couldn't be hanging out. UM. So I did that.
I I took some electrical engineering courses, but I pounded

(22:42):
the pavement and got a job at a radio commercial duplicator.
So I think it was a J. Walter Thompson was
a big ad agency McDonald. So literally we stuffed a
two cards which were like eight tracks, except they were
thirty second or one minute spots. And from there one

(23:06):
of the guys I worked with had I should say,
he came to work there. He had just left what
was Richard Perry's studio, which was studio on Melrose. I
heard that and I thought, well, that's the door I've
got a knock on. So I noticed that there was

(23:29):
a studio across the street called I think Radio and
Records or something. It's still there on Melrows is gone.
I knocked on the door. The receptionist had been involved
in a car accident, and the Carol Child's who ran
Richard's publishing company at that point, let anybody in because
it was seventy four it's a great time. And I waited, waited,

(23:52):
and the studio manager interviewed me and then called me
back and started, you know, from from the toilet up
and okay, So the first job, I'm sure there was
not a job description, but it be what janitor? There
was a job description. Really, you were the janitor, truly,
you had literally had the foot in the door. Had
the foot in the door, couldn't have been happier. And

(24:13):
that was the job of the guy was working to
the grocery store janitor. No it was. He wasn't working
in the grocery store. He was working at a T
and T. That's I think that he had played his
cards wrong and said he was qualified and he wasn't.
So I knew that there was a void, So okay,

(24:34):
so tell the people that didn't no longer exists. The
history of studio Studio fifty five was I think it
was Decca where being recorded White Christmas. We always said
the ghost of being resided in the attic there. Um
Howard Steele, who was Richard's engineer, had owned it with

(24:55):
and Howard, by the way, it was a part of
a console manufacturer called quant him. He had you may
remember the name Vanjie Carmichael. She did all the jingles.
He was married. Howard was married to Carol, so Carol's mom,
Vanjie sort of funded this studio for Howard and it

(25:17):
just didn't happen for them, and somehow another Richard got involved,
and part of the agreement was that Howard would be
Richard's engineer, and Richard so that as a benefit because
he knew the room and and all of that, and
Richard developed the studio. He rebuilt the big control room
A made a beautiful studio out of it, and there

(25:40):
was B which was a smaller room. Both had quantum consoles,
and it became an incredibly successful studio. Toto came from
that studio. There was just a lot of great music
made in those rooms. Okay, so you started out as
the janitor, how do you get out of the ship hole? Well,

(26:00):
Howard was He was interested enough to ask me to
come and assist him on on some demos he was
doing on a weekend session. So I'll never forget this.
I knew nothing of what I was doing, and I

(26:20):
mean nothing. I didn't know that you had to tell
him microphone was in number sixteen or any of that.
So we we get this whole thing going. And in
those days you ran a tape machine and he says, okay, record,
I didn't know how so that so I, you know,

(26:41):
I just started assisting Howard and uh then you know,
you just get more gained more and more experience. In
those days, you could hang out in people's sessions and
observe and people weren't offended by that, and so I
made myself useful. And still still cleaning up, still cleaning up,
still go fering, go you know. So, Okay, if you're

(27:04):
working there, theoretically you have janitorial hours, how much do
you working there? Are you essentially living there? I was
essentially living there. I'll I'll put some numbers in place
for you. When you're in the union and you're a
checker in the supermarket, which I was, you make incredibly
good money. I left that job to go work for

(27:27):
a hundred dollars a week. I worked over eighty hours
a week and took home seventy six dollars on a
paycheck and was thrilled to do it. Okay, so what's
the next step of the ladder there? Um? I started
second engineering, then I started first engineering. And when you're

(27:52):
first you're running the session, you're doing the vocals, you're
tracking the drums, you know, whatever it is. Um, how
long did it take to go from janitor a first engineering?
That's a good question. It wasn't that long, relatively speaking.
Maybe a year and a half, a couple of years. Um.
I remember, my my first real date was working with

(28:15):
earth Window basically earth Wind and Fire as the band
without Maurice. We're doing uh, was it Denise Williams demos
or something? It was really it was like as completely
out of my league, but you know, you just wing it,
and that's what I did. So from there, I uh
got involved with a producer, Bob Asteen. We made a

(28:37):
lot of disco music. He was part of Neil Bogart's
camp and Neil treated him really well. And over the
course of making disco music, we would start mastering and
you couldn't really get the sound of what was on
the tape on a phonograph record, which was the medium
in those days, and there had to be a re reason.

