Blake Bickel
My name is Blake Bickel. He/him, been living here in Kalamazoo for I guess coming up on four or five years. I moved out here with my family and for me the idea was bringing my mastering business here, with the cost of living I could focus more on that and that's what I've been doing. Before I moved here, I also started building effect pedals on the side and that's kind of turned into a fun side thing that I'm continuing to slowly build. I didn't plan on it, but not long after moving here met a drummer and we started playing together and so I've been back in another band which has been fantastic for my mental health and just being creative and expressing and just growing as an artist on a personal level.
From my understanding, you wanted to talk about the mastering side of things right and that kind of work that you do that people might want to know about in the scene?
Yeah, so I do audio mastering which is a field that is largely understood and I think part of that is because it's like finishing work, which isn't always the same thing on every project. It's like an unbiased third party, second set of ears to review what's going on and help elevate it as much as possible. It's a thing a lot of people just don't know about, including myself and I was younger and getting into engineering. I remember for a long time I was like oh you don't master it and just throw a limiter on there and crank it and it's good it's fine and of course over time have recognized and absolutely appreciate and know that it's a, at least for me if I'm putting out work, a necessary part of the process.
Are there any things of stand out to you that helped you come to the realization of how important mastering is?
Well, I mean along the way it would be little things like working on a mix and obsessing over it and then finally being like yeah this is it. This sounds badass. It sounds great in my studio. It sounds great in my home stereo. It sounds good in my car and then go take it to like a friend's house to show them and they put it on and I'm like what the hell happened that's not supposed to sound like that. That was definitely an indication. I started working with different recording studios and at one point was a staff engineer and I specifically remember a project that for us was a larger project where the client had spent a lot of time and money bringing in lots of different solo artists to contribute and it was this big, beautiful, super dynamic kind of like folk, alt-folk record; like timpani drums, french horns, opera singing like just huge and we spent a lot of time getting all the dynamics right and then I remember he was asking about mastering and I was like absolutely you need to do that and you shouldn't have us do that. We're like way too close to it. You need to get a professional to finish it off. I mean this is a while ago and I forgot who he went to, but I remember it was top shelf top tier mastering house in the east coast and he sent it off and like a month later got it back and he's really excited and gave me a copy. For me as an engineer, it was a huge letdown because those dynamics were just annihilated just like the timpani drums doing these big huge swells and crescendos, there was there was no build up. It was like the quiet part to the big splash was all the exact same in intensity and feel, and I remember talking to the artist and just gracefully trying to bring that up and be like okay on this song how do you feel about the way the dynamics came out specifically like this part and he was like, well I definitely wanted more dynamics, but he's the professional and that's what he said was best. Having worked with a lot of artists, it was that kind of separation almost like a fear of questioning what's right or wasn't as collaborative of of a process. It was like send it off, they do it, it's done. So I was kind of inspired to try and create something different where it's like, as far as a working relationship with different clients, I would be more one to make suggestions and present what I think was good but I want feedback and I want the artist to know I want to be like what they have envisioned. Yes, I should be an outside party to help give maybe a fresh perspective but I'm not the end all be all. I think it works good. There's a lot of times where I have presented something that I think shines it in a good light and the client maybe will be like this is great, not what I was envisioning. I want something more like this and my first reaction is I don't know... but then I'll do it and I get it now, yeah. I'm not doing much in a sense of you know applying a few separate tools in creative ways in the mastering process. I'm working with a stereo mixdown. If it was a rock band for example, I don't have control of the kick or snare or vocals or guitar, can't bring up faders or bring them down but I have creative tools to help kind of nudge things and accent things and expand or compress dynamics. A lot can be done but again it depends on the mix. Sometimes mixes are not as pliable as I like would want them to be and sometimes they're like a soft putty so just every project is entirely different. I think that's also probably what keeps my brain excited as a challenge because definitely anytime I've started to be like I got this, I know like I got my like mental preset and process... immediately throw it out the window like no that's not going to work for this project. It's a challenge but it's a fun challenge.
