Bob Ludwig: The Mastering Engineer's Mastering Engineer! - Warren Huart: Produce Like A Pro

this is the best job in the world I would never complain about this job even though it's pretty long hours they have to but it's great I mean every day it's like having a very complex puzzle to figure out hello it's Warren shirt here we're in Portland Maine is really really cold why are we here well we just left sunny Los Angeles and it was warm and it was sunny we've flown out here to meet two rather wonderful people actually a whole combination of wonderful people that two very wonderful people mr. Adam am a very good friend of mine great mastering engineer and the legend himself mr. Bob Ludwig the mastering engineers mastering engineer so here we are at gateway mastering let's get in an interview and tortured is to a wonderful gentleman leading freezing [Applause] [Music] hello everybody I hope you're doing marvelously well oh wait Bob Ludwick how are you I'm very well thank you very well thank you ever so much for making time in your incredibly busy schedule you're really welcome I'm sorry they had to be here on the coldest day of the season so far so well I mean I I grew up with you know variable weather coming from from England but poor old Eric who's sitting behind the camera there is born and bred LA native Oh tough tough tough 24 years old he'd never seen snow before well it's about time it's all I can say although it's like compacted ice at the moment yes it's pretty treacherous walking out there so so speaking of which so obviously with that not obviously but you're a New Yorker originally I was born in Savannah Georgia and then after the first year I moved up to Westchester County just north of New York City and so I was there until fourth grade and then we moved to Upper Westchester County in fact where my mentor of a Phil Ramone used to live before he passed away and we so I was there and then I went to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester New York so I was there for five years I was working on my master's degree there as well and when I was finishing up my master's degree there was a recording I was in the recording Department from as early as I could possibly be there and there was this jazz program during the summer session and it had to be recorded and they wanted it to be improved and so they hired Phil Ramone to come up this to come up to teach this recording workshop and when I was just kind of de-facto assistant and one of my goals as a trumpet player was to play the Bach B minor mass with a really high you know piccolo trumpet and I was also in the utica symphony I was a principal trumpet player in the Utica New York symphony now and one day they said oh we're gonna do the B minor mass for Christmas I was like oh and I wasn't waiting to do this quite yet you know I I thought it'd be about 10 years from now in my career my trumpet playing career that I'd be doing that and but it was great Eastman lonely went there piccolo trumpet for a month and my teacher and I did nothing but play the piccolo trumpet for the month and I performed it twice it was broadcast on the radio everybody loved it and amazing when it was over is like hmm not what am I going to do that was my goal that I already said so when we were finishing the recording workshop and philosophy if I wanted to come work for him at the end and I was thinking like well and when I was in high school I couldn't decide if I wanted to be an engineer or a musician and thank God my musical teacher and my high school talked me into going to Eastman because believe me I would you can pick up engineering for this kind of stuff but to do know that kind of music the way that I know it and my master's was in music literature so I know tons of music literature it's really wonderful today right that's how I got into it and so I was of working with Phil for a year at ANR recording and he all the Elliott Scheiner was there within a few weeks and Shelley yeah cos also very good friend of mine yes Shelley and I started within one week of each other Wow yeah so yeah so I've known shelleyan l's a long time and I was gonna say like so I was there and everything all the people that started worked for Phil had to learn how to cut discs because like since 1974 this isn't really true so much but before that discs were really limited and how things could be what could be put on to it you know that what I started with a fixed pitch lathe where you have a gear ratio and you set it to a hundred five lines per inch or 130 lines per inch and and there were those systems if the bass was too loud it would literally cross over the groove next to it so so you had to learn how to do that however I was somehow genetically predisposed to mastering and so I never got out of that room there and I'm so an are was the first independent studio to have the anointment analog computer lathe the BMS 66 I think it was and and Steve Tamra who imported the lays and of this country I guess kept the manual whatever no nobody could quite figure it out so I feel locked myself in the Aaron Barron one of those maintenance men into the room and said don't come out of there take out this thing figured out nice so we figured out how to do it one thing that was really kind of cool was in order for the it just was never aligned quite right and but we had the Scully preview deck with the advance head and then the playback head and I found out that