We met Shawn Hatfield (owner of Audible Oddities and main engineer) when we were wrapping up our first EP. He came recommended from some friends and I was thrilled when he lived in the same nieghborhood as me. Since then he has been a huge asset to Solid Bump, assisting in helping us balance making our tracks hit in club while not making them brickwalls of compresssed noise (see our post about this problem). He has stopped by my home studio to make suggestions on problematic mixdowns. All in all an awesome and incredibly helpful resource.
So what is a audio enginner? What do they do? Why should you not just do it yourself with your VST plug-ins? Shawn was cool enough to answer some questions for us. Sit down and put on your thinking cap… Audible Oddities will be dropping knowledge jewels.
Read the full interview after the jump.
Solid Bump: You have a rich background with your personal music, tell us a bit about it and how it influences how you work as a engineer.
Audible Oddities: I’ll keep it simple. I first started DJ’ing hip-hop in the late 80’s. I think 1988 is about right. Over the years this led to dance music, and eventually production. In the late 90’s I started releasing records on various European labels with my most well-known work being the albums on Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux. I gave touring a shot but it wasn’t really my sort of thing. I really did enjoy the performance aspect, but the traveling was just too exhausting for what little money there was to be had in niche techno. The most obvious influence in my work now as an engineer is the years of trying to produce good sounding records that would transfer well to large sound systems. I have a lot of experience seeing the process from start to finish from an intimate perspective and this helps me immensely when I’m trying to achieve the same results for someone else.
SB: In it’s most basic essence, what is a mastering engineer and what do they do?
AO: Mastering is a multifaceted job that includes both technical and artistic skills. It’s a marriage of art and science. Aesthetically, it’s the shaping of frequency, dynamics, and time to bring cohesion to a collection of songs–the transformation from a mere assortment of tracks into a fluid, telling story. A good mastering engineer can hear a project and instinctively know the direction he or she would like to take it and do so decisively. From a technical standpoint, it’s understanding the possibilities and limitations of the mediums and how best to treat each to guarantee the highest fidelity. Mastering ensures that the music will duplicate without problems whether it be for vinyl or CD and it is understanding the science of sound and how best to achieve the highest range of playability on the widest array of systems.
SB: With the growing popularity of mastering plug ins, why should bedroom producers look to professional mastering rather than do it themselves?
AO: It takes a long time to develop the ears to hear the way a mastering engineer does. There’s no plug-in out there that can replace the 12 years and nearly 2000 albums under my belt. While I am happy to see mastering plug-ins evolve into formidable counterparts to analog equipment, most bedroom producers lack the deep working knowledge of them to effectively use them in the mastering stages. It’s easy to pass a song through a limiter, hear it louder, and think you’ve done something good. But if all you’ve done is decreased the dynamic range to make a song louder, in my opinion, you may have actually ruined it. To be fair, I’ve heard a few people over the years master their own albums and they came out super, but it’s rare and it takes a special kind of person to pull that off. Even if the producer has a profound understanding of the tools, the thing he lacks most is the ability to hear the album without bias. The level of intimacy the producer has with each recording often inhibits their ability to objectively isolate problems or see how aesthetically consonant each song is from a macro perspective. I’ve been producing my own music for nearly 15 years and to this day I still don’t master my own music, and I’m a mastering engineer! If that’s not a testament to the process, I don’t know what is.
SB: What are a few things a bedroom producer can do to prepare a file for you? What are common mistakes made when you receive tracks?
AO: Keeping a file “healthy” requires the mixing engineer to use very judicious use of compression, and to stay away from brickwall limiters unless they’re used very discretely to catch overs, and aren’t used for RMS gain on the mains. The biggest and most common mistake people make is to squash their recordings before mastering. I see it in 8 out of 10 projects that come to AudibleOddities. Most people don’t realize that good punchy mixes come from preserving transients, and a song with a high RMS may sound louder, but will almost always sounds worse when a/b checked at the same perceived loudness of the original.
SB: You are a big supporter in battling the “loudness wars” in modern music. How do you approach this in your work and balance keeping tracks “competitive”?
AO: Before I start a project I generally try to find out how informed my client is of the volume wars and get their opinion on it. There are times when they might say “I’m not concerned with dynamics, just make that shit hot fire!” And so I do. If they know what they want, and they’re aware of the choices and possibilities, my job is to make them happy. But lately there’s been a real renaissance of fidelity, and I’m getting more and more clients who are not only informed of the problem, but are willing to be a part of the cure. That said, there are still interesting things that can be obtained through heavy compression and limiting and there is music that benefits from it. So it’s not a black and white situation where there’s a definite do and do not. It’s important to understand the process, the trade-offs, and how it either helps or hurts what you’re trying to achieve in the studio. It’s about having a choice again and not being forced into something because that’s what everyone else does.
SB: You used to live a few blocks from me in the Lower Haight – what is the best lunch spot in the ‘hood?
AO: Easily the best spot is the sandwiches from the guys over at Alamo Square Market and Deli at 535 Scott St.
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