(29:00):
So the people I was working with, we we were
trying to figure it out, and we discovered that there
was a lathe, which is what you cut phonograph records on,
was made locally. It was a unique machine because with
a phonograph lathe, the computer needs to know what it's

(29:23):
going to cut before it cuts it, because it's turning
a lead screw and moving a cutter head across the disk.
This lathe didn't need that, so suddenly you could use
a better tape machine. The next part of the equation
were the cutting package, which was an order phone package.
I'm using one today. Actually, I would do a lot

(29:45):
of work with Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welsh when we're
committing their catalog into vinyl. So the order phone could
cut what no one else could cut, very delicate system.
UM but ended up hearing that Steve Wonder, Stevie Wonder
was having some problems mastering hotter than July, and people

(30:09):
I was working with had the wisdom to send him
a brail letter and Steve was interested and we cut
a ref for him. Okay, let's go a little bit slower.
So you were working at studio bybe Bestie and you
have this problem with mastering, do you then commit yourself?
I'm on the mastering dream or is just like a

(30:30):
side project, a side project. It's totally a side project.
The lathe and the cutting amps were set up at
the back room at fifty five. It was on a table.
You know, we were just learning, learning, learning, but we
knew there was something good about it. Okay, so you
had one of these leaves. You said it was made
in Los Angeles. Did anybody else have one? There were

(30:51):
five in the world. UM one that was at the
place that made it so that they could keep it running.
UM two went to a company called Future Disc that's
now gone and Precision had the other two. So they
were finicky, delicate and really a miracle that they went

(31:12):
from day to day. So it was again it was
a learn while you earn experience. UM ended up building
Precision well before you. But first you got ahold of
Stevie Wonder before Precision. No Stevie came at Precisions. Okay,
So you ended up building Precisions. So you say, we're
going down this path. We're committed, We're committed. There were

(31:34):
three partners in on it. One was an experienced mastering
engineer that ended up not not coming through in ways
that should have, and so it was really it fell
on me, so you were learning on the job by
the seat of my pants. Fortunately, Richard started his record

(31:55):
company at that point, Planet and Michael Solomon, who I've
just reacquainted with, put together one of the very first
compilation records of punk bands. It was called Sharp Cuts,
and you know, we were all in the family and
Michael came to me and, uh, you know, the plim
souls were I don't remember who all the acts were

(32:17):
on it, but Michael came to me and, uh, to
master it. And I really didn't know what I was doing,
but it sounded pretty good. At the end of the day,
the equipment wasn't so great, the meaning the lathe, but
I mean, truthfully, there was there was a lot of
tears for me on that because it just it was

(32:39):
frustrating knowing that the potential was there, but I just
couldn't get get it going right and it took a while.
But Michael worked with me. He brought me Mark Saffin's
next So I got a little education doing that. But
the best education I got was your friend Harold Bronson,
who had Ryan before we do that. This is before

(33:02):
or after Stevie Wonder. This is actually after tell us
to Stevie Wonder story. Stevie was interested. There was a
gentleman by the name of Arnie Acosta that was brought
into Precision to help teach me to master um. Arnie

(33:24):
it was really a gifted mastering engineer, and I mean
a really gifted mastering engineer, and Arnie helped put that
all together. Arnie though did not live in Los Angeles,
he lived in San Louis Obispo, so he would commute
down for four days a week and we'd work so

(33:45):
the other three days in the week because in those days.
You know, it was a seven day haul. It was
me and so I would be in there on the
weekends just trying to figure it out, and you know,
slowly people would come and well I finished the story
with Stevie Wonder though as well. We Steve came in.

