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RSR041 – Jeff Powell - How To Prepare For Vinyl Mastering & Recording With Jim Dickinson & Tom Dowd

How to Premaster your Record for Vinyl

Larry Nick taught me: “This machine is going to tell you what to do, not the other way around.” There are parameters and limits for what it can handle. I cannot handle somebody just giving me a manufactured CD and saying put that on vinyl, I can’t do that as is. Number one I’d have to turn the volume way down, if I didn't it would just be a distorted mess full of overcuts and skips, so you have to ease it on there. That’s where the skill of cutting vinyl comes in is figuring out how to take what people give you and getting it on the vinyl as best you possibly can with its limitations. The first thing I do when I’m doing a vinyl project is listen to it. I think a lot of people when mastering just dig in and go, but I have to aesthetically think about it a little bit and see what the last song on the first side is going to be compared to the first song, all that matters.

I wrote a chapter in Complete Audio Mastering: Practical Techniques by Gebre Waddell. Its all about how to premaster your record for vinyl to get the best results because there are two different ways of looking at it. What I sell my services for is a direct transfer, to take what you give me and put it on vinyl as best I can. But what is happening is I’m doing more and more ‘mastering.’ I need to EQ it a little bit, compress or peak limit it a little bit. The biggest thing for the listeners to know, if you want your record to end up on vinyl, D-ess your vocals and watch your levels of your high hats and symbols; it’s high frequency information and that's something thats too hard for the needle to track

General Rules of Thumb for Getting Things Ready for Vinyl

- D-ess High End
- Center the Bass

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• You want your low end information to be centered because it causes a larger excursion for the stylus to try and cut that and can cause it to actually skip out of the groove if it's not done right.
  

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- Think about Phase

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• I’m thinking there’s a lot of plugins out there that are stereo widening or something to that effect. To me a lot of times when it's a band with huge guitars that are panned hard, I hit the mono button and they disappear, so they’re out of phase with each other. A lot of times the reverbs will disappear when I hit the mono button. So I think those are due to the desgin of the plugins and things like that so check your mixes in mono to make sure things don’t disappear. I love hard panning too, just be careful and check your phase. When things are out of phase the groove starts to look like an hourglass and get narrow and the needle again can pop out of the groove when it's trying to track it.

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Running a Recording Session Smoothly

• Be ready. I’m always extremely prepared and use an assistant on pretty much every session I do. I think that’s something that starting to go by the wayside because of budgets and things, people can’t afford them. They either expect these young engineers to work for free or they just don’t use an assistant and I think that’s terrible because that's the only way they can learn, its invaluable experience for them just to be in the room with an experienced engineer. I just think the time that it saves and the way the whole session will run with an assistant is far superior than trying to save the extra $150 a day to do it yourselves, it just depends on the scope

• If you’re not used to being on the other side of the glass. Go stand in front of the mic and just for a minute, don’t talk, just see how long a minute feels like when you’re standing there. You see people in the control room and you don’t know what they’re saying or if they’re talking about you. It seems like an eternity. I think another thing that is missing these days is rewind time. You just spacebar, spacebar, spacebar, again, again, again, you just wear them out, man! I don’t like that. Yeah you’re saving time, but there needs to be a breath or a thought, you have to know the difference

Jam Session 

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