I mastered both this record by Broken Chip as well as his 2020 release Small Shrine, and in reflection I feel the mastering of both of these records was a significant learning curve.

Firstly, when mastering ambient music one has a different set of concerns to when mastering more beat-based music. I have found that ambient music without transient heavy instrumentation such as kicks and snares, enables one in the mastering process to get uniquely high volumes whether one be metering via RMS or LUFS.

As streaming is setting new standards of LUFS, and arguably undermining the previous era of loudness wars, the ability to get such high volumes is actually a concern that I’ve found I have to be aware of.

Such issues I am familiar with from previous ambient music mastering sessions. However, these last two records by Broken Chip provided a new challenge. Both records were both created from a live improvised performance and contained overly resonant filter sweeps, cut offs and EQs. The files I had to work with couldn’t be remixed as the performance was only captured in a summed stereo recording. The resonances I speak of were creating all types of distortion when played back on smaller systems such as laptop speakers.

In practice EQ, compression and even dynamic EQ was not getting the tonal results that I wanted. Distortion was still occurring on smaller systems. The solution that I ended up going for was the relatively new era of what I’ll call spectrum wide dynamic EQ, in other words smart new plugins such as Soothe 2 by oeksound that enable frequency specific compression across the whole audible spectrum. See the Soothe 2 plugin pictured below.

I found this plugin to be essential in taming the spectrum wide resonances that were present in the original recording. I had only used Soothe sparingly before and this particular mastering session has really cemented it as one of my go to plugins for such situations.

Finally, it is indeed fun to be an engineer in an era of new gear and technological revolutions. The past 2-3 years has seen some very unique new digital plugins hitting the market.

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The three track EP is released by German label, Black Snake Recordings, and was an interesting mastering job from a loudness perspective.

Despite many articles about the end of the loudness wars, many artist and labels are still requiring masters that have higher LUFS or RMS than those being quoted as the new standard.

There are many informative videos, such as Dave Pensado interviewing Maor Appelbaum that suggest mastering is reforming and aiming for around -14LUFS, in line with streaming volume automation.

Personally, I’ve been loving new technologies such as the Meter Plugs’ Loudness Penalty plugin which shows how much various streaming services will be turning your masters down by. For an online version of that plugin visit https://www.loudnesspenalty.com/

Despite such things, labels are still requesting masters in the realm of -8 RMS, or if you belong to certain worlds / genres, this can even go higher. Check out the RMS reading of the reference tracks provided for this latest mastering job.

Needless to say, the client is always right, and similar levels were obtained via the combination of a few industry standard limiters.

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