(34:07):
We mastered Hotter in July. Um, he was he's a
critical customer. He really knows what he wants. Um, I
should say he didn't come in at that point, but
we kept sending refs to him. And this, incidentally was
the infancy of digital audio. Stevie worked on these Sony

(34:28):
systems called sixteen hundreds, and Sony built Steve a braille editor,
forum and stuff like that. So it was a lot
of pioneering on my part, Sony's part, Steve's part. Uh,
it was it was just um, it was really the
order phone system that really spelled the difference. And Steve

(34:49):
could hear that. So he was ultimately happy that you
were doing a better version. Thrilled, thrilled. And we cut
the parts for the world. We you know, in those days,
you cut lacquers, you cut who sets for Portugal, Spain,
South Africa, you name it. We cut Stevie Wonder till
the cows came home. There would you'd get at the

(35:10):
end of the day, there'd be a stack of boxes
to be picked up by motown and careered off to
the to the regions. Okay, so then okay, so then
you do Stevie Wonder and you were telling this story
with Harold Bronson. Another thing, well, Steve sort of put
Precision on the map, Harold who was one of the

(35:32):
co founders of Rhino correct Harold. I don't know how
Harold got to Precision, but he did. And this was
really at the beginning of his reissue world. He was
coming off the wild Man Fisher stuff and the Barnes
and Barns, and he struck a deal with Precision that

(35:57):
we would work together for a rate. But meanwhile, you know,
I'm doing naz nas nas nas nas nas off off
of the master tapes with Harold, and it was really, uh,
it was a great learning experience. I mean, Harold, who's
a fantastic music fan. You know, he would have all
the originals to reflect on and then look at what

(36:18):
we were doing and he'd make corrections and it was
really it was a great vehicle for me to learn
how to master okay, so go on. I was gonna say,
when I was learning to master, it's about a ten
year process until I think you were okay to good.
I mean, let's be real. You start something, you're never
great at it unless you're gifted. And Harold worked with

(36:44):
me through that. And I did a lot of work
with Harold over many years um mastering his catalogs, and
I think it made me better. It certainly gave Harold
a good product to sell. And uh also now, because
of the Stevie Wonder connection, those days, people would look

(37:05):
at album credits and by the way, we were so
late in the game. On the Stevie Wonder credit, they
had to put it on the actual disc label as
opposed to in the artwork in the package. But they
credited us, which was the main thing. So I started
doing a lot of Solar Records, Gap Band, just a

(37:25):
lot of really great music, and again learning as I
went along. I mean, it was in those days reading
the album art sort of helped your career tremendously. So
you weren't working at you were waiting and you're waiting
to pick up the phone, right, We're waiting for the
phone to ring. I mean, that's I've never been good

(37:48):
at selling myself, and uh, it was just word of
mouth that just you have the soul records, then how
do you break into the rock records. Well, as I'm
transitioning out of engineering, I'm really full time mastering. Jimmy
Ivane and Shelly are coming to Los Angeles. That Shelly yakus.

(38:12):
Shelly his father was in the business, and Jimmy started
out as Shelly second, and then Shelly ended up working
for him, right, I think that's the way the story goes.
But they were coming west because Jimmy was doing Stevie's
first record, Stevie Next, and uh, Shelly was staying in

(38:35):
New York finishing up. I think it was damn the
Torpedoes of Tom. Jimmy needed an engineer. I got thrown
in for two weeks with Jimmy, which is just great. Um,
and we started tracking the Belladonna record I was mastering,
but needless to say, I wasn't swamped with mastering work,

(38:57):
so I could do this work with Jimmy Stevie Nicks,
and uh it was time to do a single stop
dragging my heart around. By this time, Shelley had come
in and I had shown Shelley the studio and what
we were doing, and I'm not sure where they mixed that.
I think they may have mixed that in good Night

(39:20):
l A. I don't really remember, but it wasn't mixed
at fifty. But Shelly and Jimmy gave me the shot
at mastering that track. Um, I'm fairly certain it had
been mastered at the facility they were used using up
to that point. Once again, the order phone came through

(39:41):
and put on the disc what was on the tape,
and Jimmy and Shelly both heard that. So that was
the beginning of a great run with Jimmy and Shelley
and you know, which led through Jimmy's work with Tom
Stevie obviously, and then Jimmy started his label and I

(40:02):
did a lot of the really fun stuff on Jimmy's
label before he really got deep into the urban world.
So I did a lot of work with him over
many years. I it was a good run. So at
what point does it's to turn where you've got not