Where did you acquire knowledge about mixing/mastering in the first place?
Reading a lot and experimenting really. I started when I was in college. I was getting a visual arts degree and started playing music. I didn't really start playing music till I was in college, just got fascinated with recording process and my roommates and I each collectively kind of put in investments and we built the home studio. I was immediately obsessed with it. I'd be the guy in the basement till four in the morning trying to work quietly and you know the nature of the process, other friends and bands were like 'oh shit you got a studio would you record me,' and so started kind of doing that on the side. As I was getting close to graduating, I remember feeling really good about a lot of paintings and drawings and photography I was doing like just really proud of it, couldn't sell like somebody would be like 'I'll give you 100 bucks for that painting,' and I'm like I put 300 into material... it's like I was struggling to find a way to make money off of being a visual artist, but I had if I had wanted to I had months that I could have booked out in the home studio and so I just started really getting into it. Funny thing though, mastering, it was just something I would read a lot about and experiment with. I didn't actually meet another mastering engineer in person until I'd been calling myself a mastering engineer for like five years. There's a lot of people that will say they offer those services but one that exclusively does mastering, it's kind of a little bit different of a thing.
For those people who may not have the information, if you can put into words, what's the difference between mixing and mastering?
The process would be you record the audio, perhaps some editing and possibly creative editing and then mixing is maybe you have 10, 30 or however many tracks you've recorded for the song and the mixing is blending the levels and different tools to give it a sound that you're happy with and you feel represents. Depends on the band, but oftentimes it's trying to make it sound like what you sound like live and sometimes it's the opposite, just creating some kind of otherworldly space thing. When you're recording, sometimes an album consists of material that was recorded over a couple of months or recorded at different locations or you know it's very common if a mix engineer is hired to mix a record that they mix a song or two in a day, but still over time there's going to be differences in the presence and feel of the sound so mastering is stepping in, looking at the material as a whole and trying to create a cohesive sound throughout. A lot of that is level adjustment, tonal balance, dynamic manipulation, stereo field manipulation. You're simultaneously trying to enhance the material as best you can and give each song its own voice while also trying to make it kind of fit within the group as a collective body of work. Me coming from a visual arts background, one of the analogies I've used is with photography. A mastering engineer would be like a gallery owner where you're not choosing what the content of the artwork is, but you're helping present it and present the body of work. You're there setting up lighting within the room and helping space them out on the wall, maybe it's even the framing around the photographs. Another analogy would be like somebody handed you a photograph and you wanted to kind of tweak it on an app before it got posted. Me as a mastering engineer, I'm cropping it just ever so slightly. I can change the tint and the contrast to kind of maximize the depth and visual presentation of it but I'm not really messing with the photograph. It's still the artist's work. Another aspect that is huge about it is you're trying to level the playing field. A common scenario is like a mix engineer mixes it in their one room with their their set speakers or maybe a couple speakers and some headphones and they're getting it to sound fantastic and it might sound fantastic in that room on those speakers but then outside of that environment things are going to change. Every stereo system is drastically different. The average listener wouldn't catch that but once you're an artist in creating music you start picking up on all these differences. So with mastering, you're trying to have it sound as consistent as possible on not only different stereo systems but different platforms. MP3s are going to sound different than something on a CD or a record. All the different formats have kind of slightly different parameters to work around so it's trying to narrow the scope and have it be as consistent as possible from different format to format and sound system sound system etc.
Yeah, so it's like finding a way for it to be consistently heard in a way that represents it well?
Pleasing, hopefully flattering, yeah. It's bizarre how differently things can sound. I still get tripped out on that.
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I definitely do think there's songs you can listen to where like it'll sound really cool and it'll sound good and then there's songs that you can listen to where it just like completely like envelopes, if that makes sense like auditorily it's just perfect in every way and every little detail shines through and you can just sit there and completely be absorbed in it
Exactly, I mean ideally it would all do that.
