Episode 112 - Ruairí O’Flaherty
Live with Matt Rad - Episode 112
April 4, 2023
w/ Ruairí O’Flaherty - Week 3
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Show Notes
Ruairí:
As I give more of my time I am having more people reach out to me for help. As a result I have to be more decisive about what I can do that will bring the most benefit to the most people.
Often when people reach out to me in private I ask them to instead ask me the question in a public way so that my answer will benefit everyone and include others in the conversation.
I enjoy the Discord server because we’re building a culture of looking at the big picture and being more generous and thoughtful.
There’s an idea that people have that we, as professionals, ever graduate out of struggle and tough problems.
I find myself revisiting this question of “How do I add value every step of the way?”
As you progress the way that you add value is by doing hard things that others can’t do.
If you care about it, you’ll always be at your limit with the problems that you’re taking on.
I’m still working hard when mastering, but the problems I’m aiming to solve are different than they were 10 years ago.
Matt:
I ran some sessions last week where at moments the biggest thing I was contributing was simply getting tea of water for the other musicians because it was the best thing I could have done at that point.
I think people give Rick Rubin and Benny Blanco grief about their practices because those people don’t perceive the value that they’re adding. It’s hard to quantify at times.
I want this podcast and this community to feel useful first, so very early on I declared that this is not something that I will ever be monetizing.
I like to have these conversations out loud so that they can benefit everyone.
Ruairí:
I’ve benefited more by having to distill my thoughts on the Discord. I now feel that I’m a better writer as a result of this process.
One of the things that I’m proudest of in everything that we’ve done (LWMR and Conversations) is to see the various nodes in my social/professional network build connections and discover a shared affinity with one another.
When you get afraid of something or get a nervous feeling, that’s a good place to be. You want to lean into that.
I think if a peer of mine were to write a book I think it would increase the odds of me doing something because I saw them do it. I think being an example in this way is a great contribution that we can make with one another.
Atmos and Immersive Audio Formats
Ruairí:
I have reservations about Atmos as a format. I think from an engineering standpoint it is a flawed medium.
That said, I do think that immersive audio will be inevitable.
As it stands I don’t think it’s that useful for most people.
I’ve recently had to do my first Atmos mastering project because I’m at the point where I cannot say no to labels.
Label considerations are different from craftspeople and artists such as myself.
I need to be someone who can help them complete their goals and facilitate their vision instead of someone who makes their job difficult.
One of the benefits of Atmos is that it has a strict level guidance. You can’t submit a mix that’s louder than -18 LUFS.
However, the problem is that songs are often conceived and built from their genesis to be a -8 LUFS mix. When you try to make a song like that fit into a -18 LUFS style it tends to fall apart.
I hear this the most in hip hop records that were conceived as -8 LUFS. They don’t just sound different. They feel different.
The other problem I perceive is the matter of HRTF (head related transfer function) in Atmos decoding.
Each of us have different physiology that affect the ways that we perceive audio.
This creates translation issues that manifest in the encoding/decoding of records.
Right now the technology to determine people’s unique HRTF is not great or particularly helpful to solving this translation issue, but that seems to be where we are heading in the future. This is not yet a solved problem, but it will be.
Mastering
Ruairí:
I’m still working at my limits these days, but my limits are different than they were ten years ago.
As I transition from primarily indie work to more label work the amount of admin work that I have to do on a daily basis has increased tenfold.
Q: What trends are you hearing these days with the records that are coming out? What are people asking for?
Ruairí:
I don’t know that there’s an obvious trend right now. If there’s a trend it’s that things are generally a little darker.
The amount of low-end seems to be going up, even beyond what most genres want or need.
Even jazz records have RnB levels of low end.
There are trends and norms in different genres, but there is also the reality of what a given record wants to be.
A lot of mastering engineers feel like their job is to push the record into the middle of a sonic bell-curve.
But records are also trying to be their own thing, which is something that I need to remain sensitive too. While I am paying attention to the trends I’m paying more attention to what the record is telling me that it wants to be.
I’m trying to uncover what the record wants to be instead of trying to turn it into the class leader of it’s genre.
I was given only one instruction on mastering the recent Lana Del Rey record: Don’t change the relationship between Lana’s voice and the rest of the record.
Where Lana’s vocal is on each track is where it needs to remain. It was a very deliberate choice. Don’t fuck with that by bringing the vocal forward. Don’t change that relationship.
My job is to bring that intention home. I am not supposed to be reinventing the record. Far smarter people than me have been working very purposefully on this record.
I don’t ever reference when I work unless the team has sent me a very unique reference. I want to provide my own perspective and impressions without being influenced.