(40:23):
enough time to do? Everybody's looking for you, you know,
I never said no. So I can remember doing three
albums in a day, which was unthinkable. Um, But I
was hungry. I was eager. I really loved what I

(40:45):
was doing, and it was great. It was so okay.
But now let's say if you go to a regular
recording studio, of which are limited number these days, they're
loaded with equipment. Okay, you go into a mastering room,
there's a lot less equipment. Well yeah, because first of all,
you're only dealing with two tracks. You're dealing with the stereo,

(41:06):
so you don't need all the limiters and the pre
ampts and the microphone, this, that and the other. Excuse me.
So it's you know, I think I use the word
chain a little earlier in this conversation. Mastering engineers like chains,
and the chain is I come in off the tape machine.
I like this wire, I like these connectors. I mean

(41:29):
it gets really pretty minutia. Like I like to go
into this piece of gear first. I like to have
this piece of gear come in second. I like to
have and that's a great place to start. You may
change it up, but you're using the same stuff all
the time. It's not like, okay, we want to a funk,

(41:52):
distorted guitar sound that all those types of pieces of
gear don't really apply. In mastering master ring is you
know David Manley, who's a name a lot of people
will know built equipment. Now Havanna's running the company. But David,
David really taught me a lot. He said, if you

(42:14):
don't have a clean chain, you've got nothing. You can
always make a dirty chain. And he's so right. You
know you you don't need to turn something down to
turn it up later in the chain. You have to
figure out a series of equipment of tools that you
work with and that worked for you. So the question

(42:39):
was why so little gear? Well, in my opinion, there
aren't that many good sounding equalizers. So it took me
three years to find the last piece of gear I
I wanted in in an analog world. And it wasn't
for lack of trying. So now, if I remember correctly,
you met David Manly because you came in he said,

(43:00):
I have special wire, right this wire for those people.
This is something that's debated in the Stereo magazine that
infinitem to what degree is why are important? Um? I'm
going to take a very unusual position on this. If
wire is making a big difference for you, you've got
a big problem. Okay, I believe that. But for someone

(43:21):
like you or someone like Stevie wonder, can you hear
the difference in the wire? You can if there's a problem.
If if you're working with gear that's really good. I'm
not saying a piece of zip coord from a lamp
is what you should be using. But whether if you're
using a Macgami wire or a Belden wire or you know,

(43:43):
what are the quote studio standards, can you pick the difference?
I'm not sure this is this is a big problem
in our audio world. People think they can pick the
difference until they do a double blindfold and then they're surprised.
Stunned is the word I to use. Okay, So once

(44:10):
you have your chain established, what are you actually working
on on each record? What are you changing on each record? Well,
it's it's on a case by case basis every terms
in terms of equipment. Well, I'll talk about a project
I just I'm in the middle of right now. I

(44:31):
had probably not the right take on the project. I
thought that they may want something that was a little
more forward commercial loud, if you will, But that's not
what they wanted. And so the producer I spoke to
on Monday said, and we've worked a lot together. He said,

(44:53):
it just seems like maybe the attack time on your
compressor needs to be you know, slow, or to let
more of the transience through. Well, that to me, men,
there's you know, I have my favorite pieces of gear
that I like to use. I knew exactly what he
was talking about. I said, no problem, I'll take that

(45:14):
piece out. I'm only getting a dB out of it,
and I'm just actually in the middle of finishing that
record right now. But I completely understand what he was saying.
I completely understand what the artist was saying. It made
it too different than what they gave me. And so

(45:38):
what they gave me was excellent to begin with. And
so you know, my my my task is to put
a little frosting on this cake. Okay, generally speaking, I've
certainly been in the studio with you where at one
point you had a box that was basically, you know,
push it up for a little of this sound, push
it down for a little of that sound. Is that

(45:59):
general what you're doing? Absolutely? But you know, if um,
just from a creative perspective, some people want to eq
before they compress. Some people want to EQ into a
compressor and EQ afterwards too. So these are all choices.

