I had a blast last week, mastering a new project for Big Al Wagner of Big Toe Studio – the album was “Whispers from Infinity“, by the Anahata Sacred Sound Current.

Which means a deeply listenable collision of Indian, Egyptian, Israeli and hip-hop influences – featuring Hossam Ramzy, percussion player for Shakira, Page and Plant and Peter Gabriel amongst others – and guest appearances from Rasul Allah and ATMA from the Lost Children of Babylon (a chamber of Wu-tang Clan).

Not surprisingly it sounds fantastic, though I do say so myself !

And, I got a great reaction – producer Anahata said in an email

“All I got say is WoW! WoW!! WOW!!! -I love it!!! So amazing!! A dream come true -thank you Soo much… I am now officially a fan!”

- which is exactly the kind of reaction we all want to get, right ?

Well yes, except when people make comments like this it always makes me feel bad for everyone else involved.

These recordings were five years in the making, and they sounded fantastic when they got to me, thanks to the incredible work Al, Karl and the performers put in. All I did was apply the finishing touches – balance the levels and apply the right EQ, multiband compression and light limiting to each track to bring out the best in it.

But as often happens, because mastering is the very final stage in the process, and it’s the first time people can sit down and hear the whole thing as an album, exactly as it will be when released, the overall effect can seem huge, almost magical.

So, am I saying mastering engineers don’t deserve the credit they get ?

No ! Well, not exactly – I work really hard on every project I get to make it the best it can be, and as I wrote recently I think the process of assessing and optimising every song individually is the very heart and soul of mastering – making the whole much greater than the sum of it’s parts – and when you get it right, it is a bit like magic.

But I would never want that to take away from the fact that you can’t make a great master without great material – and for that, mastering engineers can’t take any credit at all. Working on people’s music is a privilege, and the fact that we get to present the artist with the final polished product that can make them go “wow” is just the icing on the cake.

Please file under “I love my job”…

Just a bit of fun – there’s a lot of doom and gloom around in some parts of the music industry, so here are some reasons that I see to be optimistic about music, recording, mixing and production as we start the New Year.

Increasing bandwidth

The mp3 is dead. Internet download speeds are increasing at a startling rate, and this means lossy audio compression will gradually become a thing of the past – higher bandwidth means there’s no need for it. Which is good news for audio, since as we all know, mp3 sucks.

However, a major factor driving higher-quality audio codecs will actually be mp3 players, oddly enough ! In order to sell us new, higher-capacity iPods and phones, manufacturers will need to persuade us that we actually need the extra space they offer – and one very easy way to do that is to promote higher-quality audio, with it’s much larger file-sizes.

How long before we get lossless 24/96 support on the iPod, I wonder ?

Loudness War backlash

Of course lossless audio is no use if the original mixes sound like crap – and, unfortunately lots of them do, at the moment. But, I firmly believe that the tide is turning and that excessively loud, generically distorted recordings will also become a thing of the past. Partly because people like you and me are complaining more and more; partly because readily-available tools like the TT Dynamic Range meter make it much easier to educate people about the problems; but mainly because software players like Spotify will make the loudness war irrelevant.

DIY Rules – the return of real sounds

Audio recording used to be a huge challenge, and that’s what made life (and the records) interesting !

These days, anyone can have a passable facsimile of a Hammond, Bösendorfer or even a Hang Drum, all for the sake of a few hundred dollars (or an illegal download). Virtual guitarists, virtual amps, virtual drummers – they sound fantastic, they are technically astonishing, and unless they’re used with genuine flair and talent, they are incomparably DULL.

The delight in recording many instruments lies in the challenge of actually capturing them in the first place – and thankfully, a whole new generation of musicians and engineers is discovering this. Artists like Imogen Heap, Diego Stoco and many others are using modern technology to record real instruments in unusual places, unusual instruments in unexpected places, and things that actually aren’t instruments at all in places that… well anyway, they’re generally experimenting and having fun.

So while I love recording studios, and it gives me no pleasure at all to think of all those that are struggling or going under at the moment, it gives me very great pleasure to know that fantastic, adventurous, high-quality recordings are being made and will be made… well, everywhere and anywhere.

Blu Ray is on the way

Blu Ray is the high-definition replacement for DVD. This year, cutting-edge Blu Ray players are available for only $200. Soon, all new DVD players sold will actually be Blu Ray players.

Blu Ray offers uncompressed, 24/96 surround-sound audio.

I think that opportunity speaks for itself, doesn’t it ?

Web 2.0 and beyond

Clearly, the internet presents all manor of threats to the music business as it has operated for the last couple of decades – I don’t need to re-hash them here. But it also presents awesome opportunities.

Services like Dropbox make long-distance collaboration genuinely possible, if not entirely straightforward. Social media like Twitter and online Forums connect us and give us community and allow us to offer support and assistance. Blogs offer news, comment and education. Online payment is straightforward.

