Rick Essig

Patrick Pulsinger

A warm welcome to Mr. Rick Essig from New York, ladies and gentlemen.

Rick Essig

Thank you! Who here still likes to spin vinyl? Very good. I like to see that, that’s good. I am the last person that can screw up your record, that is true.

Patrick Pulsinger

So actually, when you do music you maybe end up with a record deal, maybe, and he actually could be the man who is in charge so that your music sounds good on the record. You did stuff for Radiohead, for Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, for Everything But the Girl. So the man knows how to get the stuff on to the radio and everywhere, that it sounds good. So maybe tell us a little bit about your job. People come with what and what can you do for the people in general?

Rick Essig

I’ve been doing this for close to 18 years. I enjoy cutting vinyl and I got into it when people started to say, “The death of vinyl is coming.” I’ve only cut more vinyl every year I’ve been doing it, so it’s a big lie. People love vinyl. I love cutting vinyl, it’s a great format. You really get a cool sound from vinyl that really doesn’t come across well in digital at this point yet. So it is still kind of one of those voodoo-craft things, that a lot of people really can’t do, mainly because of the machinery involved. It’s a big frickin’ lathe you got to cut these things on. The material itself is a very specialized type of paint. That’s like car paint on a piece of metal. That is basically what a lacquer master is. It’s a cool gig and dance music guys, DJs, I mean, they’ve been great. They’re the main source of business for me in my work, which is nice, because I have a nice following of DJs and underground subtype labels that really only do vinyl, which is nice to have.

Patrick Pulsinger

What would you say that actually when dance music, especially techno, in the early ’90s took over with all the independent labels, would you say that this saved the vinyl or extended it? Because major productions were not coming out on vinyl anymore from the beginning of the ’90s, people were switching to CDs, but the independent small labels, they would still do vinyl because they wanted to hand it out to the DJs.

Rick Essig

Oh yeah, a lot of house and underground stuff. Definitely.

Patrick Pulsinger

So you think that the independent labels kept it alive for much longer?

Rick Essig

Yeah, although the [major] labels always have always done 12"s, it’s kind of funny, a lot of them are just promos. But it’s amazing, a lot of singles are released like a jewel single, will be longer than a frickin’ album, they got so many goddamn mixes on it. Double vinyl, 70 to 90 minutes of remixes for one track, they put that stuff out there and the general public doesn’t see them.

Patrick Pulsinger

So regardless on what kind of stuff you bring out, like it might be a CD or, you said before a cassette, also mastering for cassettes you did, or vinyl – what would the people bring to you? You start up your equipment – what would you look at, what’s the format people would bring you? Like, finished music makes you go through pain or enjoyment? What’s it usually like to start with a project?

Rick Essig

It’s getting crazy now as there are so many different formats. People are bringing in mp3s, they’re bringing wavs, they’re bringing split stereo files, interweaved stereo files, mono files, sd2, sd1, it’s kind of insane. I’m always trying to help people to bring whatever master is closest to what they finished the mix as. Not to keep bouncing it around and converting and changing things. Because a generation loss is a generation loss. They say if you got it digitally, you’re not going to get a loss, but things can happen. I’ve gotten files where there was supposed to be a stereo file, but one of them is like slightly out of phase because it’s maybe two frames offset and the guy does not know how that happened and you have to go in and [fix it].

Patrick Pulsinger

So you would usually not hear that if you just listened to it, but you would hear it and you would have to worry about it?

Rick Essig

Yeah, call the guy up and…

Patrick Pulsinger

So tell the people a little bit about what’s the perfect preparation before you can do your job and how you would prepare your master? You said you like cutting from tape.

Rick Essig

Yeah, I mean analog tape ideally is going to sound good, but in certain aspects I understand it’s not possible. Number one, it’s not cost-effective. Number two, if you are dealing with it digitally, you’re just doing samples and stuff, you don’t necessarily... I mean, a great record is a great record, when it actually sounds like it. You can have a great record of just 8-bit samples. It’s little about how bad those sound, but put together correctly it’s still a good record. You wouldn’t do an up-sampled 96k master of that, to high-res because it’s not really high-res. It’s a high-res copy of a low-res record. The simplest thing that you could come up with – again after you’re done with the mix, whether it be a CD master, a DAT – you just want to keep it as close to what you’ve done before you give it out. You know, any format, we take them all.

Patrick Pulsinger

You said you’ve been doing it for like 18 years, so you obviously started before this bedroom production era of everybody being able to have a sequencer with plugs and everything set. Would you see an increase in the quality of the material that was sent out to you, because the stuff is so around and you could get a compression plug-in here and things like this? Or was it better when it still was more down to the analog recording stuff?