if you lowered it the advant you the thing would cut a lot better and it looked just about right the fact is that if the lathes was was opera you know aligned properly none of this would have happened but anyway this turned out has turned out to be a good thing because the word got around town that leather weed cheats the preview on the lathe and cuts hotter was like a marketing thing that I had no didn't realize it was in retrospect it was like people were saying that all the time right so and because I knew how to read scores from Eastman record companies like Nonesuch started working with a NR recording and oh well so I could cut their discs you know mm-hm I cut all of the Nonsuch catalog one Tracy Stern was there and then when the other people have it but I've still done work for them and I still do work for them now he just did a Katie Lange thing and we did a Steve rice pulse record so I've done quite a lot of almost all of Steve Rice's stuff for Nonesuch I've mastered so I learned how to cut records really well and then I started after a year and a half there this brand new cutter head that Georg Norman himself not even his team but gehrig Norman had his own little lab and his factory one day he came out with the sx-70 68 cutting head which was like going from you know seven-and-a-half to thirty EPS it was a major advance and cutting technology and so he he came out with this and I was first person in the Western Hemisphere to try this Steve timber game and I said here put this on the way then we put it up and aligned it and was like oh my god this is amazing and for whatever reason not Phil but the management of A&R didn't want to spend the money for this thing I was going like oh man out how good I am I could never compete with this this quantum leap and the technology so there was this brand-new company that was going to open up with not only the sx60 a cut her head but the the new solid-state cutting amps that Loy Minh had and scooter tape machines and Telefunken em Tenet's that was called sterling sound and I became their first employee so al yeah and eventually became vice president there and I guess in some on talking about my flow of my career at one point sterling sound was sold to a public company called ocg technology and then that company bought the we're at 110 West 57th Street on the top floor and below that was mercury record studios and then on the fourth floor was mercury records cutting rooms and so they bought that so they owned to cutting rooms and they renamed that other one master disc so at one point the Li and Joe who owns drilling sound I don't know they got paranoid whatever they asked me to sign this employment contract it was so it would be so um illegal nowadays you know any was very hurt by that because I felt they gave him everything I could you know get get the estudio established and so I ended up moving over to master disc and was the next floor down two floors down three three four thousand - the seventh - the fourth yeah so yeah that was there was quite something yeah that's been some awkward elevator moment yeah well I don't that that whole thing went down when Lee and Joe decided to buy the company back so we came private with them once again so yeah so it was that was pretty crazy so and then you know through the years I've always wanted to have my own place and master disc moved from 110 to they moved over by the American Bible Society in Atlantic Records in New York by Broadway and then we moved to a 40 West 45th Street and I I just became not happy with the way my rooms were I thought my rooms were getting worse rather than better you know and so I really investigated starting my own place and and I found a great business partner a bob clear mountains then manager a Dan crew who still lives here in Portland helped me with a great business plan to get the place started and not make any crazy in the States the only the only the only thing just like with any be new business you have to work seven days a week for about a year yeah to make sure you have enough cash flow but at a rate he really did a great job with that and then early on we parted ways and so I'm the sole owner of the company now and and it's it's been great and when we had our business plan leaving New York we figured that maybe only 40 percent of people that went and attended sessions in New York would come here up until the record companies collapsed because of Napster suddenly came a third of the size it was and budgets went down up until then we had more people attend sessions than I did in New York which was it was a total surprise you know lots of people came up here and it was really great and still a lot of people do but it's not it's not like you know three times a week anymore that kind of thing so but it's it's wonderful so and I've never regretted ever moving here it's just wonderful I just love it even when it's cold you know I got it if you're someone from LA and you don't think the cold and that's cool but I like it I think Eric's having the adventure of coming yeah we're going to go out and have some Maine law - tonight oh great yeah I'll get better than that moon Adam of course yeah yeah I heard going a street and company which is one of the best restaurants here I know I'm very excited I love the cold maybe not all the time to LA but and it's interesting because when I was asked by the by the record label whether I wanted to fly out with the first