In today’s episode of #NerdingOut, Grammy-nominated mastering engineer and owner of Infrasonic Mastering, Pete Lyman (Chris Stapleton, Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile) discusses the intricate process of AAA – or all-analog – mastering.
For Pete there is nothing more rewarding than the process of cutting a record this way, with some of his favorite mastering projects having been reissues where Pete masters and cuts the lacquer straight from the tape with no digital counterpart throughout the process.
#NerdingOut is where we visit studios around the globe to ask producers, engineers and artists about their favorite tools of the trade.
WATCH VIDEO
With OMNIBUS from Audiomovers you can make complex audio routing easy, whether you’re an audio professional or enthusiast.
TRANSCRIPT
To me there’s nothing more rewarding than cutting a project all analog and cutting it to lacquer.
One of the things that I love doing is what we call AAA, all analog vinyl mastering.
I do a lot of projects where I get a box of tapes and they’re mixes from the band and I do a lot of like, I’ll do historical reissues where I’m going through old tapes and I have to EQ those masters and cut vinyl straight from the tape and there’s not even a digital counterpart.
You forget how much time it takes to fast forward and rewind tapes and to load tapes and you know with a DAW you can just hit space bar and return to zero immediately.
It’s crazy how much time during the day is just eaten up by loading tapes and playing through tapes.
Those are really fun, very expensive to do because they’re very time consuming, but when it’s done right, to me there’s nothing more rewarding.
