Hello there. I’m Shawn Reynaldo, and welcome to First Floor, a weekly electronic music digest that includes news, my favorite new tracks and some of my thoughts on the issues affecting the larger scene / industry that surrounds the music. This interview is part of the newsletter for Tuesday, February 9. If you’d like to read the rest of that edition, please click here.

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A few months ago, I was scrolling through Twitter and came upon the following tweet.

Zora Jones @MissZoraJones

mastering is a myth

October 31st 2020

25 Retweets236 Likes

It immediately made me laugh, not because I’m a mastering skeptic, but because it reminded me of a conversation I’d had with Zora Jones and her partner Sinjin Hawke many times before. The two artists, who jointly run the Fractal Fantasy platform (they don’t like to refer to it as a label), previously lived in Barcelona, and back before either one of them had released critically acclaimed albums (Ten Billion Angels from her, First Opus from him), I specifically remember trying to convince them that they absolutely had to get their music mastered.

Why did I say this? When it comes to audio, I’m not any sort of expert, but as someone who’d run several labels and spent a long time in the music industry, I’d absorbed the idea that all music must be mastered. The idea of releasing unmastered music was practically sacrilegious! Of course, I couldn’t actually explain what the mastering process entailed or how it specifically improved the music—aside from vague notions of making it sound louder and “fuller,” whatever that meant—but I was adamant. This was just how things were done, and how could Sinjin and Zora know better than the entire music industry?

Well, they certainly know something, because regardless of whether you like the releases on Fractal Fantasy, from a sheer audio standpoint, the music sounds incredible. Somehow, these two have found a way to make their tracks bang without the help of a mastering engineer, and while I certainly wouldn’t advocate that every artist out there follow the same path, Sinjin and Zora have raised some interesting questions, simply by challenging the status quo.

Wanting to dig deeper, I called the two of them up in Montreal, where they’re currently hunkering down during the pandemic, and peppered them with questions about mastering. Our conversation—which has been edited for length and clarity—explores their past experience with mastering engineers, how and why they decided to change things up and what steps they now take to make sure that their music sounds so good. Plenty of useful production tips are inside, but even if you’re not an artist, an engineer or even an audiophile, Sinjin and Zora provided plenty of thought-provoking ideas to chew on.

Shawn Reynaldo: So the first question that I have is for Zora. Back in October, you tweeted "Mastering is a myth." What prompted that tweet and what exactly did you mean by that?

Zora Jones:  First of all, it’s Twitter, so I was just being salacious for fun… obviously mastering is historically not a myth, but I think it’s a process that’s become unnecessary, especially for electronic producers who know their way around a DAW. Such a simple task does not need to be outsourced to a specialist anymore, and if you have a good mix, you don’t need to master.

To be honest, I don't remember what prompted that tweet, but my knowledge of mastering comes from learning by doing. When I first started to release music, I knew I had to get my tracks mastered, so I would finish a song, send it to mastering, get it back and be like, "Oh no, the snare is way too loud." I'd have to fix the snare and send it back off again. And then it would come back and I would listen to the revised master and be like, "Now the bass is too quiet," so I would fix that and send it off again. With time, I realized this was getting very costly, so I started  to focus more on making better mixes before sending them off to mastering. But often what I would get back would be a master that really pushed the highs or the bass in order to do something. The song already sounded great, so what else was the engineer going to do? I often preferred my own mix over the master I would get back, so I realized that I just had to focus on mixing and making my own music sound great, and not focus so much on mastering.

In the music industry, people will often tell you that you need this or that to be successful. For example, you need a manager in order to have a successful career, or you need to master your tracks so they sound good or you need to release vinyl in order to have a successful label. But I think it's probably a good idea to always consider your position and ask, "Does this actually apply to me?" Because it might, but it might not. You might also realize that it’s better to just learn how to do certain things yourself. I didn't go to music school, I didn't have a traditional education about how to master or how to mix. I just learned by doing, and by doing it myself, I realized that maybe I don't need mastering because it's expensive and I can do it myself.

Is your own music mastered in any way these days?

Sinjin Hakwe: At the end of a release cycle, we spend a lot of time mixing our records and a  really good mix doesn't need to be mastered. With a really good mix, you just turn it up until it hits the reds and once it saturates you can say, “Okay, that's too much,” and turn it down a little bit. That's how you master a really good mix. So yeah, we just spend a lot of time on our mixes and once we get to the mastering stage, we just line up all our tracks and turn them up to the appropriate levels. Sometimes you'll notice, “Oh, this track could maybe use a little bit of brightness in comparison to the other tracks,” and then you make the adjustment and that's it. That's what we do for every Fractal Fantasy release.

