( ..Impressions on the spur of the moment, after listening to the test pressing..
The interest in self-production and in financing your own business is that you can test and carry out what you want. For the mastering of “Freedom”, I asked John Dent to handle it. He is a real mastering monster; I’ll let you appreciate his CV: http://www.loudmastering.com/cv.htm
Up to today, my various experiences (for instance with Tom Coyne) have not been so memorable…
So, I went directly to John Dent’s, in Southern England, carrying my MPC4000 with me, thinking to myself that he has mastered 5 among Bob Marley’s most important albums and that this fills me with admiration.
(By the way, Bob Marley came to Ibiza for a show in 1978:
…not getting to see him perform live is one of my biggest regrets…)
So…I am not going to tell you about the whole mastering session, because I will post a video about it real soon, but I so want to tell you about the final result.
My question was: All right, I sample analogue music through my vinyls, I digitalize it in a MPC4000, then I master it on analogical tapes… is it really worth it?…and does it mean something?
Definitely yes!
When you leave the mastering studio, all you have in your hands is a digital version of the mastering.
As you keep on listening to it, you get used to your CD master…until the moment you receive the test pressing. The analogue conversion, its natural compression, its imperfections in return to some frequencies is bluffing and gives a unique nuance to your creations. The quality of the highs, the softness of the mediums and the roundness of the lows I can perceive on the vinyl are incomparable to the sound of the digital mastering.
I rediscover my album as the sound levels are different, thanks to the unpredictable reaction of the 30ips analogue tapes (photo). This gives depth to the album because on CD everything is very linear, as in a compilation.
The volume is not really high, especially on the 2nd vinyl, but, as John Dent says, “the louder the sound is, the less people will be able to hear the whole music spectrum”. This is why perfection is impossible to obtain. If you do the same vinyl mastering 10 times, you will obtain 10 different versions of your album. This is why groups such as Genesis were asking for 6 different cuts and pressings before choosing the best test pressing to create the vinyl from. Here is the real charm of analogue.
As my friend and studio engineer Ambroise says, “You never know when a creaking or a crackling is going to arrive on a vinyl, whereas on the CD this never happens”, and this is where the problem is. It changes everything. The computer, I-pod or mobile phone…, well, listening to mp3s in general, seriously damages our hearing health…
Humans (even more, engineers), and the imperfections of analogue are real positive elements in music. Mistakes are constructive and creative; they are unpredictable and a real source of inspiration…
Listening to the whole record is a musical voyage telling stories; it was exactly what I had in mind.
To understand and appreciate my music, the vinyl version mastered by the legend John Dent, gives it all its meaning and even more personality.
So, yes, my Beat maker, Beat-Digger, Dj, Artist, Vinyl Lover friend…our digital music mastered analogically by a real engineer and pressed on vinyl is really good for the health of our ears.
After 20 years of experience, I am still sure about it…
Guts ..