It's interesting to hear about how it's different for every single project like you were saying...
Totally. It's all different and it's just a fun challenge. Sometimes I have a big rack full of gear and I have computers with various plugins and things that can apply to tweak it and sometimes I'm using a lot of them and sometimes I'm hardly using anything, but that's important because even if it's projects where I'm not doing a ton of heavy lifting and just light touches, when a client pays me that's what they're paying me for is to not immediately throw it through whatever, an eight thousand dollar tube compressor because it sounds fancy and yes, does pleasing things that sound good to the ears, but does it need it? That's definitely part of the challenge is deciding what not to do.
Are there any indicators where you might realize you need to exercise restraint?
Definitely, I mean, the whole thing is definitely a mental gymnastic kind of thing. It sounds funny and counterintuitive, but sometimes I'm working on something and I just get really excited. I was like, this sounds so good. I am so pumped and then usually in the back of my head I'm like whoa, almost like a thing like I'm getting so excited I'm not really listening the way I should be listening, you know what I mean? So, that's one. Also, in my head I have certain guidelines of like I shouldn't have to tweak and EQ pass this much and if I am double, triple, quadruple check everything because ideally it's all subtle maneuvers. If I'm getting aggressive or heavy-handed after stopping, kind of check myself and be like well is say the bass level, is the bass level for where I'm at listening to it in this moment supposed to be very upfront and driving the whole thing? Is that what they wanted or was that something they didn't catch? There's so many different reasons it could be like that. I have to find a happy medium of maybe they do want it like this, but I know that's gonna like distort subwoofers on systems and just muddy everything up so how can I like subtly caress it and still let it be a highlight of the song, but still have it translate well the different systems.
Maybe you could talk about a project that you worked on that you really were happy with...
Yeah, I recently did one for a friend and his project is called the Moon Orchid. He recorded it in Battle Creek with Brendan Infante and I was blown away with how it sounded. It was beautiful. There's just four songs, but they were longer songs and they pressed it to a 12 inch and when we got it back I was equally happy with the way the record turned out, because that's a whole other can of worms. It can sound great on Spotify and on a CD, that does not mean it's going to translate well to a vinyl record, so yeah. It sounded fantastic on a record. I was very excited about that one. I've worked with a lot of different artists here in the Kalamazoo community but still my clients are all over the place. I tend to get pockets. I have a lot of artists in Seattle that I work with, Austin, Texas, Sacramento, Azula, Montana, Berlin, wherever.
That's awesome so pretty much anyone can throw you their their stems, files and you just take care of the rest of it for them?
Exactly.
That's helpful for you I'm sure to be able to like have such a wide reach of people you can do this for
Yeah, it's definitely part of why I started focusing in on mastering was because I had worked for many years as a staff house engineer at different studios, which was a blast, but make a lot of sacrifices especially in your personal life. It was telling my wife I'll be home tonight, somewhere between 10 pm and maybe four in the morning. I have no idea when. Mastering felt like a little more control over the time when and where I put my efforts. I didn't have to have the artist physically there with me and you know an interesting part of that is, again it depends on the project, but in my opinion oftentimes that's a good thing because I'm familiar with the room and the speakers and how it'll translate out into the world, whereas the client might not and I think it's freeing in a way for a lot of artists to just kind of hand it off. Just do whatever you're going to do and then I'll listen to it and give you notes. In my opinion, to take some of the pressure off because then the client can listen to it at their leisure, at their various you know if it's a car or a home stereo or they can take their time to review it, versus somewhat being under the gun in the studio all the time yeah clock is ticking.
Heavier music, is there any sort of go to's...