Rick Essig

Yeah, I mean quality-wise, yeah. Definitely, in the early days when you had a dedicated engineer making a mix of a project, it was of generally better sound quality.

Patrick Pulsinger

So bedroom productions in general suck?

Rick Essig

No, I just think that people that get themselves set up aren’t necessarily familiar enough with the tools they are using and maybe not using them optimally. They’d be using too many presets, are not really digging around with the program itself to really see what it is doing and what it’s not doing, that type of thing. There is a whole step missing these days. A guy started out as a mixing engineer, but before that I had to watch these old guys do it for years.

Patrick Pulsinger

Tell us a little bit about that, how you came from the engineer kind of thing into the mastering thing. That’s important, because that’s the step that we mostly don’t even know about.

Rick Essig

It’s not there anymore, that’s a missing step these days. If you were lucky enough to get in the door of a good studio, usually you started out slopping toilets, taking out trash, getting coffee, whatever you could do. Cleaning up after the session, winding cords, just the lowest of the low bullshit. But that’s really how you got into it. First of all they find out if you are serious about it, because you’re there about 90 or 100 hours a week, basically you just live there. But that’s where you also get to see these guys do this stuff and you also get to see how signal path works, what a signal path is, what’s actually happening to the sounds from either the guitar or vocals all the way through to the final tape. There’s a lot of stuff going on and it’s a big juggling act to get a good sound on tape. I mean, that process, just learning how to do that, you can’t buy that kind of stuff. Because now they really have set up these mixing programs in such a way that you really can get something done... It may be a great record, but it may not sound close to how good it could sound, if you are really familiar with the stuff you are using in line. I mean, it’s so easy now to have these really pretty digital mixing tools that these guys put out for Steinberg and all that stuff that actually looks like a piece of analog gear. But what is it really doing?

Patrick Pulsinger

Let’s say you do the production at home, there is no other way you can do it, you know? You have to fight your way through plug-ins. Maybe some gear that you can get on the sly. How important is it to compare to stuff you want to sound alike? But how important is it actually to listen to your stuff on your speakers at home?

Rick Essig

Very important. A lot of times, new clients especially, say, “Here is my record, here is this Dr. Dre record. Make my record sound like this record.” Well sure, it’s not going to happen. Dre has the people around him that know how to put a record together. That’s why his record sounds like that. But if that really is your goal, and you have the system in your house, put the Dre record up. How does the Dre record sound on your system – and then try to make your mix sound as close to that as possible. You may have a crappy system at home, but the whole comparative thing is what you can really get your ears tuned into. If you have a specific sound in mind that you want to get and you may not have a sub, so you don’t know what’s on your subsonic level, you just crank in that low end and tell those little babies are flumping around. And be like, “That looks like enough low end.” But then, when you actually get it on a record, it’s like, “Ohhhh, whooowow way too much.” So, it’s really just again: Familiarize with what you have. I’ve heard the worst records in the world coming out of the Hit Factory booked out for $50,000 a day. It’s horrifying. Again, I’ve heard great records coming out from people’s basements.

Patrick Pulsinger

So again, it’s more...

Rick Essig

The individual.

Patrick Pulsinger

And it’s not only the gear that you have. You can go out and buy all the gear, but if you don’t have the experience… ?

Rick Essig

If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s just a waste of money.

Patrick Pulsinger

So, people do it anyway at home, fiddle around with compression plug-ins, de-essing…

Rick Essig

L1 Ultramaximizer.

Patrick Pulsinger

Ultra-maximizing their stuff…

Rick Essig

Evil, evil tools.

Patrick Pulsinger

Does it make it harder actually for a mastering guy if people take too much life out of their stuff? What would you suggest?

Rick Essig

Never put two-track compression on a mix. Make it sound as good as you can and then let the other guy do it. Because that way, if there are really any problems that need to be fixed in the mix, you need something to be brought up or brought down. When you have the headroom to do that, it’s much easier and it sounds much better. It’s almost like people will be like, “Ey, I finally got it to be a square wave, now it rooooocks!” It’s farthest from the truth. Whenever they ask me, I say, “Just don’t put it through anything in the end.” Don’t worry about how loud it is, that’s the last thing you should be worrying about.

Patrick Pulsinger

But the loudness is to a lot of people is very important because the record might sound good. When you put it on the CD it sounds good, but you have to bring it up three or four notches so it would sound the same as a Mariah Carey record or whatever.

Rick Essig

We do that, but after we processed the tracks, so it’s my job to make it loud.

Patrick Pulsinger

So you would go from the dream thing, you would go down to the limitations of the format?