(46:20):
There's not a right or wrong. It's how you want
to set up your workflow and how you or how
I think I can achieve my best result for the
criteria in front of me. Um At every tape that
comes or every file now that comes in, it is different,
and I mean it's different. Some of them come in

(46:41):
they haven't used a limited on the recording at all.
I just did this record for this isn't any thing,
and it was incredibly great music. Uh, and the guys
really really talented. He doesn't even know what a limitter is.
I saw his files and I thought, oh my goodness,
this is gonna be hard work. And it really was

(47:03):
hard work. But it was putting the right pieces to
put the good color in place for him preserve what
was great that he presented, which was the fact that
it was really dynamic. It was full of transients. But
he also wanted to compete. You know, in a modern

(47:24):
ish rock world, it's not the loudest record in the
world and it shouldn't be. Well that brings us to
the loudness wars, which I really think of being the nineties. No,
it's ongoing still ongoing never ends, okay, So explain what's
going on there and how you address it. People do

(47:47):
their mixes, mixers a mix and at the last part
of the process they'll strap a plug into plug ins
in to mimic a CD. That does two things. It
makes it super loud, but it now becomes part of

(48:08):
the sound that the artist hears. So whatever their choices
are of tools to make it loud, I think, become
integrated into what really is the master. So somebody will
come in with a file that's good to go. It

(48:30):
takes a lot more knowledge to know good to go
than it does to touch it. So it just depends.
It's some of them come in so loud you can't
do anything. You just literally can't do anything. Doesn't want
to go through an analog chain, it doesn't want to
go through a digital chain. It doesn't want to go
through a plug in chain. You try them all and

(48:55):
at the end of the day you think, well it's
got It's a little harsh the high end, but this
is part of the sound that everybody's married too, and
they may hear it, they may not hear it, but
if you change it, they for sure hear it. Okay,
but the way the customer would look at it is
the loudness wars were based on making your record as

(49:17):
loud as possible, so it would jump out on radio.
No go back a little further, so it would jump
out on the jukebox. Okay, So we've all been in
bars with jukeboxes and a great Motown come track comes
on and it's just loud and fun and boisterous, and

(49:37):
then something that's uh a folk California, it's not as loud,
and suddenly you know you can talk over it. So
loudness wars started there where you got noticed if you
got a loud you know, they called him a hot
track coming in on a jukebox. You heard it made
you want to go buy it. So that is translated

(50:00):
for sure into radio and now streaming as well as
c d s and the all important feature called shuffle,
meaning one when you put your library or take your
library on shuffle and here comes you know. But based
on an earlier part of the conversation with this normalization, well,

(50:24):
there's an off switch for that, and I suggest you
use it. Most people don't dig deep enough to find it,
but there's they all have an off switch. Okay, so
in other words, the loudness wards are forever seemed to
be but the loudness wards were amplified both metaphorically and

(50:46):
literally when we went to the c D, because the
c D could hold a whole bunch more stuff, right,
It wasn't a question of holding a bunch more stuff.
There were tools that we will call brick wall limitters
that would stop you from going over so you could
push it to the point of distortion. And we can

(51:07):
all cite distorted records not gonna um, but people were
found that sound pleasing, so um, what was unusual became usual.
So now suddenly you've got a lot of really loud
records out there. And again, the shuffle feature really makes

(51:31):
an artist not want to be quiet. Artists are competitive
in in strange ways, so this is as about a
problem as ever. It's not improving. Let's switch it to vinyl. Okay,
what do we know. There's a Vinyl gets a lot
of ink, even though literally the number of sales are

(51:51):
small and a lot of people are paying them on
crappy systems. You obviously started out in vinyl. I'm still
doing vinyl. But let's start with raw sound. Okay, assuming
you know, you kids, vinyl sound better than if it's
a file to begin with, it is supposed to be

(52:12):
cutting on tape. Can a file sound better on vinyl
than it will on a streaming or purchase service. I
think the answer here is if you enjoy it, it
can sound better. I don't think there's a real answer. Technically, no,
it can't. It's a bankrupt system. But it's very pleasing.

