by Larry Crane | Photographs by Larry Crane Mastering engineer Gavin Lurssen has been behind the console since 1991, won three Grammys and one Latin Grammy, and runs Lurssen Mastering — one of Southern California's busiest facilities. He's worked on records like Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' Raising Sand and the Foo Fighters' Sonic Highways, as well as with clients like Ben Harper, Queens Of The Stone Age, Eric Clapton, Miranda Lambert, Rickie Lee Jones, and Elvis Costello. The fascinating Lurssen Mastering Console app/plug-in recently came out, via IK Multimedia, and was developed with Gavin and Reuben Cohen of Lurssen. How much of a lead time do people give you as a mastering engineer? You know, in the early days when I started out this whole thing, it was in '91. There was always a production coordinator. People would book the mastering session about six weeks ahead. Sometimes three months ahead. Nowadays, they get finished with the record, book the mastering, and expect you to be available instantly. I see that all the time. Especially with independent bands or artist-financed projects. We figured out a way to do it though. You get together, gather the team and say, "This is the game we're playing, this is the field we're on. How are we going to make this work?" Then we do it. What kinds of things have you implemented in order to have faster turnaround? Well, it's how fast, how affordable, and how good. The "how good" thing is covered, because of what we do. The "how affordable" angle is how do we figure out how to make the rate, just to pay our bills? Really, we're not getting rich. At the end of the day, when you add up rent, the employee costs, taxes, and all the things that add up to make your overhead, your goal is to make at least that number. Then it's "how fast," which is what you asked about. Because we're all analog, it's not as simple as opening a file, doing some tweak, running an export, and you're done — although that is the expectation of (all) the younger generations coming into the business. They have it in their mind that this is the way to do recording, mixing, and mastering. It takes communication between the person in the mastering room (where you put up the file, convert it to the analog, put it through the board, make some tweaks, re-record it to digital) and your production guy. He's working on that while you're working on the next thing (that somebody wants). It's really like a chain of events. You've got one person working in the room — or maybe two — and another person working in the production department. Then there's someone who's communicating with everybody. Sometimes the communication is, "I have no further updates" which tells them that we're still in a holding pattern while we're working on this. That's very important communication. The communication is as important as everything else. If they want something super quick, they will feel secure if they get communication about it. You could sit there and say, "It's not ready yet" and then get into some discussion about why it's not ready; but if you constantly communicate and update, they can see that you're working on it. What is the production department, just so our readers understand the process? When we are in the mastering room, it's all analog. The tape, or the digital file, gets converted so that we can do our processing in the analog domain. One hundred percent of what we do has been done that way. It does slow things down a bit, although we've developed our system. When we record it back to digital, we have a raw file. That file needs to be scoured for any little tics and clicks because, in today's world, most of what comes in needs cleaning up. Very rarely, if ever, does it happen here that we add tics and pops, because we pay such close attention to our clocking and all that. But in the mix environment, particularly in the new generations of people who are working with plug-ins and all that, all kinds of clocking issues can happen. You're also in an environment where it's so revealing, and they've come from an environment of working on headphones in a bedroom somewhere. We start to hear all this stuff that people haven't heard. The music has to be scoured for that. We have some digital tools that can clean that up. Then we have to make it all faded and nice. We have to then go through sample-rate conversion. If we can, we like to work in high-res, so we master and record a high-res file and then everything else gets made from that. We've just recently gotten comfortable with sample-rate conversion. We never were before, but it's now become a part of our reality. That process has to happen. Any time you do something with a file, it has to be listened to. If you're doing a whole album and you do certain things to it, you have to calculate all the things you're going to do. Every time you do something, it needs to be scoured. It's actually an incredibly time-consuming procedure in production to get that file. Once the mastering is done, once the feel of the sound, the tonal structure has been balanced and vibed out (i.e., mastered), there's a lot of work to be done on that file. It takes a lot of time. We do what's called a null test, which is running an out-of-phase version of the song. When you run them both together with sample-accurate sync, if there's a dropout or some kind of mute, it'll present itself that way. There's that. When we give something to somebody, part of the reason we're in business is because of the sense of security we create. That includes the vibe of the tonal structure, the mastering, and the sound, but it is not limited to that. It also includes the knowing that it will be rock solid. "Oh, it came from there? It's going to be nailed. You don't have to listen to it or scour it." Nobody's going to call asking about some little crackle they heard. Nobody's going to call and say, "Hey, this ramps up and fades out too quickly." Over time, one of the things that comes from the repetition we develop is the solidity and security that once it's gone through our system, you don't have to worry about it. As a result of that, there are a lot of clients here, the old-school clients, who are on to the next project. They don't even listen to what we do, because they just know my work, the vibe I create, and the rock solid nature of the product. That's what you want to deliver. It's a cut above, in some cases. There are a lot of independent mastering engineers working in mobile environments, I suppose. One thing I've noticed, as I look at that scene, is, yeah, there's some level of this QC, but when you're in a facility, the people who work at facilities that I know take that to another level, and it's part of the service. As a result of this other industry that's cropping up, people are starting to think of mastering as simply making something sound a certain way, exporting it, and shipping it. That's valid. It's a new thing. Technology has allowed people to create this. Maybe they're doing it now where they otherwise couldn't. You have to respect it. But the way that we roll, and the way that I was trained to, is to do what I still do. Speaking of that, how did you end up as a mastering engineer? I know you went to school at Berklee, but what was the path that led up to mastering, as opposed to other parts of the recording arts? I graduated from Berklee College of Music in 1991. My parents were living in Washington, DC. My dad was a journalist in South Africa, and he decided that my brother and I shouldn't be raised in South Africa during apartheid. He was a political journalist who was against the system down there. His newspaper posted him in Washington, DC, and we all shipped out there. From there, he made it his goal to figure out how we were going to stay permanently in this country, which he obviously accomplished. Through that journey, I ended up finding myself at Berklee. I graduated in '91. When you were going to Berklee, what did you study? I studied film scoring. The Music Production and Engineering program there had five times more applicants than slots. I remember seeing this guy all the time, Don Puluse. Wonderful man. He was chair of the MP&E department at the time. He had to reject me because my high school grades weren't good enough, so I studied film scoring, which is essentially composition with some technical techniques of scoring. It turns out that it was a great way to go for me, because what I would have learned in MP&E, I learned on the job.