conversation between bry-bry and mom:

bry-bry: i'm getting the cd mastered tomorrow.

mom: [making fun of the lingo] oh sure. mastering. of course.

bry-bry: you know... setting the eq.

mom: [more making fun] sure. yeah. the eeee-kew. of course.

bry-bry: bringing up the levels... compression...

mom: sure. the levels. compression. gotta have compression.

bry-bry: [knowingly] making sure the bass goes BOOM!

mom: [who suddenly becomes serious] oh yeah, the bass! gotta have the bass!

bry-bry: i knew a negro like yo' self would understand the bass...

illegal to drive

yeah, mastering is the icing on the cake. gives your final mixes that professional sheen. gets it ready for mass duplication.

had a good day tuesday with me new buddy larry devivo of silvertone mastering in saratoga. of course, we were supposed to crank out monday, but a certain ice storm that morning resulted on the closing of the northway, the declaration of a state of emergency in washington and saratoga counties, and (what finally forced me to suck it up and turn around after standing still on route 9 in clifton park for half an hour) the announcement on the radio that it was now not just unsafe to drive in saratoga - it was illegal. no vehicles allowed.

the gods mock me.

not a single pay phone was working in clifton park, so i slowly made my way to mom's crib in niskayuna to call larry. luckilly, his calendar was clear tomorrow: forced me to give up a vacation day from the day gig, but worth it to get jennifer into y'all's hands on schedule.

kick go boom

like i said, a good day. larry asked me to bring some cds to get a level/eq reference. we'd had a good talk earlier in our pre-mastering session about the state of mastering, how cds are getting mastered hotter and hotter and hotter: how each band wants to be louder than the last. the problem is that when cds are mastered so hot, everything's up front, compressed: you lose the nuances, subtleties of performance. the verdict: keep it competitive without losing nuances. 'nuff said.

i had the artist's truth disc, me'shell ndegeocello's peace beyond passion and wu-tang's wu-tang forever. we decided to go with wu-tang - ultimately more for a bass boom reference than a level reference. talked up odb's most recent run-ins with the long arm of the law as we bobbed heads to the big bad beat. 'it'd be funny if it wasn't so tragic,' i said.

john and i agreed earlier that the kick should really boom, but we conceded that the grooves on jennifer need to punch more than thump. cuz of the tempos, the real live and in the flesh bass guitar, and the active syncopation of the guitar. larry noticed much the same thing: his challenge was to keep the kick active and full without muddying the mix.

job well done, i say.

the first one was the reference: 'anymore.' matching the kick with the wu kick, fattening it. making the guitar and vocals brighter. tweak tweak tweak rewind rewind tweak tweak rewind tweak tweak tweak. once he got 'em to a place we both agreed was full and bright, he burned it to the computer. then it was 'closer,' which, like with the mixdown, proved to be a toughee: the kick wasn't quite where it was on 'anymore,' but he had to be careful about bringing it up, because it gets fuller during the fast mid-section. just as i was ready to rationalize that maybe the kick shouldn't be as big in this song, i sat up in my seat and my eyes went wide open: he'd found it. big, warm. and the bass on the end is brilliant. mmmm good. burn it!

'six' cracked him up: especially cindy's line in the middle of the rap. went much more quickly, too. 'that one's a hit!' he said.

i was worried about the acoustic tunes, but 'liquefy' went pretty quickly: it was a matter of keeping things soft enough to keep the liquid feel of the song, but loud enough not so sound out of place with the previous three tunes. mmmm good. burn it!

and so it went. the kick was more obvious on the latter tracks: again, i was worried that would muddy things up, but being the audio super hero that larry is, he was able to make the bass wide without sacrificing the clarity of guitar and vocals. mmmm goood. burn it!

final stuff

finished up in the sixes: then it was time for the editing, which went fairly quickly: clipping the dead air at the beginning of songs, and making fades at the end of the songs. i thought about eliminating a measure of 'anymore,' but decided against it. also was psyched to split 'smiling' into two tracks, with the cd closing track being 'nomo.' other than that, editing was pretty elementary.

we bounced the edited files to disks, then opened them up in the cd burning program. put 'em in the correct sequence, listened to set spacing between songs, and that was that.

burn it!

'i'm scared,' i said. larry laughed.

'really, i'm not gonna cry.'

and that was that. a half-hour later, the cd was in my hand. now i listen on some different systems, and let him know if i'll need any changes for him to burn the master disc that will go to the duplicator. but i've already listened a coupla times, and all i can hear is a job well done.

can't wait for y'all to hear it.

and really. i'm not gonna cry.