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I used to make a living as a mastering engineer, where the job description is to make many tiny changes near or even beyond the threshold of perception, which w

I used to make a living as a mastering engineer, where the job description is to make many tiny changes near or even beyond the threshold of perception, which when summed may add up to a perceptible whole. How to do this? It's simple: isolate and magnify. Zoom in to where your senses become reliable, make a change informed by your knowledge and experience which you predict will be beneficial, then zoom out. You don't need "golden ears" to be effective: you need an understanding of your tools and techniques and an appreciation for how they affect the gestalt. The human perceptual mechanism is prone to illusion, and unreliable for measuring and comparing fine detail — that's not what it's for. You won't go wrong if you think of it as primarily designed by evolution to model and identify threats: to hear a twig snap while ignoring the wind blowing, to perceive that hint of unusual movement by something vaguely alligator-shaped in your peripheral vision while ignoring the waves. Enjoy wine, or that Stradivarius recording, accepting that you might be fooling yourself. Even if you might be wrong about the wine or the Strad, you know for absolute certain whether it is making you happy! Leave it to the critics to claim perceptual accuracy they don't possess and to risk being exposed.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Sure. But lets have a good time mocking those deluded critics as well. That's good fun too!
whiddershins 6y ago
On this topic, what resource do you think is a really good one for learning mastering?
- rectang 6y ago
  Try messing around with buss processing and track sequencing while referencing other recordings in the same genre. Just make sure to keep the unprocessed tracks around, and err on the side of "less is more". There's a lot of overlap between the aesthetic skills needed for mixing and those needed for mastering. The profession of mastering is much more than that, but generally when people ask this question they want to know about the aesthetics, not about stuff like thoroughly grokking many source and delivery formats, etc.
  - whiddershins 6y ago
    Thanks for the directional advice. For me personally, I'm a bit past the messing around stage and wondering about specific areas of exploration. I'm just always thinking mastering engineers know some techniques I've never considered, especially in terms of creating that upper register 'shimmer' ... is there crazy stuff happening using m-s and then diving in to certain frequency ranges? It could be that it's more mystique than real?
- gwynplaine 6y ago
  The book Mastering Audio by Bob Katz covers a lot of ground.
- ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
  I don't think there are. Lots of resources on technicalities of the craft, but I'm not sure you can effectively teach mastering skills without hands-on approach. Some subtle nuances of the sound are just very hard to describe and be sure the reader really hears it properly. Mastering engineer needs to develop sharp focus, integrate themselves deeply into their listening environment and setup to understand how their decisions will translate in the wild. It's also important to know what the author/producer and the listener expects from the music, so you can, fortunately, make both sides happier. This implies listening a lot of different music with a critical ear. I mostly do mixing, but do mastering as well and I enjoy the process a lot. It's not easy but can be extremely rewarding.
trianglem 6y ago
That’s like enjoying a diamond you overpaid for or an art forgery. Just because it makes you happy doesn’t mean you haven’t been swindled.
- rectang 6y ago
  So, buy cheap wine and enjoy it without regrets! :) I know, that's empty advice. Drinking expensive wine is usually about signalling social status; it's not really about taste.
  - trianglem 6y ago
    Well I don’t really drink but it’s the principle of the matter! I want to be happy and content without being swindled.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> Enjoy wine, or that Stradivarius recording, accepting that you might be fooling yourself. Yes, but it's also good to be aware that there are limits to your perception and take advantage. The 80% rule definitely works here. I don't drink wine, but at least with beer, tequila, and coffee, there is a pretty obvious gap between the cheap/ low end stuff and the good stuff, but paying significantly more for higher end brands isn't worth it. So focus on getting out of that low end category and really enjoy the good stuff because the supposed "great" high end stuff is rarely worth tripling what you pay (or more).
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  What I’ve found is that the difference between an $30 bottle of wine and a $8 bottle isn’t necessarily quality, it’s consistency: buying the same $8 bottle of wine 10 times can result in five great bottles and five so-so bottles, with a $30+ bottle, it’s more like 1% of the time you get a bad bottle. So, when I’m giving a present or planning a party, I tend to gravitate to the more expensive bottles because it makes the outcome more certain.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    Buying into the mid-range is fine. It's what I do with beer a tequila. Buying the $200 bottles is where I question the logic. Even the expert tasters struggle to differentiate between a good $20-30 bottle and a $400 bottle in double blind tests. I don't drink Sanka or Coors, I just use good coffee beans and drink good local beer. I don't spend $200 on exotic coffee beans feral cats have shit out. The only reason I put the $6 in parens for wine is because I don't drink wine and don't really know where the price point is for a solid mid-range wine is.
    - turndown 6y ago
      I don't drink coffee, and probably never will, but I remember listening to a podcast once where two coffee drinkers who derided the whole "eat coffee beans shit out by a civet" idea tried it and said it was the best coffee they had ever had. YMMV
xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
>Even if you might be wrong about the wine or the Strad, you know for absolute certain whether it is making you happy! I also know for absolute certain that I can't afford expensive wine and that there are people who look down at me because the wine I drink shows I have an "unrefined palate". Normally the concept of "elitism" is hogwash, but this is a pretty clear-cut example. Expensive wine serves to make one seem refined and worldly. It enables rich people to pretend they are more cultured, more intelligent, and just plain better than the plebs because they think they have the taste to appreciate a $500 bottle of wine. Expensive wine is a tool of oppression. I actually don't think that's hyperbole. It is a small tool that doesn't do anywhere near as much damage as the prisons or the war on drugs or Fox News, but it has the same effect.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  Sour Grapes is a documentary about someone who sold a bunch of counterfeit wine to elites that couldn’t tell the difference, worth a watch.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    That's probably not a wholly fair characterization. Part of the takeaway is that the perpetrator had a sophisticated palate and spent a lot of time mixing already high-end (but not $thousands/bottle) wine to work out the recipes. I'm as skeptical as anyone that someone can distinguish between a $2k and $200 wine. But to someone that drinks wine daily, the difference between $6 and $60 wine (red, of similar varietal and style) is pretty dramatic. Yeah, some rich guys got suckered, but I don't think they were chumps.
    - camjohnson26 6y ago
      There’s a scene where an actual expert tastes the fake wine and calls it garbage, the people he swindled tended to have a high view of their own palate but little formal training. And yeah by all accounts the swindler had a very sophisticated sense of taste.
GuB-42 6y ago
Professional wine tasters are like engineers, and their senses work like a chromatograph. They are able to match a taste profile to one of the wines they know, they are also able to spot and identify defects. They know the wine process and the chemistry involved. They also know their senses can be fooled and will send samples to the lab if they think it is justified. They are real pros, they work for wineries and distributors to help produce a wine with a desirable profile and to identify and eventually fix defects. Sommeliers are only a subcategory of wine tasters and the most likely to sound like snobs, but that's only because it is what is expected of them. After all their job is to sell fancy wines in fancy restaurants, so they better sound fancy to customers.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Sure. But lets have a good time mocking those deluded critics as well. That's good fun too!