Not exactly, because it just just depends on the songs and you know how it was mixed and I mean really everything. Everything in the process plays a role. The instrument played, the microphone selected, the microphone preamp, the position of the microphone, how it was played, how it was mixed, like just everything plays a part in it. Heavy music oftentimes I feel it's important to have drums and vocals just a little bit more present in the mix than you would think and when I say a little bit more I'm just saying just a hair because in the mastering process a lot of things kind of get thickened up and filled up. I guess it applies for a lot of- say maybe louder than aggressive style music, the people working with their mix engineer will try to make it sound like a finished record, which you want to do but you also have to leave a little bit of room for mastering engineer to do their work. Oftentimes, looking at a project and it's a heavy heavier project and I can hear the drums but just barely and I know that it will be a challenge to make things full and blossoming and loud and still having articulation of the drum hits.
So how long have you been doing mastering for people?
Maybe 16 17 years somewhere around there.
What do you want people Kalamazoo, like musicians and bands, to know about the work that you do and how to contact you about working with you?
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Yeah I have the business called Dynamic Sound Service
I have a website and various social media profiles. What I would want people to know is to reach out and start a conversation. I hope I'm approachable but I want people to ask questions. If they want to work with me, I want to work with them. If they're in the middle of recording and they're wondering and have questions, they can reach out to me because it's oftentimes that people will make assumptions. For example, they'll be mixing something like oh, it just doesn't sound as loud as what I'm listening to on Spotify, say well I feel it's because it's not been mastered, so you don't want to try to make the mix sound like a mastered thing so they'll do various techniques and processes to make it just super loud and then I get it and there's significantly less I can do when that space has already been filled up. If people have questions, just let me know. I will talk for hours about sound and mixing so there's not a problem there. I work with people who are recording themselves in their basement on an acoustic guitar for the first time, I work with many clients like that and on the same token a lot of my clients are producers who are flying to whatever location working with the band and record label and then sending new material. Over the years, I've recognized a lot of things about the practices of say just experienced you know working engineers and producers and some of the things that they do as they're very good with the communication. They're not afraid to send me two, sometimes three versions of the same mix. There'll be an album but for each song there's like three versions. There'll be a version of each song where it's like the the vocal up mix where the vocals just a hair louder or a bass up mix or maybe they had some new compressor or you know studio tool that was getting them really excited but they were also like I don't know if this is the best decision, so they'll send me a mix that's been processed with that on the master bus and then one without. Communication and options are always great. I'll never be bummed that a client sent me multiple versions of the same song and tells me just pick whichever one works best for you as you're working on it. I mean, I just encourage people just do it. When I was starting out, it's so easy to throw up these mental blocks where it's like oh I don't have a fancy microphone and then I don't have a room or a lot of them is focusing on gear or quality of instrument or something like that. A good song is a good song, regardless of how it was recorded and mastered, or not. Mastering will help those things along the way but a good song is a good song, regardless of if it was done on your phone or in a studio. Yes, it's good to respect your art and treat it with love and precision, but don't let hesitancy just like stop you from doing it. Just do it and you'll grow with it and get better over time. By the time I realized I really want to get into music, I was already in debt with a visual arts degree as I can't afford to go into debt additionally. I was willing to, but just hesitant to so instead I was like well I'm gonna invest in gear and I'm gonna record whoever I can and I'm not gonna ask him for money. I'm gonna do it because I want to learn and get experience from it and that's how I got my foot in the door with different recording studios. I'd be like you guys need help, like, oh we're not taking on any employees and interns and we don't have paying, like I just want to hang out and figure this stuff out and then they took me on and just made myself available and found where I could help to the point that when I wasn't there, they noticed. I wasn't there and they're like shit, we want this guy around so you know I think that's also part of why I was attracted to the field too was it's like yeah school and training can help but if you go to a recording studio with a resume that says you've got a degree, doesn't necessarily help you. It's working with people, not having an ego, just being available to help where it's needed and do what you can do to improve it. I think the same thing goes with music and being a musician putting music out there. If it brings you joy and you want to share it, do it. It doesn't need to be an end game of if I don't have x amount of plays on my Spotify profile, I'm a failure. If you enjoy it that should be enough. That should be a reason to do it and express it and there's one thing I've heard at a couple different points throughout working with all the people I've worked with is somebody on the side kind of make a comment like well if this project doesn't take off and hit like that's it. I'm calling it, giving up on the music thing and in my head I'm like you already failed. I mean, shouldn't have that kind of view about it. I think when somebody's passionate about what they're doing and not focusing on financial or you know pure success that authenticity translates.
