![]() The mastering engineer’s job breaks down into roughly two parts-a final edit of the music, and preparation of the files for release. ![]() “It’s this mysterious process that a lot of musicians don’t understand, including us.” Schmidt, one half of the experimental electronic duo Matmos. If rock stars are the sex gods of music, mastering engineers are its druids, the ones who work methodically and meticulously, and to whom people come for mystical wisdom and blessing. There is the sense that a mastering engineer can save or, occasionally, ruin an album, but even musicians themselves typically know only the vaguest sketches of what’s actually being done. When the mix is finished, and the album is more or less complete, it’s sent to a mastering engineer-which is the point where general knowledge of what’s happening to the music ends. These individual tracks are then delivered to a mixing engineer who combines the best takes, adds effects, and puts them back together into a coherent song. Some of them you already know about-the musicians, of course, and the producer, who acts as a collaborator and shepherd through the creative process the audio engineers who record songs in multiple takes, usually tracking each sonic element separately. Generally speaking, an album passes through many hands before reaching yours. The whole episode provoked a series of questions, not just about what had gone wrong with Death Magnetic but about the craft in question: What is mastering, exactly? How does it work? Beyond the engineers themselves, almost no one seems to know. Eventually, more than 12,000 fans signed a petition in protest of the “unlistenable” product, and a mass mail-back-a-thon of CDs commenced. That the whole thing was drastically over-compressed, eliminating any sort of dynamic range. The consensus seemed to be that Death Magnetic was a good record that sounded like shit. And these are Metallica fans-people ostensibly undeterred by extremity. These listeners liked the music and the songwriting, but everything was so loud they couldn’t really hear anything. Upon the album’s release, fan forums exploded in disgust, choked with complaints that the songs sounded shrill, distorted, ear-splitting. According to many Metallica devotees, the official version of the band’s 2008 record Death Magnetic is not the one worth listening to.
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