Mastering in Music

John-Paul Braddock is a UK based mastering engineer at Formation Audio and is the co-chair of the Audio Engineering Society’s Mastering Group. Russ Hepworth-Sawyer is a mastering engineer for MOTTOsound, teaches part time at York St John University, UK, and is the co-chair of the Audio Engineering Society’s Mastering Group. Jay Hodgson is a mastering engineer at MOTTOsound and a professor of popular music studies at Western University, Canada. Matthew Shelvock made the transformation from session musician to mastering scholar, but is currently leading business affairs for Chillhop, the well-known lo-fi hip hop radio and label. Professor Rob Toulson is a leading scholar in the field of music production and is the CEO of RTSixty Limited, the company behind music based applications such as variPlay, iDrumTune Pro and Drummer ITP.

1 Introduction: Mastering Is Dead, Long Live Mastering (Hepworth-Sawyer & Matt Shelvock); Mastering: Practice; 2 The Creative Mastering Studio (Hinksman); 3 Surround + Immersive mastering (Legvold & Proper); 4 Towards a Definition of Compression Glue in Mastering (Moore); 5 Engineering Authenticity: The Aesthetics of DSP Modeling in Mastering Plugins (O’Connor); 6 Mastering For Streaming: Exploring a New Levelling Standard (Harker); 7 Mastering audio analysis: Teaching the art of listening (Braddock); Mastering: Music & People; 8 Interview with Darcy Proper (Toulson); 9 ‘Past’ Masters | Present Beats: Exponential Sound Staging as Sample-based (Re)Mastering in Contemporary Hip-hop Practice (Exarchos); 10 Remastering Sunnyboys (Bruel); 11 Mastering Success: A Roundtable Discussion with Early to Mid-Career Mastering Engineers (Hepworth-Sawyer); 12 Opinion piece - Peak-Fi – Have we reached the ultimate reproduction standards needed to make humans happy? (Herrod-Taylor); Mastering: Future; 13 The Shifting Discourse on Audio Mastering (Nardi); 14 Opinion piece - Loudness - the sales gimmick (Hodgson); 15 Audio Mastering Facing Automation: The Embracement of the Human (Whelan & Birtchnell); 16 Transformations and Continuities in the Mastering Sector (Collins et al.); 17 Mastering in Music: a conference, a discussion, and a ‘what-if’ – a manifesto for an encapsulated audio delivery format (Braddock & Hepworth-Sawyer); 18 Signature Mastering: New Sound Aesthetics in Post-Production and the New Role of Mastering (Lund)