whiddershins 6y ago

On this topic, what resource do you think is a really good one for learning mastering?

rectang 6y ago
Try messing around with buss processing and track sequencing while referencing other recordings in the same genre. Just make sure to keep the unprocessed tracks around, and err on the side of "less is more". There's a lot of overlap between the aesthetic skills needed for mixing and those needed for mastering. The profession of mastering is much more than that, but generally when people ask this question they want to know about the aesthetics, not about stuff like thoroughly grokking many source and delivery formats, etc.
- whiddershins 6y ago
  Thanks for the directional advice. For me personally, I'm a bit past the messing around stage and wondering about specific areas of exploration. I'm just always thinking mastering engineers know some techniques I've never considered, especially in terms of creating that upper register 'shimmer' ... is there crazy stuff happening using m-s and then diving in to certain frequency ranges? It could be that it's more mystique than real?
gwynplaine 6y ago
The book Mastering Audio by Bob Katz covers a lot of ground.
ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
I don't think there are. Lots of resources on technicalities of the craft, but I'm not sure you can effectively teach mastering skills without hands-on approach. Some subtle nuances of the sound are just very hard to describe and be sure the reader really hears it properly. Mastering engineer needs to develop sharp focus, integrate themselves deeply into their listening environment and setup to understand how their decisions will translate in the wild. It's also important to know what the author/producer and the listener expects from the music, so you can, fortunately, make both sides happier. This implies listening a lot of different music with a critical ear. I mostly do mixing, but do mastering as well and I enjoy the process a lot. It's not easy but can be extremely rewarding.