Did you want to talk a little bit more about the pedals?
Oh yes, I make petals. I guess it's been seven or eight years ago. One thing about mastering, it was a comfort to know when I started meeting and connecting with other mastering engineers even a lot of the successful ones have side jobs. It's very ebb and flow. The mastering engineers that I know that are doing it day in day out oftentimes are cutting records, doing lades, but I began to get head over heels obsessed with building petals and it's what I do on the side. It's for fun and it generates income when things are not booked out as much as I would like, so it's like a padding but it's been a blast learning about it and letting it grow at its own pace. When I first started it, it was kind of an experiment in a business sense it was an experiment to kind of do the opposite of what common practices or knowledge or you know, they're like anti-trends. When I first started getting into the petals, I remember making some prototypes and giving them out to friends and my friends were like you got to make them really small. This was like when the mini pedal phase was going big like getting them really small. Gotta have these flashy graphics that's gonna attract people. You're gonna have to give it some name like the doom annihilator, label the volume as the crusher and you got to make it like as affordable as possible. I mean, I took all the advice I was getting to heart but I was like I'm gonna do the opposite of all that stuff. I have big feet and at the time, didn't utilize petals like a special effect. It would come on and off. During songs it's just always on. I'm almost using it more like a preamp and if I wanted to switch it off or on, I'm typically so focused on playing I don't have time to wedge my big huge foot and just get that one little button so I was like, well I'm gonna make it big. I've always been into kind of the old style you know aesthetically styled recording equipment from like 50s and 60s which is like a gray panel with huge knobs big VU meters and there's no brand name on it. It's kind of all those things including not being affordable. I'm gonna find the nicest components I can find, it's gonna be hand-wired, I'm gonna put a really long warranty on it. I'll fix them if they break. They're gonna be big, they're not gonna be flashy and then I don't even put any words on them, and so far it's been working out. At this point I have four different petals I make and mastering distracts me a lot. I have currently pretty much almost sold out of everything I have, but a couple times a year I'll make 10 of each petal and then just over the next period just slowly sell them, but I get really good feedback from people who bought them.
A lot of people actually will buy one and then like a month later buy a second one and be like this is fucking never leaving my pedal board and in case you stop doing this I want like a backup so I've had really good feedback from people who own them. Probably made a little bit over 150 petals over the years. Maybe once or twice I'll get a pedal mailed back to me that something broke on it and I'll fix it and send it back. My thing is, I tell people when it then stops working you pay the shipping, I'll make it right. Modern petals, they're not designed to really be repaired. They're designed to be replaced if something broke and if you're lucky enough for it to break within their warranty, they don't fix it, they just send you a new one and that just pissed me off. Being somewhat into electronics and repairing stuff of my own over the years it just drove me crazy because I'm like, this it's just I can see it, I can see what's wrong with that but it's a micro surface mounted component that can really only be done by a CNC robot in a factory and I either have to buy a new one or if it was under warranty send it back and they're just gonna send me another one, there's just something about that just rubbed me the wrong way, yeah. So again, with that I was like I'm gonna make them kind of big so that if they break they're easy to work on. Sometimes I'll fix pedals for friends and just opening it up and getting access to something that maybe I can repair end up breaking three things along the way because it's just so jammed in there, so a lot of the ideas behind making these petals was to kind of just do the opposite of what other people were doing which I guess in part selfishly brings me joy, but it seems to be people were willing to try it out and invest again. I've had a lot of just really positive overwhelming feedback so it's been fun and I love talking about pedals and guitar tone and nerding out on stuff. When I do have time, I've invited different local musicians and friends I know just to like come hang out for 30 minutes so I can show them some of what my pedals can do because it's hard to show and tell people with a little video on the internet or writing a description and a lot of times I'm able to