With all the recent attention towards BT’s new (and yet untitled) album #6 and the associated acts doing remixes and collaborations, it’s very easy to overlook a number of contributors deeply involved in helping produce a record of the highest caliber. Today we’ll take a look at the most important person not actually featured on the album: The Mastering Engineer.
Mastering is a lost art form of sorts. It entails a broad spectrum of everything from finalizing the tracklisting, normalizing the audio to keep the levels consistent throughout the record, to preparing the material for a glass master pressing at the CD distributor. Most importantly, however, the mastering engineer is responsible for pouring through every inch of the audio with a fine tooth comb to detect and clean up inconsistencies, hollow sounds, unwanted echos from recording sources, and imperfect balances or muddiness throughout the frequency spectrum. They may also apply additional filters for a variety of subtle enhancements. Some artists opt for a bright, sweet sound, others want a “live performance” feel. There’s also the issue of dynamic range: Higher compression creates a louder and punchier sound (See: The Offspring), at the severe expense of losing the depth and dimension of the record. The trick is to find the happy medium—a sound that is forceful yet preserves all the peaks and dips of a sonic waveform. We could very easily punch out a doctrinal thesis on expert methods of mastering, but the bottom line is that it takes someone with exceptional talent and judgement to assess all these factors and implement a solution that compliments the vision of the source material. Mastering is not for everyone.
Meet Emily Lazar. As founder, owner and chief engineer of world-renowned studio The Lodge, mastering is definitely for her. In addition to mastering duties on BT’s previous works This Binary Universe and Emotional Technology, Emily has put her touch on a number of hit records including Playing the Angel by Depeche Mode, Elements of Life by Tiesto, a half dozen albums by Garbage, All Or Nothing by The Subways, (my personal favorite) Sonic Youth’s remaster of Dirty (what an honor that had to be), and even my Seattle-based home church Mars Hill’s compilation of worship bands. Having worked with a wide palette of sounds and styles for thousands of records, Emily has very few imitators, even fewer peers and nothing to prove to anybody. Plus she’s ridiculously hot. She’s the best of the best, and right now she’s working on BT’s latest offering.
Here’s a brief snippet of her biography—you can check out The Lodge here, their MySpace page here, and view the PDF with the bio and Emily’s complete discography here. She was also previously covered by Mix Magazine two years ago.
At the forefront of a new generation of mastering engineers, Emily Lazar, founder of The Lodge, recognizes the integral role mastering plays in the creative musical process. Combining a decisive old-school style and sensibility with an intuitive and youthful knowledge of music and technology, Emily and her team capture the magic that can only be created in the right studio by the right people.
Founded in 1997, The Lodge is located in the heart of New York City’s Greenwich Village. Equipped with state-of-the art mastering, DVD authoring, surround sound, and specialized recording studios, The Lodge utilizes cutting-edge technologies and has attracted both the industry’s most renowned artists and prominent newcomers. From its unique collection of outboard equipment to its sophisticated high density digital audio workstations, The Lodge is furnished with specially handpicked pieces that lure both analog aficionados and digital audiophiles alike. Moreover, The Lodge is the only studio in the New York Metropolitan area with an in-house Ampex ATR-102 one-inch two-track tape machine for master playback, transfer and archival purposes.
As Chief Mastering Engineer, Emily’s passion for integrating music with technology has been the driving force behind her success, enabling her to create some of the most distinctive sounding albums released in recent years. Her particular attention to detail and demand for artistic integrity is evident through her extensive body of work that spans genres and musical styles, and has made her a trailblazer in an industry notably lacking female representation.
Recently, Emily helped to launch the flagship Apple store in New York City with her presentation on the relationship between mastering and Apple Computers. Some of the esteemed artists she has worked with include: Depeche Mode, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Morrissey, Jeff Buckley, Sonic Youth, Third Eye Blind, Natalie Merchant, The Shins, Donald Fagen, Beyonce, Sinead O’Connor, Destiny’s Child, Simple Plan, Wu Tang Clan, Nada Surf, The Walkmen, Vanessa Carlton, Tiësto and The Prodigy to name a few. In addition, she has mastered original soundtracks for the following feature films: Training Day, Pokemon: The 1st Movie, Boys Dont Cry, Six Feet Under, Heroes and The Punisher among many others.
But even the most successful studios cannot just rest on their laurels. Seeing the potential for expansion, The Lodge recently added to the core competency of their business by opening new audio production facilities to serve different areas in the music/audio market, making The Lodge one of the most comprehensive audio service facilities on the planet.
Current articles on Emily Lazar include features in Artist Pro (cover story), Bust Magazine, Electronic Musician (cover story), Home Recording Magazine, Mix Magazine, Billboard, Pro Sound News, Medialine, Future Music, Remix Magazine and TapeOp. Lazar is also a highly publicized product endorsee for Avalon Design (audio equipment) and Apple Computers.