Zora Jones: I think the last masters that we commissioned were for Visceral Minds 2, but everything on there ended up being our own masters because we liked ours better than what we got back from the engineer. It was a similar situation to what I described before; the songs sounded good, we sent them off and what we got back was just way too bright. Everything we’ve done since then—First Opus, my album Ten Billion Angels, etc.—it was all done by us.

Obviously there are a lot of mastering engineers in the music world and some of them are internationally recognized for their work. Do you guys think that their knowledge and experience is relevant to the music-making process?

Sinjin Hawke: I think mastering is kind of this vestigial thing. It's a remnant of an old music industry where you couldn't have a recording studio on your laptop and you needed to have a specialist go through your songs and make sure everything sounded right at the end, because you couldn't do it yourself. You couldn't go on YouTube and figure out what a mastering chain looked like.

As a musician, my goal is to make the most potent and honest representation of my musical self in a waveform. If I spend all this time painstakingly putting myself into this thing, why would I then give it to a guy named Thomas from Bristol to run it through his mastering chain, tweak a few things and send it back to me 20 minutes later? He's colored my sound, he's colored my musical soul that I'm trying to show to people, and I feel like his incentive is usually not to make me sound better. His incentive is usually to get that wire transfer as quickly as possible and not to have to make too many revisions. I'm not saying that's true for all mastering engineers, but in my personal experience—and I've dealt with maybe 20 different mastering engineers in my life—that's usually the case. Obviously a mastering engineer is never going to be more invested in your success than you are, so if you can figure out how to do what they're doing, then you'll likely do it better because you'll care about it more.

Zora Jones: We also have tools like YouTube that enable us to learn whatever we want, so if I say, “Okay, I want to release vinyl, how do I master something for vinyl?,” then I can probably figure it out. I love to watch mixing videos.

Sinjin Hawke: Once you know what mastering is, you realize that it's not some voodoo thing where some guy is painting brushstrokes on your music and making the dynamics so much juicier. This guy has likely built his own preset mastering chain and he's just running your music through that chain. Maybe that chain isn't necessary. A lot of times, the best thing to do is to make the least amount of adjustments on something. Maybe your song doesn't need any stereo expansion—maybe that will make it sound weird, but he's still going to have that stereo expander on his chain.

Zora, you mentioned this, and while it’s not a rule, people in the music industry do tend to say, “you have to get your tracks mastered.” Given that you two feel differently, I’m wondering if you’ve ever talked with a mastering engineer and asked what they think you might be missing?

Sinjin Hawke: I used to go back and forth with mastering engineers—10 iterations sometimes— because of the process that Zora mentioned earlier where the snare sounds too loud or you realize that the bass is missing all of a sudden. And I realized that they just tweak something, send it back and hope that the placebo effect of them having done something will make you leave them alone. That's what it feels like.

Zora Jones: We've spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours dealing with mastering engineers . Even now, when I'm making a remix, the label usually asks me for a premaster, and I tell them, “You can master the track if you like, but here’s my master. Let’s compare them and see which one’s better.” And usually, we just end up going with mine. 

Sinjin Hawke: I've dealt with situations where I've sent off a remix that I did for somebody, the label didn’t send me the master before it went out, and the mastering engineer just ruined the song. In one instance, he jacked the highs up so much that it hurt to listen to the track and mixing it with other songs in a DJ set sounded awkward.

Mastering is like vinyl. It's this old thing that was in the music industry for a long time and people still do it because they're told that it's what they're supposed to do. I studied audio engineering and I understand the process of mastering, and it's supposed to be very minimal. I've been in record studios with huge records being made. I’ve seen what those mastering sessions look like, and it's not a voodoo process. It's a very workman-like thing. You just get it done and that's it. I know that there are renowned mastering engineers, and some people might think that they can make songs sound magical, but I think it's a snake-oil thing.

Zora Jones: I have spoken to loads of mixing engineers though. Mixing is super hard, and whatever they get paid, they deserve it. It’s an extremely meticulous process. For my album, I think 70% of the time went into mixing it.