help people reconfigure their their chains and the way they're using pedals to to get more out of them. Pedals are fun. I could go on for hours. Myself as a player, I definitely go through phases where I like build up this big pedal board and I'm using all this stuff and I'll go back and like strip it down to three things, but even when I have a lot of pedals on my pedal board, I'm using them very subtly. I'll have three gain pedals stacked next to each other, but they're just all three of them are just barely distorting and breaking things up. I feel you can get more depth out of things that way because when things are just cranked, there's not a lot of places you can go after that. One of the pedals on my board is cranked for that thing but a lot of them, just subtle, I like the subtlety. One of the first pedals I made I started by building a clone of a tube screamer because I wanted to just figure it out and try and see if I could fix the things that drove me crazy about a tube screamer because at the time I was playing bass guitar in a band but it was real mid-rangey and overdriven and I went to various stores, tried all the bass distortion pedals I could find. I didn't like any of them, but I remember plugging into a tube screamer, which is a guitar pedal, with my bass and being like there's something about that I really like but there's a lot of things I don't like. Mainly it was cutting off a lot of the low end when it was activated and for certain situations even when the gain was turned all the way down it was over driving and clipping right off the bat and the gain sweep felt very narrow. I'd start turning up the gain and I'd get to about halfway and anything on the dial passed halfway didn't sound any different to me so I figured out a way to strip the circuit down and address all those things so that it wouldn't necessarily just remove all the low end out, and a wider sweep, more dynamics and a ridiculous amount of output level. When I'm building pedals that's usually the approach I take is find something I really like, but simultaneously drives me crazy and then try and fix those things that drive me crazy about it and in my mind, make it more versatile, not necessarily user-friendly. This for example, is my modded something based off of a tube screamer circuit and there's a lot of switches and they drastically change the sound and I don't put labels on anything so people are like just tell me what it does and it's like oh yeah I'll tell you and I have like a manual thing that explains it, but when you label things I think people get this preconceived idea of what it should be and what's better so it's like in one position the low end is rolled off, similar to a tube screamer. In the other position there's a lot of thick low end bass. If I put a label on that and was like this is the bass boost switch, everybody would initially start off with the bass boost switch. They'll be like oh yeah, I want the boost, so if I don't put any labels, in my mind, I mean hopefully encouraging people to just experiment with the sound and not read a thing and then have an idea of what they're supposed to do. I like the mystery about it. That's where I think pedals can help is to open up new palettes and exciting sounds to what you're doing.
I think it's cool too that you're kind of using your pedals as a way to encourage people to use their ears
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I think it's good for them in the long run. Traditionally, I don't read manuals. I just want to get my hands on the thing and experiment and then if I hit a brick wall on a particular topic, then I'll go and read up on it and figure out if I can work around it or not. There's something to be said about using gear incorrectly. I was reading an article where somebody was on the concept of gear talking about like well fuck so much of it has has been done. If you pick up a Stratocaster you're immediately competing with everyone that's ever played a Stratocaster and you're probably not gonna get better than Jimi Hendrix. If you pick up a Les Paul you're competing with all this and then the same goes for amplifiers and pedals and things like that, so I think there's new territory to be explored going unconventional routes and experimenting. The last band I was in, I was like I want to play in a two-piece band, just bass and drums but I don't want my bass to sound bass-y. I want to be really bright and nasty and mid-rangey. There's still some bass, but I wanted it really mid-rangey because I wanted the kick drum to be like knocking at death's door. I didn't want to encroach on that that space. I want to be existing in the mids and so I was playing bass through guitar and bass amps, but going through weird speaker configurations and I don't know if we succeeded having that unique of a sound but to me in my brain I found ways to get excited.
So people who are interested in checking out your pedals, where do they find that?
