58 l August 2013
www.psneurope.com industrytalk
MANDY PARNELL may best be known for her work mastering Björk’s groundbreaking Biophilia (recently the subject of the documentary When Björk Met Attenborough on Channel 4 in the UK), but with over 20 years’ experience, she’s lent her mastering talents to many more blockbuster albums including those by The XX, Feist, Frightened Rabbit, Max Richter, The Knife, Matthew Herbert, Manu Chao and Sigur Ros to name but a very few. Tucked away in Walthamstow
Village, London, is Black Saloon Studios, Parnell’s rather unconventional yet extremely cozy workspace for the past eight years. PSNEurope paid a visit to chat with the 2012 MPG Mastering Engineer of the Year about formats, closed files and the art of listening…
How did you come to be at Black Saloon? I’ve been in the building for about 13 years, but it was designed originally around my lifestyle and workflow with musicians who would come and hang out and work here. It developed into a mastering studio over time. I was looking to rent a studio space in London, when a proposition to move to Los Angeles came about. I decided against the move for various reasons, by which time the studio at Black Saloon had evolved into the best studio I have ever had the pleasure of working in. By this time I had worked on
some great albums – Metals (Feist), Drums Between The Bells (Brian Eno & The Words Of Rick Holland), NY Is Killing Me (Gil Scott Heron & Jamie XX) , Infra (Max Richter) Riceboy Sleeps (Jónsi & Alex) – this was very high-profile work that gave the studio some great feedback.
Do you have a favourite piece of gear?
My desk (an EMI TG Transfer console). There aren’t many around as most of them were chopped up and have had their modules taken out and put into rackmounts. Brian Gibson (former Abbey Road technical engineer) maintains the desk for
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“People forget that mastering is not just turning knobs, it’s a science” Mandy Parnell
artwork. With Sigur Ros’ 2002 () album the credits were only available on the album’s website. So unless people actively looked for the credits they didn’t know who had worked on the project. Since the onset of digital
music, to find credits on albums can be quite difficult – especially to find the mastering engineer involved in a project. The MPG is working very hard to incorporate credits with the music through its initiative Credit Where Credit Is Due.
What’s next on the horizon? Recently I have been working with my former assistant, mastering engineer Chris Le Monde to implement a radical change with our digital signal flow. We have incorporated new DAWs, cutting-edge technology and various new toys. The amount of research
Black magic
Erica Basnickimeets award-winning mastering engineer Mandy Parnell, and discovers how the wrong file format can really ruin your day
me. He’s great, he sources original parts and we have restored the desk to its former glory.
You’ve mastered to vinyl, CD, and now iPad (Biophilia). Do you have a favourite format to master to? Not really, every format has its pros and cons. I’m excited about the change in digital mastering, with the formats we can deliver – for instance Apple’s Mastered for iTunes initiative – and being able to work to 96kHz/24-bit. It’s taken a while for the world to realise we can have nice sounding music out there in the digital domain that isn’t really trashy or distorted, which is quite exciting. Of course I will always love the rewards of mastering to vinyl.
The biggest problem I have at the moment is sending WAV files for digital distribution. When we send a CD master to the record company it is normally as a Disc Description Protocol (DDP). It is a format that cannot be tampered with easily. When the master is provided as WAV files, it is very open to things going wrong.
Can you give an example? I had a producer email me about a track I mastered saying “I think it sounds great, and I understand that you might have to alter the level from what I sent you, but 6dB seems excessive?”. I didn’t bring the level down, I made it louder! I was so confused and thought maybe I had bounced the file incorrectly (which I hadn’t). I
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got in touch with the record company and asked the A&R co-ordinator to send me a copy of the file in question. When we looked into it, the A&R co-ordinator had imported it into their iTunes and burned a CD with ‘Sound Check’ enabled – which had brought the audio down -6dB. This is just one example of how WAVs are an unstable format for delivery of digital files.
What does MPG’s Credit where Credit is Due initiative mean to you? I think it’s very important. At one of the pinnacles of my career I worked on some highly acclaimed albums Manu Chao’s Próxima Estación: Esperanza and Feist’s Let It Die, to name a couple, for which I didn’t get credited on the
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we conduct at the studio is phenomenal. People forget that mastering is not just turning knobs, you have to remember that mastering is a science and as such is a constant questioning and exploration of audible possibilities. Over the past few years I have
been invited by educational facilities to give lectures and workshops and I will continue to visit aspiring engineers internationally. I love sharing the knowledge I have gained and I think it is important to nurture the young talent coming into the industry. I would really like to put a workshop together in the studio, for students to explore listening skills. Why is it that in our universities and colleges students don’t have access to hear un-mastered files? We need to set up a programme for our educators to have un-mastered mixes available as teaching aids. This would give our students a reference point other than finished mastered tracks, for them to understand the different processes of mixing and mastering. Let’s educate the next
generation towards great sound!n
www.mandyparnell.com www.blacksaloonstudios.com
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