Rick Essig

You have to, yeah. I mean, the ultimate delivering is 16-bit, 44.1kHz CD master. Unless you go SACD (SuperAudioCD) or we even got that 1-bit thing, but then I will convert that format.

Patrick Pulsinger

Actually, you worry about the loudness afterwards.

Rick Essig

You know, when I process the track, EQ it, compress it, whatever I got to do with it, right before I dump it in the workstation to edit it up, I’ll put what it needs to put on it to punch up the volume.

Patrick Pulsinger

But what if the peaks stand out but you did compression before, do you make sure that it is the nice flat kind of like…?

Rick Essig

Basically what I do is like, again: VU meters, which, you know, a lot of people don’t use these things these days. But as far as a VU reading of a peak modulation on a record, it would have to be zero VU plus or minus whatever level you put on the record. So you can have a record, let’s say, plus five over what the peak of the record would be. So to transfer over to the CD thing is what, I say, basically my limit would be, I would add about eight db of gain until I get plus eight over zero for a CD, that’s basically as far as I push it. That’s the competitive line. A few people go over it, but, I mean, it’s just horrifying to listen to it.

Patrick Pulsinger

Because if you do it with software, the software would keep you with like a red line there, you know?

Rick Essig

Yeah, that’s the thing. The tools we have there are specifically designed just to do that. But again, I mean how many records are out there that you cannot sit through the whole thing because it does something to you? It’s just annoying to sit through 74 minutes of music because it’s like grinding your teeth.

Audience Member

Let’s say that we can’t afford giving our stuff to someone like you or paying you for that matter – no disrespect – so then would it be in our interest to use the L1 Ultramaximizer?

Rick Essig

Sure, you got to do what you got to do. If you’re going to deliver the record to the plant to make your own stuff, then yeah. But if you know you got to use somebody in between, don’t do it.

Audience Member

So do you have any suggestions about how people should proceed, who maybe just have the cracked wave plug-ins?

Rick Essig

See, it’s tough because I am working on an entire analog console. So I am dropping input levels to certain devices, so I’m not overloading things along the way and it’s like a little bit there, little bit there, little bit there, until the final thing is what it is. You may not have that luxury there, you’re just pumping it through the chain.

Audience Member

So you mean that you are going along with the EQ and dropping certain frequencies and increasing other ones?

Rick Essig

First you have the input level from the console, so if I get a mix from someone and it’s already screaming hot, I’m dropping the input level on the console by 10db, just to start out. And then I’m rebuilding it again from there to try and fix whatever problems there are going on and then at the very end of it, unfortunately if I have to re-add some gain to it.

Patrick Pulsinger

So, if the master I would send you is terribly loud because I am embarrassed of sending you a quiet master, you take it down anyway.

Rick Essig

Yeah, I have to.

Patrick Pulsinger

So do you go through the track? Would you subtract what you don’t have and let it stand out within what you want to have or would you add to it?

Rick Essig

It depends. There’s some things you want to cut, some things you might want to add. I am not one of the engineers that always has to be adding. Sometimes taking away is a better deal. A lot of times people have way too much screaming, like 14kHz, so I just roll that right off the bat. I’m not going to bring the bass up to try and fight with it. It’s that whole checks and balances thing. After so many years you build up kind of a card file of what things sound good and then you just reference that. I reference that in my head when I’m working. It goes like, “OK, this is this type of music. I think it seems to need this.”

Patrick Pulsinger

You were saying “the bass.” I mean, we were talking a lot about it in the studio about compression and stuff like this. Obviously, the hardest thing for most of the people is to get the bass right, like the bass is the hardest frequency.

Rick Essig

Yeah, it’s either fighting with the kick, or it’s fighting with the bottom end.

Patrick Pulsinger

So you talked about that you don’t even use a sub in the studio. You don’t believe in sub? Can you explain that to us?

Rick Essig

Well, I don’t, because in my studio I have giant speakers that have adequate low end. I’m not against it in an environment where you have absolutely none. I mean, you got to hear something. But I think people tend to fool themselves with the sub, or it’s not set up right. If you really want to get accurate, you have to really tune what you’re actually listening to to be – not necessarily flat – but as accurate as it can be for what you hear. Everybody hears different.

Patrick Pulsinger

A lot of people are afraid of that record in a club then, because they have actually a sub standing there, and it might sound like it’s screaming in the mid-range because they didn’t put enough sub in. But for mastering purposes you would try to create a mix that would work in the club as well as on a little kitchen radio?

