Excerpts from an interview with John Burdick:

“John Burdick:  Mastering. WTF?

Jamal Ruhe: I have a very broad definition of what mastering is, based on my experience and how things are handed to me. An artist team, whether that’s someone at home with a four-track or video post, where 15 people are involved in decision making, gets to a point at which they are at their maximum. They’ve made it as good as they can make it. They give it to me to finish it.

That can mean repairing things, that can mean borderline mixing things, that can mean sweetening things, that can mean just turning things down, getting things to fit. A significant amount of my time is spent putting things in the right format for distribution—vinyl, streaming, YouTube, broadcast.  A lot of it is clerical: knowing your formats, your loudness codecs, your targets.

But on the front end, it is pretty elastic. People give me everything. Mixes of records, iPhone recordings (as you well know).

JB: I have an idea about literary editing. It is less a highly specialized skill than a hat you put on and that brings out the editorial perspective in you—any engaged and sensitive writer can play the editor role. When you put on the hat, you see things differently than when you are, say, doing your own writing. I wonder if mastering is somewhat the same.

JR: I do put on a mastering hat. It is a different perspective than the other roles in recording. It is 100%  about delivery. It is about how the music is perceived.

You want an artist to feel good, but mostly you want it to relate to their audience what they want it to relate. That translation is very nuanced. You have to translate it to get that same point across to as many other people as possible. And that comes down to translation, whether that means equalization, dynamics changes, depth of field, loudness—you can go on and on about it.

JB: You have played every role in music, instrumentalist and songwriter, live engineer, studio engineer and producer, and now mastering engineer. Is that a typical route to the mastering chair?

JR: Most mastering engineers do not come from the world of making records. They come from the world of audiophiles—listeners, fans. They have a commitment to excellence in playback, which is something we don’t hear enough about in music making in my opinion. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, playback was something everyone longed for in their houses and cars, something nobody cares about anymore. The masses are not concerned with it. They sell more headphones on noise rejection and how well you can talk on the phone with them than they do on how good they sound.

It’s a dramatic change. It is good to have mastering engineers as a bulwark against that. Our emphasis on hearing things played back as intended is a net positive. There are countless millions who love their music and who have never heard it played back on even a decent playback system, I mean even a good pair of headphones. They have never heard anything like what the music was intended to sound like.

JB: Should mastering engineers have genre specializations?

JR: It can go either way. What you love is what you are going to do best. But I have done stuff that was well outside of my wheelhouse that clients were very happy with, because I did my best to make it translatable. When I am working on something I don’t like, I am often surprised by how well it turns out. It’s a regular occurrence.

JB: What are you listening for when you master? Are you thinking about every playback scenario, all the way down to cell phone speakers?

JR: So much about mixing and mastering, as technical endeavors, is about proportions, about there being enough of this and not too much of that. Proportions are what frame anything, and that is true in visual art as in music. Color timing in the film world is a very similar thing. Something looking natural to you is about proportions. Something sounding like it is in a room with you is about proportions.

If I am handed a dance hall track, I know that they want a low end profile that is loud and that hits hard. And that’s going to happen--they mixed it that way. That’s one thing about genre. If it is something that defines the genre, you can be sure they already did that. Whether they give you too much of it is usually the question.

Whatever leaves the least amount of fingerprints is what you are going to want, but that low end thing, you are going to want that to come across in as many playback scenarios as possible. There are rap records where when you put the phone down, it is going to shake the table. That’s what is mandated. It is going to ruin the music if it doesn’t do that, and they’re not going to be happy with it. It’s not genre-correct.

But that kind of playback translation is a secondary function of things being done right. The better I have gotten at my job, the less I worry about different playback systems because the more things just fall into place.

 JB: Speaking of audiophiles, what do you think of the myths that attend mastering—the dark and occult arts of it?

JR: I think I could teach any engineer the technical aspects of mastering, period.

Maybe not the taste part, or the taste for the business. Dealing with many, many clients, navigating that is not for everyone. If you’re a “my way or the highway” type of person, this is not the job for you.  If you’re the type of person that is hyper sensitive to blame and takes things personally, this is not the job for you. It is a job in which you subjugate your artistic opinions to your clients’. You use them, you leverage them to help the client, but if they are at odds with your clients, you just gotta put them in your pocket, because you’re not helping anybody by going to war for them.

JB: Certain specific ways of sounding bad and naïve get mythologized and fetishized and then become a target, a way people want to sound. Desirable, iconic.  Proportion and balance may be universal elements of good sound, but then there is a whole dimension of culturally defined good sound—cool sound, which can be bad sound.

JR: I have to reject that premise. The bad sounds that become fetishized, they weren’t bad to begin with. They may have been bad in the context of the era, or not what someone intended, but history proves that it is what had the vibe, what contained a core element of the message of the work.  That can be said of super high gain metal core guitars. The majority of the world thinks that that is a terrible sound. Go around China, Africa, South America and play that for some people who speak Quechua or Urdu, they are going to say, “wow, you have really gone out of your way to create the most horrible sound in the world.” And it is the bedrock of a genre! Not because it is horrible, but because that reaction is part of the message of the music. The point is “I am upset and I am projecting.”  If that sound conveys a message that is integral to the work, sometimes you feel the need to moderate it as an engineer, but you can’t get rid of it. That’s a mistake.