By: Tony Price
After 26 years spent working at Toronto’s legendary Lacquer Channel Mastering, Phil Demetro, one of Canada’s preeminent, in-demand mastering engineers is striking out on his own. Over the course of what has arguably been the music industry’s most mercurial and volatile period, Phil has seen many a trend come and go. Technological developments have transformed the manner in which people produce, distribute and consume music and I was very curious to learn from him the ways in which this may or may not have changed the crucial, yet mysterious, and often misunderstood process of mastering audio. In this interview, Phil and I discuss the fundamentals of audio mastering and contemplate the ways in which contemporary listening habits have changed the process of music making. We debate the differences between lossless and “lossy” audio files and ruminate on what is at stake in an increasingly digital world where the physical and spiritual dimensions once intrinsic to the process of engaging with art have taken a back seat to techniques and practices that favor convenience and speed.
TP: Mastering is a very mysterious process. When did you start and why?
PD: There’s no natural musical ability in my family tree. My dad played a little bit of saxophone, he’s an immigrant from Eastern Europe. That was not the focus of his life. You grow up and you have access to your parent’s record collection. I was born in ’68, I’m turning 55 years old. Everyone had the Beatles and that kind of stuff kickin’ around. So you hear those types of things and end up growing up loving music, but because the family culture was, “when you get older, you gotta go to school, you gotta do well, because you gotta put food on the table, you don’t want to starve, like our family did” and all those kinds of things, there was really more of a practical, utilitarian approach to work. It’s not supposed to be fun or satisfying or anything like that. I went to university and I went to college, I’m interning at Scarborough Grace Hospital in the psych ward, and I’m basically going that direction towards mental health. It was fundamentally clear after year two that this was not for me. You’re with a whole bunch of people that you realize, you know intrinsically, some people, you’re like, this is where you belong, they’d truly found what their “thing” is, and I was like, this is not my thing. I’m not gonna be able to be as effective or as helpful as I could be to people, because I’m not a natural. So I thought, I love music, I love records, let’s go to school for music. I stopped everything, in my late 20s. I was going to go to the Trebas Institute. With a little bit of guidance and a few questions and whatnot, I ended up going to a place called the Harris Institute. I went there and not the other schools because, if you go to the regular institutional route, everything is like, concrete walls and fluorescent lighting and they treat it like, it’s a very cold, harsh environment, which is not comfortable to spend a long time in. So I went to Harris, they had aquariums, and the colour scheme is purple. Halogen lighting, wood floors, I was like, wow. If I can’t get it done here, I can’t get it done anywhere. At that time, the school was looking for internships at the end of the school year. They would set you up and, as it turns out, I didn’t know what mastering was, because by third term, I was asking one of the instructors, “we didn’t do mastering, what’s mastering?” And they were sort of like, “just forget it. You don’t need to know, it’s not important. It’s way at the end, there’s other things for you to do.” So, very strangely, around that time, I get a call from my mother, and she says “the Avon lady in my neighbourhood, her husband owns a mastering studio if you wanna go for a tour.”
TP: Whoa.
PD: I thought, well that’s interesting. I had no concept what it was. So I went, and as it turns out the Avon lady’s husband was a guy named George Graves who co-owned the Lacquer Channel at that time. I went there on a tour, and I walked in and there was all this old stuff, the lathe was there, old tape machines. I expected shiny SSL consoles, I expected a mix environment, but all this stuff kicking around, they looked like gigantic sewing machines. I’m like, oh my god, what a dump, this isn’t very nice. But when I found out what it was, the guy who gave me the tour was a freelancer at the time, a guy named Brad Rogers, he explained what it was, and I thought, wow, my whole life I’ve always been making tapes and recordings and trying to fix and modify things to try and get the best possible capture that I could afford as a kid. That was my thing: how do I make a copy of this? I found that very fascinating. What’s the best possible way I could make this happen? As it turns out, that’s what mastering is. It really ultimately is making a transfer. So, I got in here, I snuclk in very luckily because they’d had bad experiences with interns. Managed to get in and on the first day, Scott Murley, who was co-owner at the time, said you’re welcome to stay as long as you want, but there’s no job for you at the end of this. I just said I’m happy to wash toilets and make coffee, to be honest. And it’s been 25 years. I’ve been in this room for 25 years, it’s like a piece of veal, really, there’s no windows, it’s recycled air, HVAC, no windows. I’m preserved, sort of.
TP: I find it interesting that you asked that question about what mastering is at Harris, and it was kind of like, “don’t worry about it”. That goes back to my point about mastering being a mysterious art form. When someone doesn’t really understand what mastering is, what’s your go-to answer?
