THE ANCIENT ART OF CUTTING ACETATES
I have cut over 5000 different LP’s onto acetate in the
last 20 years. Pop, Dance, Thrash, Metal, Pop, Hip hop, Noise – you name
it. Names spring to mind in droves – INXS, Hilltop Hoods, Jet,
Silverchair, Powderfinger I could go on and on. The point is, if you went to
the expense of having your music pressed on vinyl in Australia –
which is cheaper and at least as good as Europe not least because of the freight and duty
charges – then its likely I will have cut your LP or single.
Having
said that, in the last two years we have had better equipment at Zenith
that we used to have at Corduroy. This is partly due to advancement in
technology, and partly the attitude of management. More and more people
are presenting projects as 24 bit .wav files which is great. If
anything needs tweaking I can do that in Nuendo, embed the changes and
so the process is completely reproducible. I can even email you mp3s of the changes for prior approval!.
DIRECT TO DISC RECORDING
In the last few years I also did Direct to Disc recordings
for the likes of The White Stripes, Dirt Bombs, and Sonic Youth
and many others which were a gas. Imagine finishing an album in an hour! No remixes – pure honesty.
Like the old days.
While this facility is currently unavailable, there is talk of re-establishing this process at a new location.
Watch this space for more details.
AN AFFORDABLE SOLUTION
It would be nice if every master for pressing really was a
Master. The amount of time, waste of vinyl and energy involved in trying to cut
and press something done ‘by your mate who has a studio’ or ‘at home’ is phenomenal.
Very often I have to ring up a client and discuss the onsite re-mastering of
their album or single. This is not fair to anyone.
Those who know my work now often prefer to give me a listen in
my own studio and trust the process of doing a very quick and cheap check of their
product before lodging it for cutting.
Its
quite clear that at the factory we are NOT OBLIGED to go the extra mile and
worry about the sound of peoples music. That is supposed to be done by the
artist. However, because we really like to get it right for you we usually ask
before cutting something really weird.
Some people must mix with ancient speakers and cotton wool
in their ears. Either that or it’s the drugs.
So if you want to get a top result, run it by me. For an
album, it wont cost more than about
A$300 unless it needs remixing completely, in which case I
wont touch it and you can do that.
For a single I try to keep the cost down to under $100.
If its well mastered it wont cost anything.
OK?
This article respectfully quoted from Sound on Sound Magazine.
Despite what you may have heard, mastering for vinyl is the easiest type of mastering you can do, as it involves only two steps:
 Find a mastering engineer who has mastered a ton of recordings for release on vinyl.
Present your final mixes to that person and say "Here, you do it."
Vinyl is an unforgiving medium, and mastering for
it is extremely difficult. Its dynamic range is a puny 50dB or so, even
with decent vinyl, compared to the 80dB or more we enjoy with even the
most basic digital media. As a result, compression is essentially
mandatory to shoehorn music's wide dynamic range into vinyl's narrow
dynamic range. But vinyl has other problems. There's a trade-off
between loudness and length. This is because a groove in a record is
just a waveform, and a louder waveform will cause the groove to have a
wider physical excursion. So, to get a lot of material on an LP, you
have to cut the vinyl at a pretty low level.
Bass is also troublesome. Bass waveforms have a
very wide excursion and, with stereo, if the left and right channels
are even slightly out of phase, the stylus can 'jump the track' as it
tries in vain to follow different curves for the right and left
channels. We take concepts like stereo bass for granted now, but back
in the days of vinyl bass had to be mono.
And that's not all! As the record gets closer to
the end, the tone arm hits the groove at more of an angle (except with
linear-tracking turntables), causing what's called inner groove
distortion. As a result, song orders often used to be created with the
softest songs coming at the end of an album's side, so that the inner
grooves would be less subject to distortion.
In the old days, recording engineers were well
aware of the limitations of vinyl, and took them into account during
the recording process. Many of today's engineers were brought up in an
essentially vinyl-less world, and don't consider the problems discussed
above. This makes it more important than ever to use a mastering
engineer who is an expert in the art. When it comes to mastering for
vinyl, the advice is simple: don't try this at home!
|