of all because it was tapes hmm and I think there's probably also that reality as well as like you don't really want a ship a whole ton of tapes and if some guys willing to come out and babysit and be yeah yeah I was extremely excited to come home yeah and what an adventure I remember flying it was like a little hopper though when we came in this time we flew through South Carolina and it was like a some kind of Airbus but the last time I did it was a little like a little tiny umbrella yeah right yeah like yeah that's improved a lot yeah jets now but Oh Jess yep yep but uh back when we were doing the pilgrim record for Eric Clapton it was so funny because this is long long ago enough that he he flew to New York on the Concorde right Wow and then got on one of these puddle jumpers there you know that was back when there was mad cow disease in the UK I don't regret Louis so there's nobody getting cheeseburgers there and when Eric got in the door and said hello first words is we're gonna get a really good cheeseburger you know yeah we had one last night yeah yeah there was a place called rubies that made all organic you know meat hamburgers and they thought they were the best in the world and to me they tasted like the best I'd ever had and so I said to Eric I said what do you think about this they say that's the best in the world he says he says I think they're tied for best in the world he said he says there's something out in LA called what's called a fat burger or something like that and it's the antithesis of it it's just like grease and onions yeah yeah yeah but he said but they're both great you know fat burgers yeah sort of yeah I don't know I never thought of fat burger like that that's quite I mean it they're they're good but yes mmm but I suppose it's an acquired taste I mean in America is a whole different level when you come from England and you come here and you know it's an art form in euralia absolutely I must say you know I've been in a lot of mastering studios I would say yours might well be the most well equipped studio binning oh so you have a lot of choice now there's a couple of other guys I don't want to get into a big fight here with people but in general this you have a lot of equipment do you I suppose I'll go to ask you because everybody's probably asked this question how much you now analog versus digital what's your sort of process so was it varying from song to song album to album well I would say it's pretty much album to album it really does depend on what needs to be done it depends on I think just like with you as you're producing and mixing and you get like this groove like you have this image in your brain of what you think the thing a lot of sound like and you're just working heuristically to try to make it sound like it does in your brain and that's the same thing here and if I you know like it's been very interesting to see like for years like when when I first started working with Pro Tools that back at master disc we did something and it was supposed to be they would say it would be a perfect clone of like if you whatever you put on it would come back out and it wasn't and so he called up was in Brookes Evans Brooks Brooks Evans who is what the founder and that told them that what we'd found and he called that said yeah yeah you're right and so he they changed the code this is way back when it was just starting so they've had that part right for a long time now it's great anyway so you know when the first plug-ins came in it was just I remember when the first digital EQ came in when we started working in digital at master disc in 1978 the first thing I cut was from a sound stream digital machine the Tom Stockham had designed and we did I think it was a bolero for telluric records yeah it was very cool anyway when we had a Sony or no it was JVC made a digital equalizer and it wasn't very good and Sony made one that was like you if you put like one notch of 10k it'd be like mmm I think it's better just flat that kind of it digitally keys sounded really bad until Daniel vais from vice engineering started making the oversampled eqi's that he made and now you know as he knows it was just a slow progression like for a long time you wouldn't think of you working in the box because it was so bad sounding and then as you know it got better and then they got into 32-bit floating-point and then they got into people that really instead of coming taking their EQ out of some manual that had existed since 1950 because you know the theory behind digital was pretty well set by the late 30s really it was just a matter of time they get the computer speed up where you could do music in real time anyway instead of taking out of some engineering book that people really thought and listened to it and you know like Bruce Jackson at apogee designed filters for Sony machines and Mitsubishi machines so that they would sound a lot better because they had a good handle on that they had their you v-22 dither that was the first people to really concentrate on that and make that great and then as the plugins finally kept evolving you know you'd go like oh hey that's a pretty good one and I think I'll use that and after a while you know like for the the digital Maximizer it was really nothing in the analog domain that could do that quite like they did that so pretty soon you'd be doing everything analog at the end you'd be a hybrid situation go into the digital at the