Rick Essig

See, that’s kind of a myth too. Because as long as it is done right, it will sound good anywhere. You don’t really have to say this is going to be the radio mix because the radio guys beat the crap out of your record anyway. It’s pretty much dead once it hits the airwaves. Because they have to fit all that crap in that little bandwidth of airwaves. Plus, they want it to be screaming loud. If you try to do that with a mix, you will hear it will be super harsh. People think, “Well, I need to make it brighter, I gotta have less low-end for the radio.” That was maybe true in the ’40s, but not now.

Patrick Pulsinger

When you finished your track at home, you made it as good as possible on your Mackie mixer or wherever, I always go and I listen to it on different speakers, in the car and on different sizes of speakers as well.

Rick Essig

At that point it should relatively sound the same. Obviously there are going to be differences, but there shouldn’t be huge differences. If there is, then there are some issues in there. It’s not because the boomboxes is boomy, it’s because something in the mix is making the boombox boomy.

Audience Member

This is going to be a weird question, but basically, what you do is the same thing as maybe what Ron Murphy does? So you cut the records right there in the studio?

Rick Essig

Yeah, I have a lathe in my studio.

Audience Member

And all of your stuff is analog?

Rick Essig

Well, my console is, but I use a digital workstation as well. But I use that basically as a tape machine for editing purposes and for assembling a master for CD if need be. Or a lot of times now, people deliver records on either three different sources or out of sequence, so I have to dump it in and sequence it before I cut it.

Participant

And the best type of a format to give you would be a stereo file?

Rick Essig

If you’re going to use Pro Tools files, yeah. Keep ‘em linked once you separate them and they’re floating around somewhere. I mean, not just me but you know you may supposedly find a guy charging you 50 bucks per hour to get your CD done. Don’t leave anything to chance because you may end up with a CD that’s all f’d up. Because it’s real easy to slip those [stereo files]. I have to load the ST files directly onto my Sonic Solutions system and it doesn’t interpret it like a sound designer does. So I’m basically just now stuck with two single files left and two right that now I have got to align time-wise. So, if you got a guy that is not really hip on doing that right, you could have some problems. If you have an interleaved stereo file, they can’t screw it up.

Patrick Pulsinger

So, what’s the most common – let’s call it mistakes – that you were drawn into when people turn in mixes. If it’s coming from a big studio, from a major production studio or from somebody who did it at home, can you pin it down to the usual mistakes that people do? Not only like mechanical force of the medium, but also when people do their mix and there are vocals in it, there is a guitar in it and stuff like this, is there a usual mistake that people make? Putting up the vocals too high, or adding up too many highs?

Rick Essig

Again, I don’t know because people like different things. I have clients that I couldn’t listen to what they want me to do. It would drive me insane, but the client is the client and I am a service guy. Some guys want it super stupid bright, other guys like a lot of low end and they don’t like it so bright. It’s always a personal taste. Obviously if there are glaring mistakes I can say, “Dude, there is a problem here. We might be able to fix it, but, you know…” But some people just like a vocal way the hell out there.

Patrick Pulsinger

But you basically work off a stereo file. People would not come with eight files and you would do like…?

Rick Essig

I have done it but I make sure I make it cost-prohibitive. So they do not come too often. I don’t like doing that. I’ve had to do it, I did a compilation of Deee-Lite stuff with Dmitry [Brill, member of Deee-lite]. And Dmitry hadn’t finished mixing, so we actually rented gear and he was mixing this record during the mastering session.

Patrick Pulsinger

In your place?

Rick Essig

Yeah, which was just stupid money. I mean, I was like, “Uff, we got to do it.” Me, I guess I have ADD or something. I just can’t spend that much time on a fucking song. I work and, you know, that’s it, let’s do it, let’s move on. So to sit there, it’s just torture.

Audience Member

Can you describe a bit about the process of mastering? Because for me and for a lot of people, they don’t really know what’s the difference between engineering and mastering?

Rick Essig

First of all, it’s really just having hopefully somebody you trust as that last set of ears to listen to it and make objective changes on your record. Because you’re so close to your own record, it’s tough to really make informative decisions on what may not sound right. So I am kind of like that extra trusted set of ears to say, “Alright, you know what? We could probably fix it by doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that.” It’s kind of weird. Unless you’re actually putting vinyl out, it’s not a super necessary step yet. A lot of people think they need it, obviously. I think it helps, because they’re giving it over and it’s like now do what you think needs to be done to really make this thing shine. It’s that last bit of spit and polish.

Audience Member

Can you describe more specifically, like the Radiohead album, what did you do? What did they bring to you and what was the process that you did?