Sinjin Hawke: But even if you work with a mixing engineer, you need to be in the room.

Zora Jones: That’s true, unless you don't care about what your music sounds like. Most mixing engineers know that though, and they'll get in a room with you and mix it with you, or at least be super back and forth about it.

Both of you have produced music in collaboration with other artists, and you’ve made beats or tracks for different MCs and singers. How do your thoughts on mastering usually go over with other artists?

Zora Jones: With (Spanish rapper) La Zowi for example, I did the masters myself, and she was happy with it. There was never even a conversation about needing to master the song. We needed to make it sound good. That was it.

Sinjin Hawke: With all of our favorite celebrated dance music—Dance Mania, DJ Rashad, MikeQ and all the ballroom/vogue stuff—the best tracks are usually not professionally mastered. I remember working on “Thunderscan” with MikeQ. When we finished the track, I was like, “Okay, cool. We're going to put a compressor on it and we'll get the stereo image right,” and Mike just pushed the master channel halfway into the reds. I’m not sure if he really understood  the process of compressing your master channel, and I was like, “That's how his songs bang so hard! That’s why his songs sonically kick our songs’ ass.” He was just letting the dynamics of his songs speak for themselves. He pushed it into the red, so there was a little bit of saturation on the kicks, and that's why his songs were so tough and worked so well. I realized that I’d been limiting and compressing my stuff way too much, so after that, we just stopped doing it.

Zora Jones: When you’re starting out, you don't need to do everything you're told, just because it has been done like this for years. You can ask, “What is the essence of this process?” It's 2021 and we have a lot of other tools in our hands that weren’t available 20 years ago.

Sinjin Hawke: You also have to think about the opportunity cost of getting your record mastered. You're paying someone $600 to master your record. Think of all the things you can use $600 for to actually make your record do better. You can get artwork, you can get a music video, you can hire somebody to help you with coordinating press. There are all these different things that a release can benefit from.

If hiring a mastering engineer isn’t necessary and the mix is what ultimately matters, is there anything specific in terms of technique that is really important in terms of making sure that your music sounds good?

Sinjin Hawke: There's a video on YouTube. It’s The Art of Mixing by David Gibson. It’s from the ’90s, he's got a mullet and it's nearly three hours long, but it’s a good base for anyone who wants to become good at mixing their songs, which I think is synonymous with being a good musician.

Zora Jones: There are literally so many things that we do to make our stuff sound good, but I think just watching other people (or watching YouTube tutorials) will help you immensely. Collaborating also is amazing for that, because you see how other people work. I learned so much by collaborating with Sinjin, or with Canblaster, who’s an amazing producer. There are so many things you can learn.

Sinjin Hawke: Focus on the individual elements, make sure that you're happy with every one and that there is nothing going on in the EQ where there shouldn't be. If you have a snare, there should be no bass coming through on that, or if there's a hi-hat, there should also be no bass. You should usually cut the bass out of all the elements, except for the kick and the subs.

Zora Jones: One simple thing that you can do during the mixing process is compare your track with a song that sounds exactly how you want yours to sound like. When you get to a point where you think your mix sounds pretty good, you export it, put it in Rekordbox and DJ it with the reference song. As you mix them back and forth, you’ll hear pretty clearly what's missing.

Sinjin Hawke: If you mix in your song and the vibe loses energy, then there's something wrong with the mix.

Zora Jones: You'll hear that the highs are missing or the bass is missing or the kick doesn't smack enough. We also listen to our mixes on all types of different systems—iPhones, laptops, speakers, headphones…

Sinjin Hawke: MacBook speakers are really good. I actually think MacBook speakers are better mixing monitors than an Adam A7X studio monitor. That’s how most fans are listening to music anyways, and they're quite clear.

Zora Jones: I have this Bluetooth speaker. I hate it so much. It's the worst. It was expensive too, and it's so bad, but when a mixdown sounds good there, I know it’s done. If it sounds good on this shitty little thing, then it will smack everywhere.

Sinjin Hawke: One of the biggest mistakes I used to make is I would get these big speakers that looked like they could lop your head off and I’d jack them up full blast. I’d listen to my song on them and be like, “Yeah, this song is heavy!” And then I’d listen to it on other devices and it sounded terrible on all of them. If you can make your mixdown sound good on the worst device, then it'll probably sound good everywhere else. You do need to have some clarity, so we use open-back headphones when we're doing our mixing, but yeah, you do want to make sure something smacks on lower-grade audio equipment.

