FAQ
Q: What is Mastering and why do I need it?
A: Mastering is really two things. The first step of the process is making your music sound as good as it can. Careful spectral and dynamic processing can bring out the best qualities of your mixes. The second step is creating a master that works best for the way your audience listens to music. Whether it’s for digital distribution, CD, Vinyl, Film, TV or Broadcast, the right master will make your music sound its best wherever it’s heard.
Q: Does RFM have experience with my style of music?
A: Yes! With more than 35 years and 9,000 albums of mastering experience, I’ve worked with every genre imaginable. My clients cover the musical spectrum. Whether it’s pop, rock, alternative, jazz, blues, country, classical, dance, club, electronica, R&B, hip hop, rap, acoustic, folk, world or any other genre you can think of. From major labels to indies, from well known artists to local garage bands: you name it, I’ve mastered it. For a sample, head over to my clients page and click on an image or two. That will take you to the album on Spotify where you can hear it for yourself.
Q: My studio engineer says he will master my record. Why should I use RFM?
A: There are many reasons most records are not mastered in recording studios by mixing engineers. Look at the credits on your favorite CDs or LPs. You’ll find that the vast majority were mastered by full-time mastering engineers in dedicated mastering facilities. Mastering is as different from mixing as building a sports car is from driving it. Different disciplines require different skills. I can offer a fresh perspective on your mixes in a reference listening environment. You only get one chance to hear it for the first time, and that can make all the difference.
Q: What does RFM need from me to complete the mastering process?
A: I can work with whatever format you’re mixing to – with a preference for high resolution interleaved .wav or .aif files if possible. If you’re mixing to analog tape, please make a backup and bring/send the ORIGINAL reels.
Here’s a list of information that will help in the process:
Artist / Group Name
Album Title
Song Titles and Sequence
Specific editing instructions such as crossfades, timing between songs, hidden tracks, inter-song ID marks, etc.
ISRC information
Type and number of masters and reference copies
Job Number, Plant Info and Matrix Numbers for Vinyl Projects
It’s also important to include any other notes that will help communicate how you want your music to sound.
Q: What is an ISRC and why do I need it?
A: It stands for International Standard Recording Code. It’s a 12 character alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies each song for digital distribution. Your label or distributor can help you get this code and I can include it on your finished master. For a more detailed explanation, go here. http://usisrc.org/
Vinyl Specific Questions:
Q: One of the fist questions people ask is “can I use my CD master for vinyl?”
A: The answer is a solid “maybe.” If sibilance and other high frequency elements are well under control, there was not a lot of limiting done to the master and it has round, analog-like waveforms then it’s probably fine for vinyl. OTOH, if it’s excessively bright and/or it was heavily processed for loudness then it will be better to use a version that’s been optimized for vinyl. Some things that sound fine on a CD can sound bad very quickly on vinyl. Sibilance, high frequency mix elements and clipping create extremely jagged waveforms and a groove cut from a jagged waveform is difficult for a playback stylus to trace. When the stylus loses contact with the bottom of the groove the result is tracing distortion. It’s most obvious on vocal SSS sounds but can also happen on cymbals, effects or anything with excessive HF content.
Imagine the waveform is a smooth winding road and the stylus is a sports car. The car can handle the curves and stay on the road. Now imagine the road is full of potholes. The car bounces over those holes and it’s a rough ride. That’s what happens to a stylus on a record cut from a jagged or distorted waveform. And now imagine you’re driving a 1978 Pinto on that road. That’s roughly the equivalent of a lot of cheap turntables these days.
Vinyl is an exaggerator. If there is tone on the source there will be more tone on the vinyl. If there’s distortion on the source there will be more distortion on the vinyl. That’s the way it works. It’s a mechanical, analog format where the shape of the groove is the sound of the record.
And besides all of that, this is vinyl. It SHOULD sound different than the digital version. That’s the whole point!
Recommendations for Mixing for Vinyl:
De-ess your vocals! I can’t stress this enough. Vocal sibilance is the number one problem I encounter on incoming masters. What sounds fine on a CD may simply be too much HF for a record. The more exposed the vocal the more likely it will be to distort. Listen to LPs from the ’70s and ’80s. Sibilance and HF content were well controlled (not to mention there was NO clipping) because engineers of that era knew the limitations of vinyl. Solving sibilance and HF issues during the mix is much more effective and less damaging than dealing with it in mastering and cutting.
Please do not center the low frequency content. This is an internet myth that just won’t die. While it’s true that certain circumstances will require the low end to be narrowed, only the cutting engineer is in a position to know when and by how much – if any at all. Doing it in the mix or in mastering can unnecessarily degrade the sound of your record. I’ve been at this for a while and I’m very well versed in the needs of vinyl and even I don’t know if it will be necessary until I’m setting up the cut. Trust me on this one. Leave the LF issues to me. I’ll keep every ounce of low end that I can to make your record sound as good as it can.
Levels for vinyl: Probably lower than you think. The first thing I have to do on 95% of the masters I cut is turn them down 10dB. Remember that a record cutting lathe (in my case it’s an industry standard Neumann VMS 70 record lathe build in 1974) was build to work from tape at levels that were significantly lower than what is common today. Just about any modern digital master is way too hot to feed the cutting electronics. And a brick wall limited waveform is not a good shape for a groove. The best thing you can do to make a great sounding record is to turn the master down. Skip the limiter. It works against us. Print the vinyl cutting master files with headroom. Your vinyl will sound a lot more like a record that way.