(52:36):
I put on some of the phonograph records we've been cutting,
and I've been selectively doing vinyl on some of the
artists I've been working with. UM, I don't want to
cut you know, bombastic stuff because we're using an order phone.
It's very fragile, but it's incredibly pleasing. UM do you

(52:58):
get the same if you didn't know what you were playing,
If you could eliminate the ticks and the pops and
the surface noise, would you find the same satisfaction off
of a file? I think you would. You know, the
surface noise adds something to it. I like the conversion
of electrical to mechanical and mechanical back to electrical. There's

(53:20):
something that's good about it. But technically no, it's not better. Okay,
So let's go back to stuff that was cut on
tape to begin with, Are you gonna hear it better
on vinyl than you will on any digital system? Vinyl

(53:42):
is let's just talk about vinyl for a second. Vinyl
has its has really strict limitations. Okay, the low end
doesn't go as deep as subs do off of a file,
and the high end is rolled off, but it's rolled
off musically, so tape does similar things. Tape is not

(54:03):
an exact image of what you've got. It's a color.
It can be very slight, it can be very very big. Um.
Back to David Guilt, they're complete analog people. We master
their stuff off the tube shooter. It's uh, it sounds
spectacular when we put it in vinyl. Their music doesn't

(54:28):
have a lot of high frequency component. Um, there's air,
there's dimension their space. If you're going to put in uh,
something that's done with files, it's all digital all the
way through comes in lout as ship. It can sound
okay on vinyl, but I think it sounds better off

(54:49):
the dig Okay, let me just ask you this though.
If you're mastering off the high REDS file straight from
pro tools, Okay, to vinyl. Is that gonna be better
then the commercially available file? You know, I can't qualify

(55:09):
better if you like it. It's better if you you
know it's it's it's a first of all, you've got
to have a great system to play back final. Okay,
you can't put in a cross USB turntable and think
you've got something good because you don't. So no, that
can't doesn't stand a chance. You're come into my room.

(55:30):
You've got a fancy turntable, You've got a fancy preamp.
You've got some nice speakers, very clean path, noise floor,
very low in the room, so you hear the rumble.
You can hear all kinds of crazy details in the vinyl,
but you will also hear those in the file because
they're not invented in the vinyl. You know, the vinyl

(55:52):
is just a capture medium that back to the electrical
to mechanical to electrical it there's something very good about that. Okay,
I'll ponder that. What is the So if I'm an
act trying to develop, what's the best thing to send
to you? If you're working on it, something that you've

(56:14):
mixed that you like and you say I feel really
good about this. So it doesn't matter what formatic comes in,
whether it comes in on a piece of tape or
it comes in and hires file or forty four, it
doesn't matter. The best thing to send me is something
you like and are happy with it. It's satisfying. So

(56:37):
you've gotta you have to work at your mix until
you're happy. Don't don't come in with something that's limping
and think you're going to be a you know, a
thorough red racehorse. So what is the futuring of the
mastering world, Well, it's, uh, I think it's very much
a in the box future. I think that define that

(56:58):
for those unfamiliar. It's working with computers and plug ins. Um.
I think there's always going to be room for what
i'd call traditional mastering and analog chain fancy analog gear,
good great converters, um. But that's a special client to that.
You know, budgets come into this too, more than ever

(57:19):
now somebody that wants to take the time to do
a real, full on analog recording where they've got a
great machine, fantastic tape, and you have to remember they
don't make tape so much anymore. So good and bad batches,
and so you know, if you're fortunate enough to have
a budget that you can work like that and you

(57:39):
want to mix it down through your pristine NIV or
SSL console and put it on a fantastic piece of
quarter inch or half inch tape. Takes a lot of
time times money. It's so if someone is doing that
and they're doing a full on mastering, what would be
the rights for that? For my services, I charge an

(58:04):
hourly rate and then the goods um. You know it
gets expensive. Okay, so today, when you're finished, what do
you actually send to the manufacturer or to these varying outlets. Well,
we provide multiple files sources, so the m FIT, so

(58:24):
we we conform to Apple standards for the m FIT.
We're an infant sanctioned studio. There's the digital, which is
your Amazon um from the digitals. I think Amazon makes
their two fifty six MP three and a half. And

(58:46):
then there's the CD which is getting less and less.
And another thing I'm noticing is is that we get
less call for the super high res K two. It's
getting it's reducing. Yeah, we don't we see fewer requests
for that. Yeah, I think that I may not work
in the genre of music. I think that that's maybe

(59:09):
more jazz classical oriented than it ever you know, has been.
But we used to provide those high res files for
I forget the name of the company in New York,
the HD tracks or something. Okay, what about for a
long time, especially in the CD era which started in
Night two or so, remastered what was going on there? Wow?

