Music Production Tips – The Stereo Bus Blog

This post is about the mastering process for my latest EP.  The session was booked at Minneapolis’ Rare Form Mastering.  Greg Reierson took the helm and did a really solid job overall.

First of all, I’m not the sort of producer who does mastering the same way for each album.  For my own material, I prefer a light touch and lower overall volume.  This is the sort of thing mastering engineers tend to prefer, so it works out well.  Obviously, a metal album would be a different story altogether (and my next self-produced release will be more along those lines.)

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This post focuses on the basics of equalization.

Equalization is something that most people are probably pretty familiar with on a basic level, having some EQ capacity in their car stereos and portable players.  Essentially, EQ is cutting or boosting of frequencies or frequency ranges.

There are fundamentally two kinds of equalization: graphic and parametric.  Graphic EQ usually has set frequency points with sliders to boost or cut at those points.  Parametric usually has a set of moveable frequency ‘centers’ with a width control, combined with a cut and boost knob.

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This post focuses on creating engaging sound for music production by combining pretty sounds and ugly sounds for contrast.

Something that the most successful producers understand is the importance of both pristine, pretty sounds and awful ugly, sounds. There have been countless examples of moments where engineers, producers, and artists have strived for creating something that is only pristine. Generally these sorts of projects fall short of the intended quality. When everything sounds good, it does not sound good together. This is one of music production’s dirty secrets. When Rupert Neve abandoned his iron-laden transformer preamp designs to achieve low-distortion preamp results, they didn’t have the bulky sound that people relied upon from Neve components. When solid state guitar amps hit the market, people bought them but discovered they didn’t have the same pleasurable distortion as tube amps.

The best producers know how to make pretty sounds sound really pretty by pairing them with really lo-fi sounds. A master of this philosophy is Nine Inch Nail’s own Trent Reznor. Take a listen through The Fragile and you’ll hear some of the ugliest sounds you’ve ever heard contrasted with some of the prettiest sounds you’ve ever heard.

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