PD: I can relate to a degree why people don’t want to tell you. The people that I learned from and grew up with, they’re not social influencers or TV stars or actors, they’re just workers. They’re doing a job. They’re real purpose is not to explain what it is that they do, they’re not fashion models or actors. They do a job and sometimes, you go to a musician and you ask “hey can you show me how to play that?” And they’re like, “I can just play it, but I can’t show you how I play it because I can’t explain it to you.” I understand also from a competitive standpoint, I’ve seen this in person, a lot of people don’t really want to tell you what it is because if I keep the mystery alive, you also maintain that competitive edge. If you run a business and you do a magic trick, or you have something mysteriously secretive or better, if you have a special sauce that the competitor doesn’t have, it ensures your customers keep coming back in droves, right?
TP: Yep.
PD: If I could put caffeine in my masters I’d do it. I’d never have to worry about business again. But the short answer definition for mastering is, basically, the process of making a master. That’s the definition. Mastering is you’re making a master. What is a master? In the music production process, as you know, if you’re a songwriter or performer and you’re looking to go to a studio, you do recordings, you do a mix of those various recordings. If you have a rock band, you’ve got guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, vocals, etc. You make recordings of all those instruments and then they’re balanced via the mixing stage, where they get all their relative levels and perspectives. And then, traditionally, the album has been a very popular format, so you would have an artist that would have five, six, seven, twelve songs on an album and you’d have to take all those different mixes and you’d have to compile them. The process of compiling them – you do the sequence, you do the space in the songs, you would do some correctional adjustments, because basically you want someone to listen to your music and not be distracted by technical difficulties, like, this track is too bright, this track is too bass-y, this track is too quiet. So you really want to bring a level of cohesion and continuity to a full listening experience so you’re not having to get up and make adjustments to your playback system, you’re not distracted by that, you’re just enjoying the music. You’re in the moment. So the mastering ties all those different musical elements together and frames it in such a way that you can add a creative element to it. I think that’s sort of where a lot of boutique mastering and some of the big name mastering studios really develop their reputation over the decades, by bringing a nice proprietary and consistent addition to an already existing mix that sounds fantastic. You’d go to someone on the East Coast or the West Coast or overseas or whatever and have these hallmark sounds. Studios would get to be known by their sonic footprint or their creative stamp on your music, and people would be like, that’s the key to the hit. They would look at credits on a record and go, “oh that record was done there, this is great, I’ve got to work with those people.”
TP: That’s a great answer. In 25 years of mastering, we’ve seen the first “death” of cassette and vinyl, the rise and fall of CDs, and now vinyl and cassettes have come back. We’re now inside of a very digital landscape when it comes to consumer music habits. We’ve had all these different formats in that short span of time. In your opinion, what do you think is the best sounding commercial medium for listening to music? Not so much from a mastering perspective, but as a listener or a music fan, do you have a favourite, or do you think one sounds better than the other? Does convenience help sway that opinion in in one direction or another?
PD: Yeah, I mean, there’s listening experience and then there’s just listening. For me, the ultimate listening experience is not even the format. For me, the ultimate listening experience is one free of distraction. I don’t have the internet going. As a kid I used to sit there for hours on the couch at my parent’s house in front of the stereo playing records, just like everybody did. And that’s a beautiful thing, but you can’t always do that. It’s great when you’re a kid, but when you’re older, life takes over and you can’t really set aside two hours of your day just sitting on the couch staring at a record jacket. You can’t do it. For me today, the ultimate listening is usually on my dog walk every night. I load up .wav files as opposed to MP3s. I load up the high-res tracks and I put in some earbuds and I’m on my walk. I’m not fumbling with cables, there’s no one around, just me and the dog, so my focus is very much – I’m outside of myself, or work, or home, things like that. I’m not distracted with making a left-hand turn or dodging car accidents. So for me, it may not be the best sound, it’s pretty darn good. My own space, outside, walking with my dog with earbuds playing .wav files is the best.
TP: Do you believe that there is a major audible difference between a compressed digital audio file, like an MP3 or a .wav or a .flac file? What would you say that audible difference is? Do you think that the average listener can tell? This is something that always gets debated on the internet, or amongst musicians, whether there is an audible difference.
