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Steve Hall, working away
In Future Disc Systems’
new mastering suite.
Photocredit: Rocketman
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It was late, and he was hungry. Tracking a live Leonard Cohen session with producer Phil Spector, Steve Hall had ordered food. The front door intercom light signaled pizza arrival. Hall buzzed the courier into the control room. Suddenly the barrel of a large, ugly pistol was pressed to his temple. “Who the f**k is that?” Spector snarled, glaring at the boy. “NEVER let anyone into this studio without clearing it with me! Get him out.” Pausing before holstering his gun, he added, “Tell him to leave the pie.”Not long after that night, Steve Hall decided to focus on mastering. “I’ve always enjoyed working alone,” he says. “It helps me bring an objective perspective to a project. I learned in my days as a recording engineer, you can get too close to an artist’s work. You can focus so long and so intensely that by the 67th mix, you can’t hear anything beyond the music you’ve recorded. It’s like a journalist handing in an article with a blatant typo. He’s read and reread the piece so often he can’t see the goof even though he’s looking right at it. A sharp editor will catch it immediately. Beyond the skills to technically improve the sound, a mastering engineer provides a fresh, objective set of ears.”
With 25 years as a leading Hollywood-based mastering maven, Future Disc founder Hall accrued a sizeable gold record collection. Working on a string of hits ranging from Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever, Alice In Chains’ Dirt and Madonna’s True Blue to Blondie’s Heart of Glass and The Knack’s “My Sharona,” Hall honed his skills to a fine edge.
“Mastering is primarily a process of delicate fine tuning, but occasionally you’re inspired to make a more substantial recommendation,” he says. “Just recently, I was working on a UK-based classical pop group. They perform exquisite vocal harmonies backed by lush orchestrations. Listening carefully to the work, I decided to open the music up a bit, move it subtly away from the pop direction and ‘wrap’ the vocals by pushing them into the orchestrations. My mastering wasn’t dramatically different, but it was a departure from the original concept. I sent the files off to the engineer and didn’t hear anything back for a few days. This is not always a good sign.
“Finally,” Hall continues, “word came back that they wanted to adhere more closely to their original vision. In an effort to give them what they were looking for, I made the changes and sent it off again. A few days later the engineer called to say that after they’d listened in several different places, they were going back to my first pass. That’s a really good feeling, and a prime example of the creative contribution of the mastering process.”
Recently removed from Hollywood to the pastoral reaches of McMinnville, Oregon, Hall’s spacious new Future Disc mastering suite is outfitted with his own custom Big Bang Acoustics nearfields, Yamaha NS-10s, Bryston and Manley amplifiers and a powerful arsenal of digital processing gear including Weiss EQ1-MK2 24/96 7-band parametric EQ; Weiss DS-1 MK 3 compressor/limiter; TC Electronic 5000, Sonic Studio HD workstation and a complete NoNoise package. Analog processing includes GML 9500, Sontec, Manley Massive Passive and Pultec EQ, Manley Variable MU compressor and Manley el-op limiter. A set of three Pacific Microsonics Model 2’s provide A/D and D/A conversion.