No matter how long you’ve spent in the studio, how adept your musicianship or creativity is, or how well produced your final recordings are—all must be ‘mastered’ before the world can bask in your brilliance.
Scourers of liner notes like myself have probably read “Mastered by so and so at so and so…” but how many of you know what that actually means or what it entails?
It’s literally the last artistic piece of a long process and one we’ll delve into over the coming months from a variety of angles with Scott Hull—mastering engineer and the owner of world-class and world-famous Masterdisk studios in New York City—for a master class in mastering, from the fundamentals to the final product.
And before our time is up, a select few of you will be given the opportunity to win an in-person training session at Masterdisk. For now however, the floor is Mr. Hull’s:
VINYL BASICS | My name is Scott Hull—I’m the owner of Masterdisk studios in NYC. I’ve been mastering records and cutting lacquers since the early 80s.
I hope you find my guest blog here at The Vinyl District to be a fun and informative look at many different aspects of making and enjoying records. We are going to talk about vinyl from all angles: technical, musical and historical. This behind the scenes blog will help you understand what goes into making exceptionally good sounding records.
Let’s talk about some basic equipment. The most important piece of audio equipment in my disk cutting room is my ears. Because every single decision I make is based on what I’m hearing, and how that relates to thousands of other records I’ve heard and mastered. Gearheads might be a little disappointed with that statement, but musicians can probably relate.
Turning a recording into a record is very straightforward process. Back in the 40s, there were portable recording rigs that had a microphone and a platter that cut “field recordings” into plastic discs. The machine was marvelously simple. The microphone signal was electrically amplified and caused a cutter head coil to vibrate while it carved through the plastic. The disc was about the size of a 7” single and played at 78 rpm.
I have one of these discs—it’s a recording of my grandmother and her six young sons outside a grocery store in Tippecanoe, Ohio. The interviewer was selling bread, and asked my grandmother what bread she liked best. Then each son said a Sunday School verse he had memorized. It must have seemed like magic to hear their voices played back on a record. I remember hearing this at a very young age, and marveled at the recording of my father as a 9 year old.
Many of these disks were recorded at home and sent overseas to servicemen in war zones. And many came the other way too—carrying the real live voice of their son or husband serving far away.
So, why bring up an obscure dictaphone technology from fifty years ago? I think it’s best to first think of making a record as a very simple process. A process that becomes more complicated as we try to make the recordings better, and longer, and quieter.
When you’re cutting a record, you start with a recording on analog tape, or as a digital file. This recording is converted to an analog voltage, amplified and sent to the cutting head on a lathe. The cutting head is very much like a speaker. When the signal comes into the voice coil, it causes the “speaker” section to vibrate. The Voice coil is attached to a cantilevered shaft and causes a small sapphire needle to wiggle. Each wiggle—left and right and up and down—is analogous to the audio signal being fed in. This sapphire stylus is allowed to contact the surface of a soft lacquer disk and the squiggles are preserved in the plastic. It’s magic.
The reproduction of the signal is just the reverse process—except that the cutter head is designed to dig a small trench in the vinyl, and the playback cartridge is much more delicate and meant to ride along in the groove without damaging it. As the playback stylus rides through the groove, the microscopic squiggles move a coil and the voltage is faithfully reproduced, amplified and routed to speakers for listening.
Next week I’ll take a step back from the technical view and discuss the experience of playing a vinyl record. Over the course of the next few months—leading up to Record Store Day 2011—I hope to touch on many different aspects of the art and science of vinyl. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride.
Scott Hull is a mastering engineer and the owner of Masterdisk (founded in 1973) in New York City. In his 25-plus year career, Scott has mastered records for Sting, Bob Dylan, Steely Dan, Os Mutantes, John Zorn, Uncle Tupelo, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings and hundreds more. Visit Masterdisk online or on Facebook.
