Hello, I'm Jonathan Wyner, I'm Education
Director for iZotope and I am here in beautiful downtown Ashland, Oregon with
Sylvia Massy in her compound called Studio-De-Lux. It's an amazing facility
that's just full of interesting objects and tools where Sylvia does her mixing
work. And we're gonna spend some time together talking about mixing, mastering,
the relationship between the two. I have some questions for Sylvia about mixing,
and she has some questions for me about mastering. So let's dig in.
- Okay. You started out as a musician, is that correct? - Yes. - Which probably allows you to
have empathy for the musicians that you're working with.
-Exactly, in fact I learned how to play drums just so I could understand the placement of the drums in a— in a kit and where I could put microphones to not get in the way because I don't want to impede the way that the drummer plays. - How did you learn to mix?
- It was interesting to start in the analog era because when you pushed up
the faders for your mix you were really a part of a living thing and you could
grab faders, several at a time, and whether you're using automation or not, I
would do a lot of work live. That's my specialty, I think, is that I'll put in
events into a mix that come out of my background as an analog mixer. - Would it be fair to say that it's somewhat performance-based? - Yes
- ...the way you're describing it?
- Well, being that I'm not the primary musician in the project... - Sure.
- ...this is how I can play. - Great. I don't know about you, but I've had this experience over and over again over
decades where artists will start to do their own work and they'll get three
months into a project and they're like "Oh my stuff is shit, you know, how come
how come it's not getting better? It doesn't sound like my favorite record,"
and somehow they don't get that it's a long-form process.
- Learning how to mix was an observation of popular music when I first started, I would take my mixes
and compare it to something that I was listening to on the radio. And I would do
an a/b and I would really learn to find the details of what made the commercial project finished, and then I would apply
that to my mix. And it usually would take the shape of adjusting the overall
compression and EQ, and so I was, in essence, doing some pre-mastering right from the beginning, because that's how I could quickly shape
my mix to be more commercial and competitive.
- Is there sort of a thing that you know you're gonna do from the get-go in a mix and at what point do
you start doing it?
- When I was working at Larrabee they had GML 8200 EQs in the
racks, and that was my go-to stereo buzz EQ when I started out in analog mixing.
And it was easy because I would just shape the mid range and I would scoop
the mid range and it seemed like a lot of commercial masterings would work
that way: there was a little air on the top, a little scoop out of the middle, and
maybe a little bump on the low— lowest frequencies, and it's very easy to just
go Bing Bang Bing and then do my a/b, and I would get my mix quickly into a
competitive form.
- So this observation that you used to make about the mid
range being clear, or the top end having a little bit more energy...
- Air, yeah...
- ...and the low end having a little bit less energy
- Mhmm, yeah... - ...and you take a look at an EQ that's sitting on your 2-mix for this track and there it is. - Yeah, there it is.
- So is that something you start with at the beginning? Or you get X amount of the way into the mix and then
do this?
- When I was working in analog mixing, I would go straight to that and
GML EQ, but that wasn't until towards the end of the mix. But now, with template
mixing, I will add this curve on to my stereo bus right away. I'll bypass it
and just check and see how it's working with no stereo bus processing.
- So far, you've been talking about EQ. You have not been talking at all about
compression. Is that also a standard part of your treatment?
- Absolutely. When I did analog mixing, I would have a selection of really great
valve tube stereo bus compressors and I had a Fairchild 670 and I would use it
on every mix, and it really finished the sound of the mix.
- The time constants in the vintage limiter are derived directly from the Fairchild 670...
- Oh, okay...
- ...which is kind of interesting that you would pull it up,
and especially in the tube mode. Your comment about not being able to
introduce as much level into a plug-in as you can in the analog world I think
it has to do with the fact that it's really hard to model the non-linear,
chao–chaotic behavior of an analog circuit in DSP. We can model the behavior
when it's working within a quote unquote "normal range," but if you want to
introduce some unusual, aberrant behavior, that's harder to model and harder to predict.
- That's what I love, the aberrant behavior. The unpredictability.
- So this, for instance, represents what you would put on the 2-mix, as far as a treatment, when
you're working in the box?
- So the way that I have this mix system set up is
that my Pro Tools I/Os come out through these D/A converters, they're summed
analog through an analog summing unit by Dangerous Music, and then they are put
back into digital form, and I print it back into the session, so I can keep a
keep track of it. That's where they live and that's where I'll bounce out the
files later. The final step before, it's printed, is where I put a stereo bus
plug-in. So I'll have Ozone and I'll use the EQ and compression or limiting there.
- Mhmm. That hybrid approach that you're
describing, that round trip through the analog world, does that give you a chance
to insert other devices?
- This particular system has the option of me adding
things into the stereo bus and I have, actually, this unit here, which is a
Western Electric 111 C, it's a pair of transformers that I'll put on the output.