You mentioned comparing mixdowns to other songs. Do you have some go-to songs that you always use as a baseline?

Zora Jones: That’s another important thing. If you have one song—one of your own songs—that smacks, you can go back to that. In our case, it’s “Thunderscan.” That one sounds great. 

Sinjin Hawke: But that’s only for club tracks.

Zora Jones: Yeah, it really depends on the song. I'm not going to mix down a song from La Zowi and compare it with “Thunderscan,” because they have completely different sonics and different feelings. So I'll compare a La Zowi song with something like Cardi B, something with a female vocal, lots of 808s and stuff like that.

How do you two feel about automated mastering services?

Sinjin Hawke: I personally tried automated mastering and I still prefer just smacking my shit into the reds.

Zora Jones: We’ve actually tried it a lot. At one point, I was really broke, so I tried an automated service, but I didn’t like it.

Sinjin Hawke: I think automated mastering services do almost the same thing as mastering engineers. They have a chain of plugins and they just run your track through it at different volumes, and so what’s fundamentally wrong with those services is also what’s fundamentally wrong with most mastering engineers.

So when you two are doing your mixdowns, do you have your own chains that you use? Or do you build a chain for every specific song depending on what you need?

Sinjin Hawke: The best chain on the master channel is no chain. If you're great at what you're doing, instead of compressing the whole master, you just compress the elements that need to be compressed and you leave the elements that are better with more dynamics. However, even though I say the best mastering chain is no chain, sometimes you're comparatively listening to songs that are going to be on an album together, and there might be a difference in brightness. So you might have to adjust the brightness on one of them slightly with EQ, or if one song is too dynamic, you might have to give it a compressor. Usually though, all of that stuff is better done in the mix than on the master.

In the interest of full transparency, there is one trick. I want to democratize this process, because I think everybody's tracks should bang. There's this plugin called Oszillos that we do put on pretty much every master channel, which essentially creates a Rekordbox- or Serato-type waveform for you in real time. If you can learn to analyze a Rekordbox or Serato waveform—with reds for subs, blues for highs, etc.—then this plugin will spit them out. You can see if your kicks are hitting the 0 dB point or if your kicks are punchy by the shape of the wave. I find that visual data can actually be very helpful, especially when you don't have a club where you can go and play your song to test it out.

If someone's reading this who’s a new producer and they don’t have a ton of experience, would you still recommend that they not use a mastering engineer?

Zora Jones: Yeah! Learn how to do this shit. If you want to be great at making music, you have to learn how to be great, and all the information is on YouTube or with your peers. It's really about putting in the time and effort—it's not rocket science.

Sinjin Hawke: I learned this the hard way: mastering engineers will not make your shit bang. They're not going to add the special sauce that's going to make you successful. You're going to add that special sauce.

Zora Jones: You can’t think that you can pay someone to make your song sound good. You can get mixing help, but even if you work with a mixing engineer, you have to put in time and effort because they might make your songs sound completely different, and not in a way that you like.

Sinjin Hawke: Learning from a mixing engineer is good. If you have an opportunity to get in a studio with a good mixing engineer, then take it. We learned a lot from this guy, Chris Tabron, who was running the Red Bull New York studios. He helped me with “One,” the Just Blaze collab that I did, and after that, I kept coming back to New York and he helped me a bit with First Opus. Those experiences were really formative in terms of learning how to do mixdowns. 

Zora Jones: That was a great time for me too. My songs weren’t being mixed down, but I sat in the studio with a notebook and I wrote down every bit of information that I found valuable. I was also just looking at what he was doing, and I learned so much during those sessions. It was insane. But otherwise, just put in the time and effort. If you go through our project files, the names will often be “Version 59 FINAL MIX 2.” An insane amount of work goes into this, but it pays off, because you know how to do it yourself and your music will sound exactly how you want it to sound.

One last question. Can you tell me anything about what you have coming up in 2021?

Zora Jones: I don't want to announce what it's going to be, but I'm working on new music and visuals. Sinjin is working on new music too, which sounds incredible. I’m also working on fashion with a friend of mine from Barcelona, which is very interesting because we're doing it over the internet. I've never done that before, but it's been working out.

Sinjin Hawke: We do have a crazy little wild-card project that may or may not happen, but I can’t talk about it.

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