(59:34):
In two not a lot of good stuff. But fast forward, Um,
I've been around long enough to have the privilege to
do people's twenty five year anniversary albums and stuff. So
I just did the last I did Monster and Out
of Time for R e M. And in those cases

(59:58):
R e M is really into quality be We actually
get the half inch tapes from the vault and uh
I remaster them. I got to say, it's kind of
a daunting task because I put on those old CDs
and they're incredibly good sounding, and it's you know, it's

(01:00:19):
always different, and different can be good, different can be bad.
It just depends on who's just is. It's such that
there's been improvements in technology such that a master like
you can literally do things better. Yeah, I mean, I
experiences is a big contributing factor. I think that if

(01:00:40):
you're dealing with somebody that works in the in the
world I work in, nobody's really got second rate anything.
We've been around long enough to pick and choose what
it is we want and can use the tools to
get out of the project what I'm looking for, and
hopefully the client is satisfied with. So in a perfect world,

(01:01:02):
if you could snap your fingers, what would you change
about today's music industry? I wish loudness wasn't such a factor.
I like my loudness. I certainly get slagged by the
the people that like to finger people for making things loud.

(01:01:23):
All of those people forget that somebody approved it. Um.
But my personal taste would be for music to come
back a couple of notches, because you never run out
of volume on your volume control, but you sure run
out of patients when it's too loud. You know. I
we had a car when I when our son came

(01:01:46):
into this world, we got a Mommy Mobile and it
was interesting the first click of volume. You couldn't talk
over with a modern c D. Wow Wow is right, okay,
but inherently nal will be quieter. You know, Vinyl, you
know you're you're at the limits of time and frequency,

(01:02:10):
so to reproduce a fifty cycle wave, and vinyl takes
up space physical space on the disc. So if you've
got something that's got a robust low end, you're not
going to get it super loud without overly compressing or
compromising the audio in ways. It's not to say it

(01:02:30):
can't be pleasing to do some of that, but that's
the Vinyl has those types of limitations. Um. You know,
if you remember, there are numbers of your favorite records
that are nine tracks, you know, maybe thirty four minutes,
you know, seventeen minutes aside sixteen eighteen, whatever it happens

(01:02:52):
to be, which is sort of an ideal time to
for for a vinyl disc. When you get up into
these twenty four minutes sides, they're okay because you know,
again the level is not overly pushed. The problem is
you start start having signal to noise problems. I did
I did Leonard Cohen's last record, and it was before

(01:03:14):
I was cutting vinyl, and I remember saying to the
guy that was cutting it that could we hear it
a half dB quieter because I thought it might sound
a little better. And he said, well, you know, we
can do that, but you're gonna start noticing the surface noise.

(01:03:35):
And he was so right, you know, he was just
so right. So it's all a delicate balance. Uh, you know,
audios a, it's a funny thing to chase. It's a
sure a lot of fun and well, especially today because
people are not younger generations not into stereo like the boomers,
so they're playing it back through earbuds and a lot

(01:03:55):
of crappy systems. Yeah they are. I mean, that's that's
the downfall of add O is is that there's no resolution.
You know, you're listening with such limited reproduction, you know,
reproducers meaning earbuds, even good headphones. There are very few
good headphones. I know a lot of people take issue
with that. I should say there are very few good
affordable headphones. Um. And when the you know, the common

(01:04:19):
denominator is the handheld device, i e. Your phone. Um,
you know, if it jumps on that and that makes
you happy, great, And I'd like to make it jump
on that and make you happy. That's your job. You've
been listening to Steven Marcus in Mastering Engineer Extraordinary here
on the Bob Left Sets podcast. We've gotten technical, you know.

(01:04:40):
I think a lot of people are intrigued. Some people
are knowledgeable about this already. Other people can learn. I
certainly learned a couple of things. Stephen, Thank you so
much for being here. Thanks for having me, Bob. It's
been a pleasure. Until next time, I'm Bob. Left sets