- Can you describe where you're running into trouble with levels?
- Whether it's a session that I've recorded or a session that someone has sent me to mix, it seems
like I start with levels too hot, and I'll show you on this session, these are
the levels that come to me on the Edit window, and then you can see that they're
already brought down a little bit. This is just too hot already. When I
play this track ... if I was to bring this up to zero ... let's say I bring this up to
zero now ... you can— you can hear the problem ... alright so I have to bring my
levels back before I even begin. And I'm a little bit afraid about harming the
the audio by reducing the level. Can you tell me about that? Am I harming the
audio?
- Quite the opposite. I mean, certainly when you're hearing a
distortion, that's an obvious sign that you need to change something. Right? So
you're actually harming the audio by not changing your levels, right? So that's
thing number one. I mean, it's funny we always want to get the technical aspects
of what we're doing right, but let's just start with the sort of simple proposition
that if something sounds wrong, like okay we got to deal with that, you know, to hell
with the bits, right?
- Right. It makes sense, certainly to me, if you're
recording all of your tracks at a level where the peak is somewhere, say, between -3 and -10, right, for every individual track. Once you've summed a
bunch of channels together, like what you see here, inevitably you're gonna end up
with a level that's too hot, and that - That's what happens.
-...you're going to have to turn it down. The good news is, you know, with Pro Tools or Studio One or, you know, any sort
of modern DAW, we're operating in a floating-point digital universe, so so
long as you're not making changes that are in the order of 40 or 50 or 60 dB,
then I start to hear the artifact, the change that happens because I'm making
extreme changes in gain with floating point you've got so much dynamic range.
- So I could actually take these and start at even a lower level like even a -30 and be okay? - That's correct.
- And now, by doing that, ... I have so much more room to work with on my stereo bus. Ooo to rebalance a few things, too. Hahaha That's good news because that is a constant issue— was mixing because I'll have a client, I'll get the mix just right, and just on the edge...
- Yeah.
-...and then the client will say, "Hey, can you bring up those guitars?" and the drummer will say, "Hey, can you
bring up the drums?" and the vocalist will say, "Hey, I can't hear my vocals anymore."
You know, everybody wants louder...
-Sure. - ...pretty soon we've lost the headroom
when we're distorting again and then I have to rebalance and bring it all back
down. So it's this constant fight and I want to play with that more, too, I want to
play with the stereo bus, umm, and and try to push the stereo bus harder instead of
having these loud tracks.
- There's an art, I think, to the compromise between level
of your individual tracks or your stems, you know some people mix to buses, right? And then that gets combined to a 2-mix. - That's the way I'm doing it here, too.
- Yeah. So the level there and the level on the 2-mix. If you leave too much for the thinking of the
mastering stage to get the level that ultimately the artist or the client or
you, yourself are gonna desire, you won't be able to achieve it without
having to be maybe more assertive with a 2-mix processing.
- Right.
- ...or the mastering processing, than you would like. The mix engineer, in my way of thinking,
has to pay attention to some extent to the difference between the peak levels
in the average levels, that's that's sort of a big deal.
- The other thing is, I always thought that there would be like a global adjustment, maybe in the I/O,
that we could just bring everything down and start from a lower level, but there
really isn't. So what I was doing was I was adjusting the level on the stereo
bus through using the Ozone inputs and outputs and then I would reduce it here
and I would reduce it here on the input and output. But it wasn't solving the
pinched sound of having everything just on the edge so the solution for me now
is to bring it all the way down to even -30 to start. Whereas, people give me
WAV files and they start at zero. Before I start mixing
everything's brought down to -30, and now I'm having success. I just
was really curious if I was doing something wrong, so thanks for that.
- Sure. Like you are sort of fond of saying, there are no right answers, right, there are no
rules here, so these are all guidelines. But in the case of the mix that you've
got going here, if I hit play and we just observe the levels on Insight and take a
look at the average level versus the peak level, I think it's somewhat
instructive, so I'm going to just play a little bit of audio and then we'll come
back and talk about it.
- There it is! Oh, wow... - A couple of things are going on here. The average level in the loudest section of the tune at the end was sitting around minus
point, uh, -6. Right, if you think about the old-school sort of VU meters that we
grew up on, right, usually we would target something between 0 and +3 or
whatever, but that zero on the VU meter was usually about 20 dB below clipping,
below full-scale, right. I mean the way that we used to make mixes that we were
happy with, the level is much lower, the average level, so here, this is quite hot.
So I would venture to say if we leave this mix at this level, you're going to
get a plenty hot record. There will be no problem in terms of the level, ultimately, that you're going to get in the final result.
