Mastering Engineer's EPIC MOBILE STUDIO SETUP 2022 | Brian Calhoon

okay so um Brian is back we're gonna talk about mastering the last time we spoke you told me about your mobile mastering setup so could you explain what led you to doing that and then let's get into I want to see it you've got your case here are you laptop uh no it's actually a Mac Mini I mean literally if you move everything off that table that's what I'm used to doing I've set this up in hotel rooms I've set this up all over the place and I just need you know so is there a computer monitor in there yeah all right so you told me the last time that you were using this rme converter and you really liked it yeah I've used that when I've been back place um and then I have sometimes taken that with or I actually have a little smaller apogee interface that I take with as well so I can use both but that's the one that I use when I'm at home doing most of my work and you said you had it on loan yes it was on loan but yeah we got it as a you know test unit that we were using for a lot of work that I do on the east coast and so liked it so much I kept it until finally they contacted me and said we kind of need that well this is for you so thank you that's a gift from Sweetwater and I don't um know much about it the reason why I like this one is the conversion of it is really super clean um doesn't add its own color and that's kind of what I've looked for from a mastering standpoint is I didn't want something to introduce its own warmth its own color its own Vibe I wanted something that was just clean that I was hearing basically what content was given to me and then going through this and then my monitoring setup so that way any changes I was making I could trust that I wasn't hearing changes coming from the conversion process this is really clean also there's a lot of little bits and pieces inside of here so you know the EQ to be able to do some kind of tweaking with the room as well as there's a cross feed when working with headphones to be able to kind of get more of a realistic headphone feel really super clean German engineering love it the things built like a tank so it's you know traveled with me a bit and so you were saying about a monitor so yes whoa I have a little 15-inch monitor that I take with me everything look how slick that is that comes with I have my entire Mac Mini that comes with ah 2018 Mac Mini right yes that is the last of the Intel units uh just because right now everything is compatible with it there was some weirdness with the silicone chip so I don't have it monitor stand that folds up and then power cables and everything else I gotta say everybody really liked you in the last video you've become um more likable than me come on I'm gonna need you to come back and be in more of these videos okay I can do that mobile mastering I do everything off of a pair of Odyssey lcdx headphones those are very fancy and a little pricey how much are those the lcdx Creator I think is 12 or 1300. kicked back and forth about moving to the LCD fives but that's like five grand so still debating whether or not that's what I want to do as I've mentioned to a couple clients with stuff it's been a you know buy once cry once that if you're gonna invest into it yep sometimes you just gotta do it foreign first off what is that monitor stand did it come with the monitor no so this the stand and the monitor those were Amazon finds um the stand was like I think 20 bucks and just folds up and it can work with anything from this to an iPad and then the monitor I think it's from a company called you perfect which was another Amazon fine and it's a 4k monitor that you can just use whatever you need it's USBC so I don't have to have an additional power supply oh nice the thing is I travel with this because that's what um because I had an Intel MacBook Pro for a long time that I used and that ended up working really well but that laptop like some of the MacBook Pro retinas ended up having a logic board failure with the video card for a while I was just using a different laptop that couldn't handle it and I knew that this had everything so that's why I've just always traveled with this and it's always worked and I haven't had to load a second set I have a 14 inch MacBook Pro that's um one of the M1 chips and it's great and everything but there's still some stuff that I use that is a little flaky with it so that's why is it software yeah so software plugins that have still been a little bit weird with it but yeah I've heard really good things about the army gear I am a bit of a Apollo universal audio apologist in Fanboy so it works perfectly for me but I know that rme does really um grade a conversion and make some good Hardware that I have some friends that really really love their stuff so if I do my my very very mobile setup that did not use the Army um I was actually using uh an apogee Groove holy cow so this is actually it's um just a DAC but it runs two uh two decks per left and right so it's actually four layers of chips and it just was really super clean and then the way that they did the headphone amplification on it it allowed you to use super high in paints headphones without having to have an external amplifier so for travel and everything just was clean and my only reason why I moved away from it was it does introduce a little bit of color apogee has a bit of a sound and I like it but you know wanted to move up and that's why this guy came into place and as you can see that's small enough to where I can fit that in that case with everything and then just in case I do International stuff I have a little International Tower adapter as well that goes with so that'll pop up and that can go wherever the big Point here yes is you master in