Geographical location will soon be irrelevant – maybe it already is – especially as streaming live audio and video from the studio becomes straightforward. You can’t beat having artists with you for the mix, but if they can listen and comment in good quality from the other side of the world, exactly what “with you” means starts to become a little complicated !

And some artists are using the web in more and more interesting ways – one of my favourites is Imogen Heap, who I mentioned above. She connects directly to her fans and asks for their opinions while songwriting, recording and mixing, even improvising one track while streaming live and asking for comments. She offered her new album to listen for free on the day of release, by anyone who chose to embed it – trusting the quality of her work to power sales. On her recent tour, she held live web auditions for a different local cellist at every venue on the tour. The artwork artist was chosen via a crowd-sourced competition, and fans contributed to her biography via Twitter… the list goes on.

I for one can’t wait to see what she, and all the rest of the next generation of online musicians, producers and engineers, do next.

So, despite the many challenges we all face, I feel cheerful about music and audio production, heading into the next decade – and, I hope you do, too !

Image by Rachel Sian

The game has changed – forever.

It’s no longer about sounding great on CD, it’s no longer about sounding great on the radio.

It’s about sounding great on Spotify, and this is fantastic news for anyone who loves great-sounding music, because it means the so-called “Loudness Wars” are about to become an irrelevant footnote in history.

If you live outside Europe, you may not be familiar with Spotify yet, but trust me – you will be.

Spotify enables you to stream almost any music you like to your computer or mobile device, in return for simply listening to a few ads, or for a modest monthly subscription fee. (Required for the mobile version.)

The interface is great – slick, professional and easy-to-use. The music sounds good – better than any mp3 thanks to the use of the Ogg Vorbis codec – and is available in even higher quality for subscribers. The catalogue is huge, and growing every day, and mobile users can even listen offline.

But what does this have to do with the Loudness Wars ?

The answer is - Spotify uses “Volume Normalisation” by default.

It adjusts the playback level of all songs so you don’t have to keep adjusting your volume control.

Which means that a genuine pop classic like “Billy Jean” will play at the same volume as the flat, fuzzy distorted mess that is Cheryl Cole’s new single.

And that anything off Kasabian’s latest album will play at the same volume as anything by Black Grape.

Or that “In Bloom” from Nirvana’s masterpiece “Nevermind” will play back at a similar level to U2′s recent Loudness-War-casualty “Vertigo”.

Guess which ones sound better ? The modern, brickwalled, crushed-to-death clipping victims, or the lower-level, more dynamic, open, punchy, older stuff ?

You guessed it. To take that last example, Nirvana wins – by a mile. The kick kicks, the guitars bite, the whole thing rocks. Vertigo is a limp, mushy lump by comparison.

Don’t believe me ? Try it yourself ! Fire up Spotify and pop those two into a playlist. If you don’t have Spotify, just line them up in any audio editor, and turn the U2 version down by 5dB. Or compare any of those tracks, making sure you use the TT Dynamic range meter to level-match them first.

Listen to the kick drums, the snares, the guitars, the bass.

(And while you’re listening, pause for a moment to think – have you ever heard anyone complain that “Nevermind” was too quiet ?!)

QED.

Every track has it’s playback volume adjusted according to “ReplayGain” values which give a decent estimate of a song’s apparent volume and therefore how dynamic it is. Very dynamic material will be compressed somewhat to boost it’s average level, but almost all recent, heavily compressed and high-level material will simply be turned down a little.

Now some of you will be saying – “ReplayGain ? I’ve heard all of this before – so what’s the big deal about Spotify ?”

Easy. Spotify is going to take over the world.

Think about it – the first evening I paid my £10 subscription and installed Spotify on my iPod, I downloaded over 200 songs. 100% legally. A week later it was over a thousand. Some are old favourites, some are new experiments. None of them are things I would have bought on CD or even mp3. And as long as I pay my subscription, I can listen to them wherever and whenever I want.

Pretty soon, this is how everyone will listen to music. (Except it’ll be with a lossless codec ) Eventually nobody will own any hard copies at all, it’ll all just sit in the cloud waiting for them to call on it.

More importantly, Spotify is where everyone will listen to new music first.

And all those people listening to music for the fist time on Spotify will have volume normalisation enabled by default.

Meaning if you want your music to sound great and leap out of the speakers at you, it doesn’t need massive level, it needs great dynamics.

Game Over.

PS. Metallica aren’t on Spotify yet, but when they are, do you think they’ll still be impressed by the 2dB-dynamic-range sound of “Death Magnetic” ?

Ian Shepherd is a mastering engineer and producer at Sound Recording Technology. He writes the respected Mastering Media blog, and runs the Production Advice website.