end just to use one or two plugins that there was no correlation for in the analog domain and then as you get where I'm coming with this it just got better and better and better and now there's so many good plugins and the math behind the coding of the consoles internally is so much better you you can you know easily do things completely in the box and I think a lot of it as a function of like if someone if I got a mix like from someone like Bob clear mountain who's like probably the world's greatest mixer his stuff is so close to begin with and he knows like Bob doesn't care for analog tape because it comes out of his console exactly like you wants it and if it's not that he doesn't think it sounds good and analog tape is usually not that it's usually warmer ie muddier and where with a bass pump you know or something like that somebody sends me is really really good and so it doesn't need much usually and and you know you don't have to and at one time this was a huge problem having to go under the analog domain work with it and then re-encoded into the digital domain again so with his this was some of his first stuff I would do entirely in the box because it was good but then BOOM you know George Massenburg had the MDW equalizer and Oxford started coming out with some great stuff and you know some other but the fab people in France really good stuff you know that is really great and there's now a lot of things and especially noise reduction like when I was at master disc we were the first studio in the East Coast the onus onyx Aleutians we had the first digital DAW actually the very first digital DAW is considered to be Tom Stockham sound stream computer that he built to do editing in Utah but after that the sonic solutions was and they were the first people that they developed no noise Andy Moore at the sonic was the guy that developed no noise and it was very cool because I remember at one time Tom Stockham had come to master disc and we were doing something for new world records and there was some engineers must have been asleep at the wheel like it was this mass and everytime the choir got loud it would distort and so they never released it and then that so Tom Stockman was there and he was talking on the phone with anymore and anymore would send us recode updates and was back on the three-and-a-half inch floppy disks back then so he'd put it in and we'd have this new software and try it and pretty soon he developed a way to clean up that distortion so it could be released which was quite an amazing thing I mean like incredible yeah I mean like before there's nothing remotely like that in history so so you know that again all those no noise things or things that are really only exist in the digital domain do you also find I know from the mixing perspective what I like about digital is I can get really detailed with EQ Oh completely yeah Jeff balding and Don Henley were here working we were working on his solo album love Jeff yak ask country yeah yeah County is so talented yeah so anyway this is something that they've been as you can imagine Don and Jeff we're just you know beating this thing over and over and over again refining and refining it are you finding it and so we found it was the first time that you could easily hear a tenth of a DB stuff which I always thought was not true I knew that years ago the clear mountain work this with this thing I had the indigo girl 'some normally the mixes are like mixed six or four or whatever and I get these I'm loading it in and it's like mix 31:40 I'm like what happy Bobby death you know it's the vocal still not right and the indigo girls have got ears like I'm really amazing and I'll tell you a Frank Zappa story that's maybe even more amazing but they've got very amazing ears and so they were saying like oh the vocal still not right right and so I used or jizz MDW EQ and the TC 5000 and I took 1 point 6 K and I raised it 6/10 of a DB and and I was Emily yeah ah yeah now it sounds right a gun but maybe it's too much you know someone said only the point 2 on there and and she could reliably tell when it was in or out I mean it was really quite amazing that's amazing so yeah so I yeah digital because the impulse response isn't smeared by all the analog tape which is a positive for some things but not for everything but because the impulse response is so strong with digital you can get so finely detailed you know you know people always talk about tape versus digital being better but you know I can make a digital recording of your tape that you wouldn't be able to tell which was which but you can never make it you know what's the other way around yes yeah yeah a tape of something digital and not know which was which you know yeah there you go but the best years that I worked with is still Frank Zappa years ago he called up master disc and said I need a week to master my record this is the shake your booty that joke by chicka really mixed very well mixed to one of my favorite mm city of tiny lights yes yeah yeah great great record I remember at the end I told Franco says I think I've worked on a masterpiece but I can't play it for my mom Bobby yeah what is it brown nice little boy take about an hour and a tower power yes exactly yellow golden shower yes that lyric al yeah it was great anyway yeah there's definitely like I actually played that in my art class when I was at school oh great double album amazing album everybody check