headphones so cats out of the bag yes I do I worked in studios for a good number of years worked on you know large format speakers you know dynaudio M4 pluses and a whole collection of a bunch of stuff Asperger's and everything else when I started mastering I was working on speakers in all of these spaces and it was great I learned a lot kind of developed you know what worked what didn't work then as I started traveling more and more doing the design work and everything that I do for the integration firm I didn't want to stop mastering so I started to bring you know headphones with and worked on a laptop at that time I would Master something from the road and then I would check it back on speakers that worked and just kind of refined the process over and over until I noticed that okay what I'm doing from the road what I'm doing on headphones is allowing me to get the same results and so that took probably about a two to three year period of testing and going back and forth different headphones I worked on sennheisers for a little bit hd600s which were great they're kind of like an ns10 of headphones very mid-range forward super clean but amplification of them can be a big pain because there's something like a 600 ohm headphone so you can't drive them off of just the headphone out of a Macbook and that's where the groove came into play because it allowed me to use that without having to drag around another piece of gear speakers and whatnot you're talking about you know four ohms 8 ohms whatever that would be when it comes to headphones because of the size of the drivers and everything to get something that actually has a really decent output you normally end up getting a higher homage of the headphones so take sennheisers and things like that or buyer Dynamics they're going to be a really really high impedance headphone because it needs to have a higher wattage to drive the headphones themselves to actually create the way the manufacturers did them with those they sound really great but problem being it needs more than the output of say like you know a laptop or you're you know even just an iPhone when they still had headphone Jacks you'd get the sound out of them but what you'd notice is the low frequency reproduction was really really lacking so that's when you know these guys actually are a lower impedance headphone because these headphones are what's known as planar magnetics what there actually is is a super super thin diaphragm that is then sandwiched between magnets that then pulls that diaphragm back and forth so the linearity of these guys is just stupid flat almost low Distortion they also can reproduce low end very very well and that's normally the lacking bit of headphones is everybody's like hey I don't really have bass I don't really have this but with these guys I've actually been able to get that low frequency reproduction where I'm making decisions and I'm not questioning the translation of them so here's everything that I literally have so this whole setup has traveled with me and I'm able to just set this up in a hotel room set this up in a friend's place that I'm staying at or wherever I've been working because my work that I do on the design side I travel to New York City a lot I go to Washington DC pretty much wherever we have projects go and I didn't want to really stop mastering stuff because of the guys that I've worked with and clients that I'm building hence all of this that you see here that fits into this case that you know pack it up jump on a plane sometimes I get questioned about having a whole computer and a monitor but eventually security doesn't even ask and you just move past it set it up and there you go you're able to kind of continue and do whatever you need and yes I do travel with a full-size keyboard and mouse everything boots up and then I have my Pro Tools and everything that I can go ahead and launch and I have my external drive that's got everything on there and I'm good to go a little dock over there a little anchor or something uh yes so that's there because of the fact that my ilock is still USB and so when using this and then using the dongle for the MX stuff I was out of USB A's so yeah that's why that's there and then also with the groove I needed another uh usba Port so you're in Pro Tools are you working off like a template so um I do have a template that I have that predominantly just boots it up I have all of my metering plugins that I use for loudness and for frequency response and then I have a Vu meter that's inside there actual chain wise I don't really work off of this is my set mastering chain that's sure everything gets run through there's a lot of different plugins and processing that I've kind of curated my collection of them over the years and the way that I view that is they're all tools to work on each specific project I may have a very new plugin that I'm using that works really great on you know this one you know set genre that I'm dealing with but then doesn't work on something else and so I have you know a Shadow Hills emulation or I have some other things that I'll throw in and whatnot there's a couple things that are very much like the Swiss Army knives that touch almost everything and that's my fab filter Q3 I use that kind of almost across the board just for filtering in any sort of Correction accused before I start running everything into analog emulations that is kind of my Swiss Army thing and I've Loved Fab filter cute you know their EQ plugin ever since the very first iteration their their bundle is a rock solid bundle man I love their limiter too the pro l so the pro L2 and even Pro all before that I used to be shamefully addicted to it yeah and I would use that a bunch I have ventured a little bit away from it because I