Again, going with like the anti-industry way of doing things, I have an instagram page and a facebook page it's called Emerald Circuits and I don't do a website or really much anything outside of that. I'm trying to go with the, if you want it come to me. It's fun, but the Emerald Circuits, everything is handmade in my basement and I stand by it and if you check out some of the stuff that I do have posted on there I'm dead serious it fucking blows everything else away. I'll show you guys after we do this what the pedals do and I think you'll be like holy shit.
Do you feel like you've shared what you wanted to about the services you've got? Is there anything else you wanna add on to that?
I'd say just in general, the music community we have here in Kalamazoo is really unique. It's to the point that a lot of people I think who've grown up here aren't aware of how unique it is, because that's what they know. Myself having moved around a bit, it's something special and everyone is so supportive of each other and people from outside are starting to to realize that, but I'm in this community and I do mastering and I make pedals. I'm a nerd on tone and sound and and all things music and I've chosen to immerse myself in that every possible way I can. If you're making music and trying to put it out there and need assistance, I do mastering that's what I do and if you're struggling with guitar tone I'll talk your ear off, maybe you know, turn you on to a pedal that you want or need and/or just help you fix whatever you've got going on. Yeah I'll talk your ear off.
Do you have a like favorite pedal that you've made?
Probably this one. This version of it I'm calling the Little Black Simple and it's hard to describe. I mean it's a gain pedal it's not that hard to describe, but how it's better than others... it's very difficult for me to play without because I've become so accustomed to it. A classic example would be, I had a friend that bought one and he became accustomed to it and he left it at home when he was supposed to go to practice and when he got to practice he's like ah it's no problem I'll just grab my tube screamer and it'll be fine and they couldn't get through a song because somebody in the band would be like it's not right, it's just broken and he's like it's not broken I just don't have that one pedal. He thought his amp was broken and he said no it's that I don't have that pedal that I've built into my sound like identity of what my sound is, and I feel the same way about it. It's dynamic, really wide range of tones, very sensitive to pick sensitivity and what you're doing with the strings and yeah, just very articulate and open and if you set it the right way it's just crushing gain but it still has texture and depth, that's what drives me crazy about a lot of other pedals is it's like a quick instant where like oh that's gnarly, but there's no depth to it, yeah.
I didn't know whether to ask about gears in terms of mastering too, if there's anything there that you wanted to talk about...
For the mastering stuff, I use a hybrid system of digital and analog gear. When I started out doing it, I made the decision I wasn't going to buy or invest anything into my business unless it was exactly what I wanted, which at this point means I still don't have a ton. I don't have racks and racks, but what I have is exactly what I want and and need and valuable to me in my process. The speakers, I mean it's the same as anything you could spend as much money as you want on anything. I think the most important thing with mastering is being familiar with your speakers and your room. The speakers I'm working with I've had for about 14 years and at this point I've been forced to figure out how to repair them because they haven't been made for a long time but I love them. People have always been like check out these new speakers and they do this and they do that and it's like I don't care. I don't know those speakers, I know these speakers. If I ever was in a situation, say there's a fire and my house burned down and I lost those speakers and I couldn't get a pair that were identical to them that would knock me out of business for a while because it would take me a while to get comfortable with a new set. That's the most important thing, not necessarily fancy gear but good gear and then just being familiar with it. The ones I'm using are Genolak s30a's, which were designed in the 90s for broadcasting and mastering and so on paper they said CD mastering so their three-way speakers, the ribbon tweeters and each speaker has its own unique amplifier dedicated to that frequency range and a long time ago a friend sold them to me for a very fair price, let me slowly pay him back for a long period and at this point I know a client sends me something, like throw them on and listen if something's off it immediately jumps out to me. I'm like okay I need to address that. Then the room, custom built the room, pictures of that on my instagram but rooms are important. The square room is very difficult to work in, which is unfortunate because all rooms in existing structures are squares or rectangular with 90 degree angles everywhere which are the worst acoustically. Yeah i think that's the gist. Thank you so much for having me.