PD: Yeah, people love to argue. I would say there’s not a big difference, because the MP3 and Apple have really invested considerable resources, time and money, into figuring out how to streamline audio so that you can send it everywhere across the internet or stream it without interruption. If you played a file for me and then told me what it was, if you played me an MP3 file, maybe not like 128 megabit, kilobit per second MP3 but maybe something higher, and you said that was a 96K .wav file, I would have to believe you. Now, if you play them side by side, you could probably hear a difference, and I think anyone could probably hear a difference, whether or not they care, because it sort of becomes a point of diminishing returns, where I think people are like, “just give it to me, I want to hear the song, I’m not here to be a music critic for a magazine.” Some people just want to get the job done and they love the melody or they love the beat or the rhythm, it just makes them feel happy or want to dance, whatever it is, it makes them want to sleep or something. Honestly, man, I don’t like the idea of MP3 and I slightly have my back up against the wall about that whole thing, because it seemed like everything was improving: video was getting better, you’re getting 4K high-definition, BluRay, but for audio people, it seemed like it was going backwards. And I was like, “why are we getting 128kpbs MP3s that sounds like the music’s underwater?” So, the soundtrack is crappy, but the video is sharper than reality.
TP: That’s a very, very good point.
PD: Are we second-class citizens, us audio people? Why can’t we have better? But I think the ultimate experience for a human being, whether it’s convenient or not convenient, is to listen 100% analog. That’s the best way to listen because the minute those sine waves get digitized, down at the sample rates, basically just little photographic snapshots along the line, following the line of a real analog sine wave, is the minute that so much musical information is being tossed away. Even though we know what we’re listening to, we can identify music in any bit reduction, whatever they do, we’re still organic creatures and our ears are not binary, zeroes and ones and pulse-code modulation technology, our ears are true analog, right? That’s where the ultimate experience is, dealing in reality. Probably as you know, we’re getting further and further into virtual reality and being sucked into the machine. It’s more and more not so much about natural experiences anymore but sort of like, we do it because we can.
TP: As a mastering engineer, you are constantly receiving fresh mixes from artists or producers. Do you think that two and a half decades of listening to MP3s through earbuds has changed the way that people make and mix music in any way?
PD: I’m not really sure, I mean, if MP3s came around in the late 90s, when people started getting their iPods, and sharing their music libraries around. I don’t know if it’s the technology so much that’s changed production. I think what’s changed, from my experience, is just moving away from traditional means of musical capture, so a tape machine or cutting a record has moved to a screen, looking at a screen. So instead of having, when you go to those classic studios, there’s no screens anywhere. It’s just a console and the engineers and speakers on the wall, and every decision was being made with your ear. There was no eye. There were no eyes involved in musical decision making. For instance, I always notice if I’m driving in my car and I’m trying to parallel park, I have to turn all the audio off in my car or turn it really, really down, because I don’t feel like my brain has enough DSP to handle parallel parking with my eyes and having music blasting at the same time. I have to give one up. There’s almost kind of like a sharing of the DSP between senses. If you have a workstation like Pro Tools, and you’re looking at music on a grid, you’re not really caring about performance necessarily as much, because you’re like, well now we can put this whole performance on the grid, we can fix that snare, we can move that over there, so really it’s almost like you’re assembling a puzzle, in a sense, but your eyes are now part of the auditory process, because you’re now using your visual to confirm what your ears are hearing. But I always feel the eyes are dominant to the ears.
TP: Wow, I understand exactly what you’re saying. I think my opinion is similar, too, in that it’s not so much that the sound of music has changed the sound or manner in which people make music, it’s the process of making music that has changed the process of making music as a result of all this. Which brings to mind another debate, which is what I wanted to ask you about: the ongoing analog-digital debate. Does analog gear play a large role in your workflow? What do you think of that debate when it comes to production and mastering? Do you think that analog equipment will always play a role in mastering? We have these new - I don’t even know what you want to call them - these new ventures into artificial intelligence mastering, where you can upload a song and it purports to be able to master the song for you, which I want nothing to do with. I’m just curious about what you think when it comes to mastering about that analog-digital debate.