feel like it has a bit of a sound and sometimes I want something different so there's a couple of limiters that I do play with and but for a long time it was almost like that always sat at the end of my chain that was always kind of my final touch and I'd tweaked through settings to make things fit whatever was the best for that specific content mastering template I will say I have always been stayed away from mastering like offering mastering for people I mean I under understand conceptually how it historically has been done sort of the purpose of it I don't really know like the reason for the season except for just like I want it to sound really good and I want it to fit into a playlist of this kind of stuff okay it's where when this comes on it doesn't sound like oh this is drastically different okay so here is the overarching philosophy that I have of mastering it's kind of the Hippocratic Oath Do no harm you know I just pulled up this session of the single that I that I did with Tony Anderson so my mentality with this is Tony gave me a really decent mix I know Tony will honestly tell you that he's the crappiest mixer but he's not he's lying to you he's actually really decent so the goal of this was it's a very intimate cover of uh Bruce String's Jane's Secret Garden so the whole feel when I listened to this down the first time was what do I need to if anything do and so hearing it the things that I thought when I was listening through it was you know there's a little bit of low end that was kind of filtered too much to the sides and then really how do I bring that vocal forward to where it sat and then overall just loudness to bring it up to that way it's competitive but not crushed I'm not necessarily the mastering engineer that's like hey I'm gonna crush it beyond belief just to get you up to competition I'm very much in love with Dynamics and overall balance so that way what is that speak for the track the best and not well it's going to be on a playlist so let's squash the hell out of it yeah that's really not my thing what's right for the song exactly with this track as you can see it's like pro-q I really didn't do anything that's literally just doing a filter at the bottom just to clean up any sub-harmonics and then from there this is a emulation of a masilic EQ and I'm running it in Ms so I'm just filtering out some bottom end on the sides everything else is left alone and then from there there it's hitting a 2bq what I did is on the low shelf um I'm just filtering everything down and then there's a little bit of top end that's getting tweaked on so plug-in wise just stuff that I like for analog emulation I'll use from acoustica or from plug-in Alliance those are the two that I kind of lean towards for a lot of things my favorite very mu emulation is actually from Pulsar audio so Pulsar audio does an emulation of the manly massive passive in the manly very Mew and so I will use those pretty much if I'm looking for that sort of flavor what's the Vu that you like so this is from TV pro audio it's actually free so nice and I use that for view meter uh voxango span is what I use for an fft and then you lean loudness is everything that kind of sits over here that just you know oh yeah I'm able to sit there and then that just allows me to monitor kind of My overall loudness and frequency readout and everything the way I work is I have you know my main track that's here that's doing all my processing and then that filters up to a print track and then that's where the meters are all feedering off of the final level I kind of went through and I don't know maybe some of your viewers and everybody else they've kind of played the game with waves waves has been great I used them for a number of years and then as I've you know used and played with more things kind of found out what really gave me the best output and what was closest to what I had used working in studios and working on analog Hardware plug-in Alliance has really done great with that acoustica I really love their stuff it's just super CPU heavy and so I only use a few bits and pieces of these specific items and then they get played with all of it the limiter has we were talking earlier this ended up being with uh DMG with Limitless DMG audio is manufacturer and then this was uh Limitless their their Mastery limiter a mastering limiter is like a multi-band limiter this one is multi-band but like fabfilter L2 that's just a Broadband limiter same thing with well ozone as well ozone depending upon what version you're playing with because there's like their IRC 3 4 and XYZ this one you can change it to be either a Broadband or you can select up to six bands and then filter them through but with this it's also a two-stage limiter you can run the multiband that's doing more of a dynamic limiting and then you have your Peak limiter that's after and then you have a balance between them I'm only using like 10 of the dynamic limiter in this it's predominantly just catching little bits of Peaks because this track if you listen to it is very mellow very much kind of like a warm hug to be into it and not necessarily very heavy transient based so the limiter on this is mostly just given that little extra push to get it up to volume yeah but not necessarily hey I got to control Dynamics to then get this to play well that's why this one up ended up doing a job on it I think I put the Fab filter through it and it just kind of gave it a little bit of an edge that didn't fit the vibe of the song so that's something that was done entirely on headphones that's the session that I mastered it on the only difference is I did that with the same thing on headphones I just didn't do it while I was traveling and for people who want to listen to that can you again