out show you beauty and I hey I had girls like upset with me how the guys were a lot of trouble yeah this Frank yeah I'd have to listen to it with mm nineteen years and see if some of those lyrics are just too horrible oh yeah there's no PC not at all but some amazing guitar playing oh my go guitar playing and then sorry to go on this tangent but then the that there's this tracks where he's got like a bass line at the bass lines in 4/4 and the drums are in 7th yeah years since I've had since I've thought about it but and and he took two different performances and just stick them together it's just incredible yeah really amazing now most of that album is from live performances that were all over dud than just turned into whatever so it's just amazing anyway though it was that we a machinist we had a similar setup here I had my lathes here double ways to to lays I would operate simultaneously my console was here a client a sofa there and then the speakers and Frank was there in front of me and when he said he wanted a week like we said nobody needs a week is that's all I need a week and so he gave him like three days or something like that and great as Joe chicka release mixes were on this and there it was amazing he had this idea in his head for it to sound like the way you hear it sounding now and there was just like so many moves you know like even single words and it was just unbelievable anyway in order to even cut a reference disc I like memorized all these moves because they can't you couldn't read the card by the time it's like let's see 1 k plus 2 it like three moves would have gone by by that you know that kind of thing so I was doing a practice run and I was doing all these moves and everything and there was I knew that I had gotten everything absolutely right and there was a snowman equalizer which I could get out and show you where he could make of still of it and take a picture of it whatever and it had sharp medium and broad for the bandwidths of the different eq's and the the EQ was 250 Hertz minus 2 DB and it was supposed to be medium and at this one place in this song it came and I just I just hit it really fast and it popped up into the sharp instead of the medium and this is just 2 dB at 250 Hertz sharp versus medium and frank raises his hand and says something sound quite right there oh yeah I said you're right this first time I miss something backed up the tape and put it to medium he goes ah that's better we continued on yeah I love that story but I mean like that that was something sorry Mike you're okay that was really a mind blower for me you know it's so Oh an insane town yeah yes it was really fantastic so we got I got one of the masterpiece of a record mmm three days yeah I'm gonna go back and listen to it we've reviewed enthusiasm knowing that you spent three days mastering yeah III don't know if it's up there anymore but when Gayle Zappa was alive I used to work with her estate and we remaster the shake your booty record and I remembered in my brain all these things that we did and so there's a probably a high-resolution version of it available right now so I'll have to check that yeah so that's great I live in Laurel Canyon so I'm oh you're right there ranked at the bottom of a straw my gosh perfect no I love that I I remember being in England and looking at these albums and being like I have to be I have to be in America I have to be in Los I have to be around have to be up the street yeah it's it's beautiful that's such an a wonderful record so I'd like to do a little bit of gear talk if you don't mind because I know maybe people like a better yeah I think probably the speakers are you know I was joking when it came in that I thought it I have seen them before obviously but still that first impression when you come in it looks like 2001 Space Odyssey I mean these are these are pretty massive yeah and they're way almost 800 pounds apiece 800 pounds yeah so why so you got two different 880 hours you've got you got one inch and 1/2 inch what is what is the what's this this is going section temper parravicini esoteric audio research tube playback amps and this head has two different playback head so you can align this and then at the bottom is the Aria class a solid state discrete solid state amps playback amps nice and so you can align them both and then just flip back and forth between them and see what you like and of course Oh fantastic the problem is that the producer usually says can he give me the base of the tube with the top of the solid state I don't know I can't do that yeah but they're really good in fact we just did the new Mark Knopfler record that's really wonderful it's done at British Grove studios it's one of the world's best studios and that was all mixed to one inch tape completely analog and that was reproduced with these tube amplifiers so it some credit sounds really great yeah amazing and then there's a half inch here yep and then out in the hallway we have a two inch 8-track when we were doing a lot of the surround sound for DTS CDs and and the super audio CD disc and surround quite a few projects would come in on that 2 inch 8-track there we go two inch 8-track that's amazing yeah and we use six of the tracks of course right Wow and yeah we did there was a clean I think it was Night at the Opera was came off of that that is actually my favorite rep yeah and and being the Roy Orbison black and white night concert I don't know