The Mastering Show

Brian Eno is probably the musician, producer and artist who has had the single biggest influence on my music taste and enjoyment over the years. His work speaks for itself and needs no introduction ! So when I heard Emre Ramazanoglu talking on the Working Class Audio podcast about re-mixing and mastering many of Brian's classic albums for Dolby Atmos, my ears immediately pricked up. I just...

I wanted to do something a little different to mark the 100th episode, but wasn't sure what. I was wondering about interviewing myself but that seemed a little weird... And then Matt Boudreau from the excellent Working Class Audio podcast invited me back onto his show, and it occurred to me - I could get Matt to interview me, which would be way more fun and get some much more interesting...

Stereo, mono, binaural or surround-sound ?I've worked with this episode's guest in all these formats and more over the many years we've been working together - but which does he prefer, and why ?Richard Durrant describes himself as an "Indie Classical" musician, which I think is a pretty good summary - but doesn't really take into account the fact that he also toured with Sky, worked as an...

'Stem mastering' has provoked a ton of debate recently, with people claiming it crosses the line between mixing and mastering, interferes with the artist's intent, and isn't even really mastering at all !But if that's true, why would Abbey Road, one of the biggest mastering studios in the world, offer a dedicated stem mastering service ?!In this episode I talk to Oli Morgan, who specialises in...

The term “legend” gets thrown all the time in audio production circles, but my guest this episode really deserves it. I’m sure you already know this but Ken Scott has worked with the Beatles, David Bowie, Elton John and Supertramp amongst so many others, so I was delighted when he agreed to join me for this episode !There were so many things we could have talked about it was hard to know where to...

We’ve been using “soft clipping" in mastering for over 20 years at this point, but it suddenly feels as if it’s all anyone is talking about ! New plugins, new suggestions about how to use it, and wild new claims about how amazing it sounds. Except it doesn’t.At least – not all the time, and not for all material.In this episode Joe Caithness and I dig deep into the details and talk about:* What...

The Billboard Top 50 global singles from the first half of 2024 have an average loudness of -8.3 LUFSSo that’s how loud we should be making our masters, right ?Well…It certainly might seem that way, but in reality it’s a bit more complicated than that. This is only one of the interesting results that Ian Stewart presented in his latest blog post for iZoTope, and in this episode I asked him back...

People are always asking me about mastering for vinyl, and I’m happy to try and help based on the experience I have. I don’t actually cut vinyl myself though, so that advice is always limited and second-hand. So for this episode I decided to talk to a genuine expert on the topic - Scott Hull from Masterdisk - and really get into the details. Scott’s knowledge and experience of cutting vinyl is...

I’m always arguing for balanced dynamics rather than loudness for it’s own sake, but some people have a different opinion - high loudness is important, and even beneficial.Nick Di Lorenzo is one of them - he says that loudness is important regularly on his YouTube channel. So in this episode I invited him on to explore that idea in more detail, and really get into the nuances of the topic. Do you...

You can't go a day without someone telling you how loud your music should be, these days."Everything has to be -8 LUFS""EDM has to be -6 LUFS or louder""-11 is the perfect balance""Just master everything to -14"...but they can't all be right !In fact, none of them are, and even more importantly, they may not even be talking about the same thing. And the differences are really important. So in...