it's Tony Anderson the song's called Tony Anderson the song is called Secret Garden and it is up on Spotify Apple music you know anywhere that you stream yeah I love Tony stuff now there's one little thing that I didn't mention so we talked about the Army we talked about the Odyssey LCD x's and everything both of those are great there's a little extra secret piece that I use so I use sound ID and I have their EQ profile but then I also have my own extra little nodes that I use to adjust a little bit okay so so this is a an EQ from sound ID these headphone correction yeah so it's doing its own little bits but as you can see because with them I can turn them off but I have my own EQ that adjusts a little two little notches because I don't like is how much they're pushing there I have it run through there and then a company called good Hertz I use their mid side because sometimes on headphones which you end up getting is everything kind of sounds separated and you lose either either everything gets pushed to the center or it gets too far to the sides and you lose that kind of Sound Stage that you get with speakers where everything's in front of you I use mid side to kind of adjust the stereo image a little bit so it feels like what I was used to hearing sitting in front of speakers and then my last stage is I use a can opener from them which this is a crossfeed algorithm so cross feed for anybody that is hearing me say that a couple times it doesn't know what it means is when you listen on speakers you know your left ear hears both the left and right speakers on headphones you kind of put them in their own bubble so what Crossview does is it corrects that so it takes a little bit of the right and then filters it into the left and you know inverse for the other side because if you look at this when I click the amount you can see its own little EQ where it's filtering in some of the center for the low end but it leaves the high frequencies spread wide what that does is if you ever listen on headphones and then immediately take them off and listen on speakers you notice that your kicking your Bass feels in headphones without something like this like it's wide and you lose that Center percussiveness but using something like this it pushes it back to the middle and all of a sudden I'm like hey this now feels much more similar and granted it takes a little bit of tweaking and beating up and whatnot but the cross feed that's in here works really well but I can't fine tune it as much as I can here which is why I ended up using a software version of it can opener Studio cool so and I've run that through a program called Sound Source so that way everything that I listen to on headphones for referencing so Apple music Spotify title anything else filters through this chain so that way any reference thing I listen to I'm not having to constantly bounce back and forth Pro Tools Safari Spotify music it's all being redirected up through this chain that goes out through the ADI too sound sources from a company called Rogue amoeba nice that's that's the setup so I literally take my Mac Mini out when I'm at home I plug that into my ultrawide set this back up on my desk and I'm good to go if I'm on the road for a month a week whatever I toss this stuff all together and there you go I handle whatever gets sent my way I've worked in mastering studios I've been in mastering rooms I love them they're beautiful spaces when they're done and all the geometry and the correction is done perfectly I build my own space if I was going to be in one place for a long period of time but because I'm nomadic in my work and everything else this allows me to continue with the art and creativity and facilitating everybody else that I work with to then keep them and their music getting out to the world the other thing is is I have to thank uh Glenn Schick because he's the first person that was a mastering engineer that I read an article about who transitioned from being in a studio that he built and did a whole bunch of stuff and then decided I want to be a nomad and I don't want to be locked in a dark room all day I want to see the world and so I read a couple articles from what he did I'm not as pro-level as him so I can't afford a ten thousand dollar converter that he travels with sure but hey this is done well he's using the odyssey's but he's using the flagship ones that are five grand but kind of playing off that so thank you Glenn for sharing your trials and tests because it allowed me to venture down that same path thank you for doing this first off bring this over and show me this I'll just say anyone who has any questions feel free to leave them down in the comments and uh if they want to give you a follow-up on your Instagram on in the description so that is the company that I work for that we do all the design work so you know you can look at that and you can see all the other stuff that we do that's the other part of you know me besides mastering which is doing all the system design work and room design and everything else that keeps me on the road and that's why this is facilitated cool thank you so much for doing this thank you bye everybody

Channel: Andrew Masters

Views: 35,349

Keywords: home studio, studio tour, home recording, mixing, how to, aea, ribbon mic, gear review, recording tech, technology, affordable, producing music, investment, recording studio, recording, audio engineering, productions, music, millennial, mixer, home, diy, universal audio, luna, uad, plugins, soundtoys, studio, drums, big drums, drum sounds, sounds, sweetwater, senheiser, coffee, session, consulting, andrew, masters, vintage king, dangerfox, studio desk, Epic studio gear

Id: LJD9LHiC0aM

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2022