trianglem 6y ago

That’s like enjoying a diamond you overpaid for or an art forgery. Just because it makes you happy doesn’t mean you haven’t been swindled.

rectang 6y ago
So, buy cheap wine and enjoy it without regrets! :) I know, that's empty advice. Drinking expensive wine is usually about signalling social status; it's not really about taste.
- trianglem 6y ago
  Well I don’t really drink but it’s the principle of the matter! I want to be happy and content without being swindled.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> Enjoy wine, or that Stradivarius recording, accepting that you might be fooling yourself. Yes, but it's also good to be aware that there are limits to your perception and take advantage. The 80% rule definitely works here. I don't drink wine, but at least with beer, tequila, and coffee, there is a pretty obvious gap between the cheap/ low end stuff and the good stuff, but paying significantly more for higher end brands isn't worth it. So focus on getting out of that low end category and really enjoy the good stuff because the supposed "great" high end stuff is rarely worth tripling what you pay (or more).

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
What I’ve found is that the difference between an $30 bottle of wine and a $8 bottle isn’t necessarily quality, it’s consistency: buying the same $8 bottle of wine 10 times can result in five great bottles and five so-so bottles, with a $30+ bottle, it’s more like 1% of the time you get a bad bottle. So, when I’m giving a present or planning a party, I tend to gravitate to the more expensive bottles because it makes the outcome more certain.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Buying into the mid-range is fine. It's what I do with beer a tequila. Buying the $200 bottles is where I question the logic. Even the expert tasters struggle to differentiate between a good $20-30 bottle and a $400 bottle in double blind tests. I don't drink Sanka or Coors, I just use good coffee beans and drink good local beer. I don't spend $200 on exotic coffee beans feral cats have shit out. The only reason I put the $6 in parens for wine is because I don't drink wine and don't really know where the price point is for a solid mid-range wine is.
  - turndown 6y ago
    I don't drink coffee, and probably never will, but I remember listening to a podcast once where two coffee drinkers who derided the whole "eat coffee beans shit out by a civet" idea tried it and said it was the best coffee they had ever had. YMMV

xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago

>Even if you might be wrong about the wine or the Strad, you know for absolute certain whether it is making you happy! I also know for absolute certain that I can't afford expensive wine and that there are people who look down at me because the wine I drink shows I have an "unrefined palate". Normally the concept of "elitism" is hogwash, but this is a pretty clear-cut example. Expensive wine serves to make one seem refined and worldly. It enables rich people to pretend they are more cultured, more intelligent, and just plain better than the plebs because they think they have the taste to appreciate a $500 bottle of wine. Expensive wine is a tool of oppression. I actually don't think that's hyperbole. It is a small tool that doesn't do anywhere near as much damage as the prisons or the war on drugs or Fox News, but it has the same effect.

camjohnson26 6y ago
Sour Grapes is a documentary about someone who sold a bunch of counterfeit wine to elites that couldn’t tell the difference, worth a watch.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  That's probably not a wholly fair characterization. Part of the takeaway is that the perpetrator had a sophisticated palate and spent a lot of time mixing already high-end (but not $thousands/bottle) wine to work out the recipes. I'm as skeptical as anyone that someone can distinguish between a $2k and $200 wine. But to someone that drinks wine daily, the difference between $6 and $60 wine (red, of similar varietal and style) is pretty dramatic. Yeah, some rich guys got suckered, but I don't think they were chumps.
  - camjohnson26 6y ago
    There’s a scene where an actual expert tastes the fake wine and calls it garbage, the people he swindled tended to have a high view of their own palate but little formal training. And yeah by all accounts the swindler had a very sophisticated sense of taste.

GuB-42 6y ago

Professional wine tasters are like engineers, and their senses work like a chromatograph. They are able to match a taste profile to one of the wines they know, they are also able to spot and identify defects. They know the wine process and the chemistry involved. They also know their senses can be fooled and will send samples to the lab if they think it is justified. They are real pros, they work for wineries and distributors to help produce a wine with a desirable profile and to identify and eventually fix defects. Sommeliers are only a subcategory of wine tasters and the most likely to sound like snobs, but that's only because it is what is expected of them. After all their job is to sell fancy wines in fancy restaurants, so they better sound fancy to customers.