Rick Essig

Say a Lil’ Kim record comes in or a Jay-Z record. And it’s a 12", so you have three different remixers doing a remix of the same track, three different guys in three different places. So, initially you listen to all three and you say, “There has got to be a certain amount of continuity here.” Since these guys are not talking to each other, it’s probably not going to be that. So the first step is to say, “Alright, what do I need to do to bring these a little bit closer together in more of a flow type thing?” So one track may be ultra-maximized, one may not. One may have super stupid low end and one may have nothing. So you got to look at that and again, you kind of reference what you have in your head as for whatever I’m listening to, “This is what sounds the best.” And then you try and adjust that to come up to what that reference point is. That’s basically just EQs and compressors, just the basic stuff. De-essers.

Patrick Pulsinger

You do use compressors on the overall track?

Rick Essig

Yeah.

Patrick Pulsinger

Good ones, though?

Rick Essig

Yeah.

Patrick Pulsinger

So basically the chain would be, you go through a couple of EQs… ?

Rick Essig

I actually compress before EQ. If you do it afterwards, it will tend to get more pumping because now you compressed an EQed signal. I think it’s easier to compress a flat signal if it needs it. And then you’re dealing [with] number one. You may not add as much EQ because you’re hearing more of what’s missing in a track to begin with. That’s my preference. Some guys do it after, I do it before. I’ve done it after, but now I do it before. Maybe next year I’ll change. I don’t know.

Audience Member

Has there ever been a time, where, let’s say, hip-hop artists or any artists bring their music unmixed and say like, “Just master it”? Could you please share an experience of something you brought to life, you felt like, “Oh, it’s unmixed and I have to do something with it”?

Rick Essig

What do you mean by unmixed? I mean, it’s always going to be in a two-track form.

Audience Member

Yeah, two-track stereo, that’s what I mean.

Rick Essig

Oh yeah, all the time. A lot of my clients – that’s why I have them – because they are like, “Alright, do what you got to do. Do that thing you do.”

Patrick Pulsinger

They wouldn’t come with suggestions?

Rick Essig

Yeah, most of my guys, they don’t come for sessions anymore, they just mail it in. The deal with the mastering is, if you come in to a studio, you really don’t know even what you’re hearing. I know what I’m hearing because I’m in that room every day. Once the guys get used to what you’re doing, they would rather not show up because sitting on a couch for eight hours can get pretty tiring. You play the same SEGA golf game over and over, it gets old. It’s the same principle as with that 12" thing. They come in and basically the mix is all over the place, the tracks themselves.

Audience Member

What exactly does the equipment that you have do and how do you do it?

Rick Essig

I have a Maselec transfer console, which is a three-piece unit. One is analog inputs. All my inputs and outputs from my converters and my analog gear go in the back of that. The input from whatever source I’m coming from, whether it be tape or whatever is plugged into that goes through… The console is broken up in a bunch of different sections. An input section, you have an insert section, you have an output section, which has different filters. It has a width control, it has all the neat little gizmos in the analog thing. Then from there I have it going to a Maselec compressor, into a Sontec mastering EQ, into another Sontec split left/right parametric EQ. Then it goes into another de-esser, an analog peak limiter, which I pretty much only use for cutting the vinyl. I have used it on some CDs, though. Then it goes back into the converters, to convert it to digital and then whatever nonsense I got to put on it to make it loud, it goes in there. I have an Ultramaximizer L2. Everybody’s got an L2.

Patrick Pulsinger

OK, we got something from our man P-Nice here. This record is out, right?

Audience Member

Yes, it’s out for free.

Patrick Pulsinger

So you did some mastering on it?

Audience Member

Yes, I did. This is something I did a lot of mixing on and then at the very end I did EQ to bring up the highs a little bit and L2 or L1.

Rick Essig

Ultramaximizer!

Audience Member

Right, exactly. Since I knew I wasn’t going to give it to someone to master it, this is just a demo, I did not have to have them crank up the system.

(music: Unknown)

Rick Essig

A big problem with that, too, is those goddamn multi-disc players. That really is what fucked everybody up because you could just put five in or ten in and then you really start going, “Oh, now I got to turn the thing up.” But when you put them in one at a time, you are already up there [at your stereo system].

Audience Member

Like you were saying 45s and 33s, you have to turn up anyways…

Rick Essig

Yup, nobody wants to get up off the couch.

(music: Unknown)

It’s kind of boofy. That technical term “boofy.”

(music continues)

Yeah, a lot of times subtracting works a lot better than adding to cover up stuff. That’s what I would do with that. The piano, it’s like that 600 to 1000Hertz range…

Participant

So you think the piano is a little bit too loud?

Rick Essig

It’s not loud, it’s something in the low range of the keys. It’s a low-mids thing. They need to be, I think, more tinkly. You know what I mean?