- But the mastering engineer needs some headroom to work with - That's exactly right. There are a couple of ways of thinking about this idea of headroom. One way of
thinking about it is, "Well, the mix sounds great, let's just turn it down a little
bit." And if the mix truly sounds great, if you're totally happy with it, and you
have metering that shows you what we're seeing here, then, whether it's you or the
mastering engineer that just pulls the output down, that final version, to get
some room to work, that's an option. I'm not saying it's the only option, nor is
it always the right option. If you're saying to me. "You know what, I think it
sounds better if I give myself more room to work so it doesn't sound pinched," I, as
a mastering engineer, would be very happy to have some more headroom above where
the average level is sitting than what we have here.
- Well this particular project, the mixes were all the way up to the the edge...
- Yep.
- ...then when it came to mastering, the mastering engineer had difficulty to
keep it clear because the guitars were obscuring the vocals. Things got lost
right away. I went back three times bringing down the levels just to get it
to open up enough that when I got the mastering back it made sense and it
wasn't worse than the final mix. Understanding how far down I can bring
the initial tracks is going to help me a lot with my future mixing. Now this meter
is really revealing, and I wanted to ask you, where do you have that? Is that post-Ozone on the stereo bus?
- Yes. In order for that meter to truly be useful, it needs
to be the very last thing in the chain, because it'll show you the accumulated
level through everything that you're doing, whether it's on the track level or
the stem level or the 2-mix out. It's a complex system, this sort of gain staging
through a mix, right, you've got your stems your busses, right. Do you have
anything on your busses?
- Yes. - So, you know, one of the things
you have to be aware of is that if you drop the level of the tracks it's gonna change...
- Yes...
- ...the processing on the... - ...and I have to rebalance again...
- ...so you have to do all of that again. And that pinch phenomenon I think that you're alluding to comes from
pushing level into your 2-bus processing into the limiter.
- Oh really, is that right?
- Yep. You probably would get some satisfaction if you drop the input into
Ozone, but but still anything that's happening upstream from that, in terms of
gain staging, is still maybe gonna be problematic, so yeah feel free to take
the tracks down, give yourself plenty of room to work, and then you can add level
later It's really hard to take level away and undo some of the artifact and
some of the things that you're hearing. - Right, right.
- There's one other thing I wanted to point out: so you've got a limiter here that's your final stage.
This is sitting on your 2-mix output... - Yeah.
- ...and then the ceiling is sitting at
zero. I always encourage people at every stage to leave a little bit of margin
coming out of their final stage. Turning this down is very much like turning this down.
- Oh.
- It's really the same thing, but it gives you a little bit of room here
so you won't get levels that peak above 0 dBFS you won't hear distortion on the
output if you if you let this sit at zero there's every possibility that on the
analog side what we're hearing actually will exceed zero and it'll sound a
little bit clipped. So whatever your final stage is, go ahead and cheat that
down just a little bit, give yourself a little bit of room. It'll make mastering
engineers happier too. - Can we take a listen that effect?
- Sure. Anything more than a dB or two is not
gonna help, again, the pinched thing that happens
because of the gain staging into the limiter. But it's always a good habit or
a good practice to leave a little bit of margin at the very top for when you print your files.
- Is that gonna create pinching— the pinching sound?
-Turning it down? - Yeah.
- No.
- Okay.
- Absolutely not. It's just a function of level. If anything, it should make your peaks sound cleaner and better and clearer. You know, a lot of people are
having to kind of master their own stuff, so people start thinking about mixing
and mastering at the same time. And so I just wanted to get your take and your
approach to that issue.
- When I start on a project from day one of recording I'm
always thinking of what it is going to be when it's mixed. And, ultimately,
mastered. So I make placements in monitoring, while we're monitoring, while
we're recording, I'm combining things, I'm placing them in the panning, I'm doing an
EQ on the way to the recorder so that I don't have to make these decisions later.
And ultimately, those things are meant to make mixing easier. So it's already
thought out when I go to mix. The trick that I've found is to get an approval
from a client. That mix has to sound competitive with what's on the radio,
which has already been mastered. So I'm always going to do some pre-mastering
just to get the client happy and excited and so we can really actually understand
what it'll sound like. So I want to start right away with understanding where the
mix is going to be and then, ultimately, the mastering. Once I get an approval,
then I'll strip off the stereo bus compression. I'll use it for the approval,
and then I'll take it right off before I send it to master.
- Talk to me about your relationship with the mastering. - I just don't want them to screw it up. When I send them, without processing, without stereo bus processing, I also send them
the reference, the final approved mix with the processing, so that they have a
reference. "This is what the client approved. Please, if you're going to do
anything, make it sound a little better than that. If you're going to do anything,
just don't make it sound worse." What do you think the job of a mastering
engineer is? The title is "engineer," does that mean that they're being creative
with what they do?