PD: If you do it long enough, if you do something for many decades, your opinion is going to change. Your opinion is going to be reflective of the times, whether you know it or not. Look at the kind of conversations you probably had today, they’re all probably based on current events in the news, and five years ago, your conversations were based on current events on the news. So, any sort of prevailing opinion I might have is based on, say, the last 25 years. And I would say there was a time when I would say the analog gear was how we’d differentiate ourselves a lot of the times, because of what we have: certain gear that other people don’t have, or it was very expensive so a lot of people couldn’t afford to have that equipment. Fast forward through time a little bit, and by the way I do work with analog, I have all the best analog and I work digital, so it’s one or the other, or it’s a hybrid. I have to say that when I see people now entering the field, and they’re posting – I can’t blame them – but their sort of proud picture of their studio outfitted with all the gear, and they’re standing in front of this big stack of equipment, I sort of feel sorry for them in a strange way. I’ll look at them and think they bought into it, you know. And I feel sorry for them because I really feel like now it’s less and less and less a critical factor in getting the job done. Even though I have all the analog gear, and maybe I should be keeping secrets, but the reality is it’s quickly becoming esoteric and outdated. Now, why do I say that? Because if you have an analog performance on an analog tape and you’re going through analog equipment, records that were made a certain way have a certain sound. The current production that I’m really hearing nowadays, I’m hearing less and less analog in it. What I’m trying to say is, and this might take us into your automated processing or artificial intelligence future, is that if you’re a 15-year-old kid and you have Ableton or something, and you’re like, “I’m gonna make a song.” They reach into their sample library and they start dragging stuff into the playlist, into the session, “oh there’s my drum, there’s my snare, I’m gonna bring in a kick, I’m gonna pull in a longer sample,” and they line it all up, right? All those sounds are generated digitally or by computer. It would almost make more sense to treat it with the same tools, because it’s of the same world. I find that by going to analog, the first thing that happens is there’s losses. You can’t go from a digital environment out to analog and have it be a one-to-one process. There is a loss. Now, if you go through a bunch of equipment, you’re gonna get distortions, you’re going to get phase shift, you’re going to get noise, and then you gotta hit another set of converters, and that’s going to change again when it comes back to the computer when you continue processing it. That’s a lot of patch-points and distortion and manipulation. I think sometimes that’s why a lot of those records end up being so smashed and so loud and so crazy there for a while because there had to be so much processing to get a market result from the losses from using off the equipment. It’s like a measure of compensation – you dropped in a bit of a drop there, so I have to do this to compensate. Now what? It was a bunch of successive compensations. You could get amazing results. I’m not slagging it. My feeling is, if you now have an environment that’s on a grid with computer-generated sounds, other than maybe a vocal, the music is now vastly becoming an equation. Where’s your highest amplitude, where’s your lowest amplitude? All these use all frequencies. You can determine compression. All these things, you can calculate. So basically music is quickly becoming an equation. That’s why it’s so easy for these online mastering programs to do what they do, because based upon consumer feedback plus inputting certain things, music feels formulaic. Do you ever listen to music, and you’re like, wow, everything sort of starts to sound the same way. It’s because of natural tendencies for human beings to capture the flame. They wanna put the genie in the bottle, and once you’ve got it, you want to perfect that one thing. That one thing changes, but everyone tries to perfect THAT genie. Intrinsically what happens with human beings is you do have things like mood, and adrenaline rush, so the enthusiasm which you bring to a track, the spirit – music will excite you, you’ll sweat, your whole body’s coursing, and that’s the one thing that we’ll always have over the automated process, at least for the next few years anyway. We can bring a depth or a taste aspect that’s not necessarily just a keyed, formulaic, this is going to work for everything idea. A little bit louder, a little bit brighter, a cut here, a boost here, compress here, limit there. If you have ten different artificial mastering services doing a song, they might come out very close, where if you have ten different human beings mastering it, it’ll be very different.
TP: Yes. Yes.
PD: As long as the human being is an autonomous individual, a real person with a real, true personality and distinctly different from somebody else, then you’ll always have something that’s unique and hard to replace by a computer.
TP: I agree. That was an amazing answer. I’m curious about what you think of the state of physical music media, the place that we’re at with vinyl and cassette existing as this consumer product that everybody in music is infatuated with. A lot of people being very adamant that their music exists still in a physical form, even if people aren’t listening to it, they just want to own it. I’m just curious, what do you think of that?
PD: I think the fact that the cassette comes back or the vinyl comes back to a large degree really reinforces our nature as human beings, that we are really, truly looking for experience. We’re nostalgic, we’re romantic. I have to say, as much as I prefer convenient listening nowadays, nothing really matches the wonderment of being able to create a playback system, getting a great turntable. Saving my money, getting a particular stylus, and getting great speakers and a room. There are so many aspects I can bring to the process. It’s involved and very satisfying to spend some time, devote yourself to something, and have this incredible outcome. I think the vinyl world, with cutting records, is a similar thing that people forget how satisfying it is to put a needle into a groove and just look at it and watch this thing track across this platter, and then music’s coming out, and it’s just like, wow, this is so cool. It’s like watching things being made in a factory as opposed to just getting, like, a cake: there’s a cake, right, but there’s all these things, like how the cake gets baked and decorated. Essentially, I think it’s too sterile, MP3s are too sterile. Put it on a hard drive and you forget you have it. You go to your bookshelf, there’s books, there’s vinyl. Those are old friends. I love that, I wanna go back and check that out. Not that having a big collection of stuff is important. I have a couple records that are my parents that I treasure because there’s memory there. You can have a relationship with vinyl that you can’t have with the MP3 stream. We’re visceral, we’re tactile, we’re human beings. As much as I think the world is going to try to push us into a virtual world, I think the soul is crying out for contact with real things.
Phil can be contacted at phildemetromastering@gmail.com. Check out his website for more information: phildemetromastering.com