if you know that one yeah that was really great and then right now the machine out in the hall is a modified for one inch and so when I've been working with Jack White on blunderbuss and Lazaretto he wanted to have the vinyl cut from with no digital involved whatsoever not even a pedal so he and the Lance usually mixed the records and the senate's me on one inch and then so I would master in the analog domain from the one inch to the other one inch and that's what they would cut from so it was that was so it was master but no digital in there anywhere so amazing mm-hmm yeah so some GM le Q's yes so when you're up at Adams room you'll his room is the based on the same ratios is this room which are excellent except because he's up on a mezzanine and there's rock right beneath him it's not as tall or as wide or as long as us but we have both basically the same gear except this room was designed for a surround like right now we only listen to the left and right speakers here everything else you see is just for surround sound and we have speakers in the rear closets that come up they roll out for the 5.1 so this room and so Adam always when we have a 5-1 project he'll come down here and see and work here because this is rooms really set up for it so so we have six channels of GML EQ which is yep really good for precision work you know it has a sharp peel on it and you can it's just a really transparent equalize here like if if this was set to zero and just you pressed in and out you'd have a hard time telling that it was in the circuit and then on the other side of the coin are these tube manly massive passive equalizers six channels of that and with this you could tell if it was bypassed if it wasn't the circuit or not right you know it's got a sound of its own which is what we're looking for often and this is great for just colouring you know tone painting overall impressions you know it if I was to generalize would that be something that came in specifically very digital and you wanted to add some auditory yeah if something was suffered from what we would call digit itis yeah yes we would definitely use that and even if the thing was EQ pretty properly we might even put it through that and bypass oh I think just to use the iron and the tubes from that right so it's really good and then down here we have six channels of the millenia twin comm which is both solid-state and tube and then six channels of the ssl and done a couple of specialized gear like our consoles made by SPL in germany sound performance laboratory and this is the SPL is the only company I know of that uses 120 volt DC rails so this thing will not distort it will not do it because it's got so much juice yeah yeah so both Adams Adams has the 2 channel version of this and this is the 8 channel version of the SPL console amazing and this is an equaliser they make that if I had turned it on in advance you could see it's it's motorized so if you turn one it'll move both of them at the same time amazing the idea behind that is that you would buy six channels of this and only use the front plate here and you'd move this and six channels of your a remote analog iki would be moving but before we we didn't have to go that far that unfortunately is very expensive and you got the why she were talking about that yeah yes yeah we have the both the equalizers and the their compressor the compressor down there so yeah which is also and also over here is six channels of their DSR so I mean an insane amount of equipment here you're using is there any particular clocking that you like a you have a prayer now we have the the antelope the Angela yeah yeah we used to use other clocking and then we ended up with the antelope and so we have one atomic clock that feeds my Trinity here and Adams Trinity from the same clock some elephant testing yeah it's good so yeah it's yeah when I had I hardly ever run out of things in my brain that I need to you know when I'm mastering I am envision how it should sound and then figure out what knobs to move to make us I like it does my head and I seldom run out of gear but a lot of times I will you know we have a storeroom that has some older gear yeah and then I'll think why that thing in there is just what I need you know so and then you've got guys like Jack wire very specific yeah they come in with a vision they're like we need this this yeah yeah yeah so that's great you know that sounds like funny keeps keeps the job interest and you're not like this is the best job in the world I would never complain about this job even though it's pretty long hours yeah but it's great I mean every day it's like having a very complex puzzle to figure out you know and do you have a monitoring level that you know is going to like preserve your ears for the day oh yeah think about a monitor 85 dB you know that some of the flash peaks might be a little bit louder but not much and you're allowed allowed to have about eight hours of exposure of that a day right and like I never ever walk out of here with my ears ringing or you know anything like that so yeah in fact that's a and I can't go to rock concerts without earplugs you know sure it's just not in the game to to do that you know it is great the real codes to go so much better since they start using digital consoles if you noticed that how silently now it's so much more controlled yeah yeah because guys are going away and mixing the show they're recording the