Upsampling: Don’t. There is nothing to be gained if the source audio was not recored, mixed and mastered at >44k1 sampling rate. As a guy who gets upsampled audio for vinyl on a regular basis, I can tell you there is nothing up there you want. Noise, distortion artifacts, etc. I filter that stuff out as soon as I can. Yes, interim processing can benefit from oversampling, but the benefit comes from filtering that stuff back out of the signal at the end of the processing chain. And beyond that, nothing up there belongs in the cutting electronics or at the business end of the playback stylus. Resist the urge. More is not better here. In the same way hard digital limiting is a bad idea for vinyl, any audio signal >20kHz works against us and only needs to be filtered back out.
If RFM is cutting lacquers but not mastering the digital files, please assemble your master into one continuous sound file for each side – exactly the way you want it to sound on the record. Label the files something like Band Name.Album Title.Vinyl Master Side A/B. Also, please fill out and return my Vinyl Track Sheet detailing the song sequence, the length of each song and the total length of each side.
Sequencing and sound quality: It’s a fact of physics that the outer bands of the record sound the best. Traditionally, the first band or two on each side is reserved for the most important, loudest or most dynamic tracks on the album while the inner bands are best for softer songs, ballads, that sort of thing. That’s because distortion increases and high frequency response decreases as the groove approaches the center of the disk.
Keep the side lengths relatively even from side to side and within the limitations of the medium. The amount of music you can put on one side of a record is a delicate balance between bass content, the length of the side and the level of the cut. One way to visualize it is with my Length / Level / Bass Triangle. As you can see below, more of one means less of the others.
For a pop / rock type sound, anything up to about 18-20 minutes on a standard 12” 33 1/3 LP side will sound great, 22 minutes is pushing it and 24 is really the max you want to go. I can cut longer sides at a lower level and with less bass. Quiet songs or songs with very little bass will push that time out a bit. Excessive level or bass content will reduce the time. You get the idea. Here are my recommendations:
12” 33 1/3 RPM:
DJ / Single levels up to about 6 minutes
Hot levels up to about 12 minutes
Standard levels up to about 18 minutes
Lower levels up to about 22 minutes
Even lower levels up to about 24 minutes
Spoken word or quiet classical up to about 28 minutes
12” 45 RPM:
Hot levels up to about 9 minutes
Standard levels up to about 15 minutes
10” 33 1/3 RPM:
Hot levels up to about 9 minutes
Standard levels up to about 15 minutes
10” 45 RPM:
Hot levels up to about 7 minutes
Standard levels up to about 12 minutes
7” 45 RPM:
Hot levels up to about 4 minutes
Standard levels up to about 5 minutes
Somewhat lower levels up to about 6 minutes
7” 33 1/3 RPM:
Standard levels up to about 6 minutes
Low levels up to about 7 minutes
Q: I got my test pressing but it sounds dull or distorted. When you sent me a transfer made at RFM it sounds great. Why?
A: Why my transfer sounds different than yours is always the toughest question to answer. And it happens a lot. One factor is that people are not used to hearing their own music on vinyl. They have gotten used to the digital sound and the vinyl surprises them. And they have not spent time examining what various digital albums sound like compared to their analog counterpart. They accept the sound of their vinyl collection without really knowing whether their table is accurate or not.
Worse, each turntable has a different cartridge and tonearm configuration. Imagine how different each mic in a studio sounds. SM57 vs U47? At 6” or three feet? The difference between cartridges is even bigger. Some are bright, some are dull, some have poor stereo separation, some have terrible high frequency response, especially inner groove. Some have a fine line or elliptical shaped stylus that can follow the high frequency contours of the groove while others have conical styli that are simply too large to fit into the small physical shape of high frequency waveforms in a groove. And the geometry of the tonearm (how well physically aligned the tonearm and cartridge are) has a large impact on things like sibilance and inner groove distortion. Much more so than the physical alignment of a tape deck head.
The vast majority of the time, when I play a test pressing and compare it to the source it matches very well. That means the groove contains the sound I intended. And that is honestly the best that I can hope for. I can not control for all of the variables out in the real world. Every speaker has a different response. Every room sounds different. Every turntable and cartridge has a unique sound. All I can do (and this is what all mastering engineers do; whether analog or digital) is shoot for the middle. Try to reach the largest audience.
The turntable I use for listening to test pressings is simple. It’s a 30 year old Technics SL-1200. The most ubiquitous DJ tablet on the planet. Stock tonearm. Ortofon 2M Bronze cartridge. Nothing fancy. Just a very well set up turntable (Lofgren B tonearm geometry, 1.5 grams tracking force). I could easily make it sound terrible by messing with the cartridge alignment or by putting a $30 conical stylus cartridge on it. But that would not give us a good representation of what is actually in the groove. People with great tables will hear something like my transfer. Even better. People with lower end tables will hear more distortion and less top end. That’s just how vinyl works. No escaping it.
When asked to make changes based on the sound of a client’s turntable, I tell them this: My philosophy is to not mess up a good master to accommodate a problematic playback system. This is also true in purely digital mastering. When a recent client said her boom box made song X sound funny, I had a hard time convincing her that the boom box was the problem, not the master. When a client tells me their test pressing sounds dull or distorted but it sounds good on my system, I tell them to first get their table professionally calibrated (I always recommend Lofgren B tonearm geometry) and to buy a decent cartridge. 99% of complains magically disappear after that.