Mastering engineer Randy Merrill breaks down his approach to five recent artists he's worked with, from how he makes Adele’s voice shine to what’s different about mastering Taylor Swift’s rerecording projects
and Styles’s “As It Was”). By now, Merrill is used to the accolades — this is his fourth time with multiple AOTY nominations in a single year — even if casting a vote doesn’t get any easier. “I’m super-blessed and very, very grateful to all the people who trust me with their work,” he says from Sterling Sound, the New Jersey studio where he works. “I don’t take that lightly as a mastering engineer. They can really go to anybody.
A mastering engineer is the final unsung hero of the recording process, often the last person to work on a song or an album before it’s released. While adjusts the individual elements of the music, equalizing and balancing every instrument and vocal track separately, it’s up to the mastering engineer to tackle all of those elements, making sure the full track sounds good on any format and from any source . Merrill compares the process to photo editing. “You want to touch the photo up a little bit — you might crop the photo, you might adjust the color balance or the brightness or contrast,” he says. “That’s basically what I do with sound.
Really, by that point, the adjustments were pretty minor. There was one song, ‘Coloratura,’ that Chris just wanted different, that Max and I had listened to on the second day. Every person involved has a different perspective on it. Max, he’s listening to everything. Chris, as a songwriter and a vocalist, he’s listening more to his voice.
There’s a bit of room for some creative touches, which is really the fun part of the job for me — the creative things that we can do rather than trying to fix a problem . On the song ‘Cinema,’ we got to play with a bit of midrange EQ to make it a little richer and a little more luxurious in the vocals. My little bits and pieces of things that I did are audible to me — and I think to the people who worked on it.
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