show then going back and mixing it and then coming back and all the moves are programmed in there's a lot more I've noticed a massive improvement last five or 10 years you know it's great yeah I think the Grammys live sound people kind of pioneered that oh they did yeah so they would record the rehearsal and then do a mix and then put that put it up for the show you know it's great that's amazing our studio with the conceptual design for my room like as I was saying when I one of the reasons I left New York was you know I wasn't happy with my rooms and I wanted to do something really right and so I was talking with dr. Peter Dantonio from art PG diffusers that make the diffusers in the back of the room like what's the best possible sound we can get and that would have been 1992 and we were designing everything and so he came up with this conceptual design and had all the right ratios this is built on some Louden an acoustician named Loudon has this ratio that the rooms built on and and one of the things he wanted to do was to isolate the speaker from the floating floor so that the sound wasn't transmitted through the wooden floor so this is like the floating floor and that's the concrete that goes around the speaker and when we were doing it we asked him how much leeway should we give ourselves it says well six inches but when he gave us the dimensions for it from the wall and from the back wall side wall and back wall where to place the tweeter we put it exactly where he said to put it and turned up the monitoring part pot and I'd never heard anything sound that good in my life so I think he and he would tried moving around I think he really nailed it so and these are all at the moment yeah these are on and they're like oh it's completely silent mmm insane that's fed by these dual bridge cello mark 2 performance amplifiers well that'll put out like 4,000 watts into one ohm to probably weld with us if you wanted that's amazing so these where these main and what I this is made by Bill eggleston his dad bill Eagles from the third his dad William Eggleston is the father of modern color photography if you go to much fought in the Museum of Art in New York or the Museum of Modern Art in New York there's always William Eggleston color prints and just like his daddy this is from Memphis and but this the speakers this is Dynaudio woofer Dynaudio a sitar tweeter and these are more L mid-range drivers which is really cool and then we use transparent audio cable if you look in the back there there's a it looks like a tiny little vacuum cleaner would hit a transparent audio speaker cable which does impedance matching for the between the amp and the speaker and it's really pretty amazing when we got our the this SPL console we had to take the whole room down we took it down to the floating floor and rewired it was we already had transparent RTK but we we rewired it with new transparent cable as their table technology had advanced in the time since we had it and clients like I've been working on the Rolling Stones reissues back then and Joe decline in the head of aapko came to my room after the change and he couldn't believe the difference in the sound it was just from the rewiring and the end the console and things like that that's amazing yes I remember being in this room with that with the FRA records and just I'd not heard the record like that yeah a lot of people that so and don't hear why some experience you know I'll hear noises on mixes that they'd worked on for a long time and never heard you know I remember the low end I remember like and remember hearing like some extra low in the vocals I was like always yeah so yeah I never I'd never heard it like that but and I've never heard again like that since but the good news is you probably have so much experience with the speakers you use yeah that probably don't do there anymore that problem no exactly I've said this many many times before I've learned more you know more from mastering engineers about my mixes and then anybody else mm-hmm yeah yeah don't be like oh there's a little you've got a little 150 bump and you're like what is that why do I have that yeah right thank you ever so much my pleasure we're gonna go in we're gonna go and talk to Adam great great it's gonna be fantastic excellent good yeah and I met Adam because of working with you yeah we came here did something I went upstairs and hung out with him and yeah Adams amazing I mean he's been here quite a while now and he was so mature even the very first time the first years he was here it was just always amazing like wow you really that centered you know and then together and he is that's great unbelievable yeah so thank you ever so much for sharing your time with us and allowing us to come here oh you're welcome even I mean it's nicer look I'm sitting here with a shirt on and well meanwhile it's about - whatever outside it's great I know beautiful good thank you so much all right [Music] [Music]

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 105,228

Rating: 4.9592147 out of 5

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio, Bob Ludwig, Mastering Engineer, Gateway Mastering.

Id: SJIfEhMJt5M

Length: 44min 24sec (2664 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/HamAlien]

MAINE, babyyyyy!

[u/cryptobozo]

Nice!

[u/rogermoog]

Great interview with Bob, with wonderful history of audio mastering and the changes the industry has gone through.