- That's a hard question to answer. You use the word "creative," I think you have to tread gently with that. Sometimes creativity and mastering, to me, may be the gentle addition of color that might come, in some cases, fairly
transparent. Transformers very rarely tape sort of treatments or something
like that can benefit a mix but only a little bit and if you go too far you
change a lot about the way a mix is put together, you can change the balance and
you can change the tone. I think the responsibility is to sort of notice what
you notice about what's going on in the mix, if you have any questions communicate...
-Sure.
- ...with the mix engineer and say, "Did you really mean for the pennywhistle to be 30 dB louder than the vocal?" Or, you know, whatever the thing is, and if they
say, "Yes," you have to figure out a way to make that work. You know, it's not your
job to know what's right, it's your job to make the observations, and then to
help, I think the key word is sort of, you know, words "respect" and "a little goes a long way."
- I find it amazing to see what a mastering engineer can do to broaden the
the width of a mix, but that often is at the expense of level, certain levels of
things that you've placed in the mix. When I get a mix back from mastering and I'm listening to it and now it's wider, it's
it's airier, it's cleaner, but my lead vocal is buried behind the freshly
exposed guitar parts, so what do you do? Well I have to go back in and I'll make
a vocal up version, or anything that's obscured by this new finishing EQ. If I
like it, I'll make adjustments to my final mix and send a revision over to
the mastering engineer so he can remaster using the same settings, just
will just be able to hear those those parts better.
- That's very cool. So you hear something that's revealed in mastering that you do like...
- Mmm, yeah.
- ...and you sort of want to work towards that goal.
- Right. - Yeah, cool.
- I used to work with Prince, and he
would record in a way that made me uncomfortable because he was pushing the levels on the tape so hard that if the monitors weren't up in the room, you
could hear on the tape machines the rattle of the needles because they were
all pegging just— and there was a sound to that. If you listen to those
Revolution records and anything that he recorded, and he did all the recording
mainly himself, they had a sound, it was smashed and
really in your face, so I love that, but add a hundred tracks together and you've
got this crushing mess.
- That's my favorite genre. - Now, when I start a mix, I take
every track, before I even begin, and bring all the levels down, whether it's
something that I recorded or if it's something that was sent to me to mix.
- That looks to me like what I would hope for from a mix engineer. There's a little
bit of a margin at the top, there's a little bit of room to push level if it
needs to be pushed, but there's also enough average level that it's not going
to be, um, it's it's not going to be up to mastering to make the record sound like it needs to sound.
- Okay. - That looks perfect. There's something else that we noticed that was really interesting about this
record. If we pull up Tonal bBalance Control, which is this tool that's designed to give you a sense of what is, I hate to use the word "typical" or "common," because that just sounds really
uninteresting, like "I want to make a common record or a typical record." Every
record, of course, is supposed to sound great and compelling and interesting and
beautiful, but if you look at the display, you see a range what we like to
call "tonal balance," right, low ends to mid-range to top end, the average
distribution of energy across thousands and thousands of records.
- So this is machine learning that's evaluated, um, thousands of records? - Correct. But it doesn't mean that this is the final answer, nor does it mean that
you have to make a straight line image of, you know, in this display in order to
have a good record, so when we hit play and let this settle down for a moment,
you can see, and this is this is a fairly aggressive record...
- Yes.
- ...so you might expect to see the bottom and the upper mid-range being a little bit more emphasized...
- Right.
- ...and and, in fact, it's still... - It's pretty obvious here, isn't it?
- Yeah and it's still kind of within bounds, it's not like anything so whacked that you'd have to
go back and, you know, and revisit your decisions...
- Right
- ...you know or else you'd blow up a car speaker or something like that right?
- Well that definitely illustrates the scoop that I pull out of the stereo bus on this genre of music,
because it's a it's a harder, heavier genre, and it's kind of a scoop.
- Right. Actually that's right, so if we take a look at the Ozone EQ, you can
actually see that right there this influencing that shape.
- How about that? That is an amazing tool. - You and I have had the luxury of honing our craft in very specific parts of the music workflow. Not everybody has the
luxury of doing that. Some people love doing it all themselves. If you're
talking to somebody who wants, for instance, to master their own mixes, do
you have any advice that you would give them?
- I wouldn't push anyone away from
doing that, actually, because you can get so much out of just taking your mix and
a/bing it with someone else's work, and really dissect what is the difference, what makes it sound good, what is the ultimate shape of that that
successful mastering? And you can do that yourself just with a few tools.
iZotope has a great suite for mastering, you know, so I would I would suggest
everyone try it at least. Sylvia, thank you so much...
- Of course - ...for spending this time. And I want to invite everybody, we've got a bunch of learning assets on the iZotope
website. We've got blogs, we've got videos, we recently published a series called
Are You Listening? where you can learn some more specifically about mastering,
we've got mixing videos, and Pro Audio Essentials, and other things, so please
visit the site. And I really appreciate your desire to keep learning.
- Absolutely.
