Taylor Deupree

About

Taylor Deupree is perhaps known best for being an exceedingly prolific electronic musician and as the founder of independent record label 12k, but here Deupree talks about his work as a mastering engineer. Sought out by labels like Hibernate, Kranky, Raster/Noton and Home Normal for his chops in the electro ambient genre, Deupree has been recording and producing electro-acoustic music for over 20 years. While he respects the orthodoxy of transparency, Deupree is not afraid to put his own sonic stamp on the music he masters and feels it is precisely the reason his clients keep coming back. It’s his fascination with the details that makes Deupree the master of the microcosm.

I love the creative side of mastering. I wouldn’t be as interested in it if I always aimed to sound sterile.

Getting personal

Taylor Deupree is perhaps known best for being an exceedingly prolific electronic musician and as the founder of independent record label 12k, but here Deupree talks about his work as a mastering engineer. Sought out by labels like Hibernate, Kranky, Raster/Noton and Home Normal for his chops in the electro ambient genre, Deupree has been recording and producing electro-acoustic music for over 20 years. While he respects the orthodoxy of transparency, Deupree is not afraid to put his own sonic stamp on the music he masters and feels it is precisely the reason his clients keep coming back. It’s his fascination with the details that makes Deupree the master of the microcosm.

What was your first mastering-related job – and what or who were your early passions and influences?

Back in the early/mid ’90s when I worked at Instinct Records in New York I was the art director. I handled 100% of the graphic related jobs. However, I was also signed to the label at the time and because of my knowledge of music and studios the label had me do rudimentary mastering on a lot of their releases. Mostly it was to compile compilations from many sources and make sure the included tracks had balanced relative volumes. I would also deal with the flow and spacing and produce the master disc.

While I wasn’t doing very much audio processing, these steps in mastering are really the foundation, super important, and often overlooked. Doing this for years for a lot of releases really gave me a good background for what I would end up doing years later… now.  

As for influences… I’ve never followed the careers of any other mastering engineers. My only influence has been the desire to make people’s music sound better. It really stemmed from the fact that a lot of the music in the genre I work in is produced in bedrooms with sub-optimal acoustic situations, recording equipment or digital/analogue convertors.

I took it upon myself to invest in high quality analogue equipment to help bring about better sound quality to these recordings, to really make sure people hear the details and the subtle, beautiful sounds that all of this music can present.  

What do you personally consider to be the decisive moments in your artistic work and/or career in the field of mastering?

I’ll stick to mastering for now, as my own creative musical career so far has many such moments. I would say that 4 or 5 years ago, when I decided to really take mastering seriously and offer it as a service to others, I made the commitment to myself to jump in and do it and do it right.

I already had a solid knowledge of the recording studio and deep knowledge of the genres of music I worked in, so I made the decision to open an analogue mastering studio and try to help the final quality of sound for musicians and labels within my circle. Just about every one of my clients is after analogue mastering with outboard gear that is beautifully tuned for the job and has great sound quality. This, as well as my knowledge of experimental music, is what I offer to clients.  

How would you personally define your role in the creative process? What is the scope and what are the limitations of what you are capable of doing? In how far do you feel increasing technical education even among amateur musicians has changed this role?

Traditionally, the role of a mastering engineer is a non-creative one. Technical-only, I would say. This can still be true today and many engineers strive for a transparency of sound. However, because I come from an arts background my mastering tends to take on a more creative roll. I always call myself a very non-transparent engineer, unafraid to inject a bit of my own sound. This is simply the natural way for me and I think most of my clients come to me for this reason.

I think it helps to have something unique to offer people instead of being too by-the-book. Of course, with mastering, you don’t want to totally change someone’s sound that they’ve worked very hard to achieve with their mix. There are subtle ways to create a vibe or bring out details that my clients and I feel improves the sound, even if it’s different from the original mix.

I love it when a client listens to the masters for the first time and tells me they hear sounds they didn’t even know existed in the recordings. Usually this is a good thing, I have a knack for bringing out little details and nuances.

I’m not so sure technical education has increased among amateur musicians. If anything, maybe it’s decreased. Writing and mixing music is so “easy” now, with the abundance of plug-ins and automatic-everything out there. You really don’t need to know much to make a finished recording these days. If you’re not interested in learning about recording techniques or details about mixing, it probably doesn’t matter.

I’ve never really looked into this notion, or researched it in any way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if technical knowledge has decreased. It’s not a good thing, I don’t think. I’m not a proponent of taking the easy way out or not fully immersing yourself in all of the aspects of your craft, technical or otherwise.  

In which way does the way music sounds change the way it is perceived? How do you see the relative importance of sound and composition?

I’d say this question is too broad to answer. Music is sound. Every way the music changes will change the way it’s perceived. Sound is only as important as you make it, as you let it change your world. For me, it’s extremely important. 

What, to you, are the main goals of recording, editing and mastering? Do you, for example, feel it important that a recording is a reflection of reality or is it by default artifice and therefore subject to its own rules?  

Mastering, by many people’s definition, is about being as transparent as possible. It’s about making the recording translate to the end medium as cleanly as possible and to be so subtle as to almost hear no changes. While these are certainly important points that have to be considered when mastering, as I said above, I don’t usually claim to be a transparent mastering engineer myself.

I think it comes from being a musician and also being highly involved in the types of music that I tend to master. I think I often have a sonic stamp to my mastering, which would probably be an idea criticized in many circles, but I think people come to me because of that sound.  

However, at the end of the day, each song has to be mastered to achieve what is its own very specific goal. Sometimes that is transparency, or very subtle processing but sometimes it is a heavier hand with saturation and character driven by the equipment used. I love the creative side of mastering. I wouldn’t be as interested in it if I always aimed to sound sterile.

Fancy studios and the greatest equipment mean nothing next to great songs, great sounds and passionate songwriting.

Building inspiration

Recording can be related to a particular location, but thanks to technology, it no longer has to be. How do you see the relation between sound, location and space?

It’s pretty wonderful that there are such high quality and portable musical tools and technologies now. Music really can be written and recorded anywhere. I definitely prefer to do the bulk of my recording and mixing in my own studio with my complete set of tools, but I have absolutely taken advantage of portable technology to record and write in specific locations. With the idea of conceptual recordings, location becomes very important.

On my recent collaboration album with Seaworthy we did a lot of field recording in the forests and streams around my house, which was then mixed with recordings in the studio. The whole album was about the exploration of these surroundings. Simple processes like field recording are vital and can be done very easily in very high quality these days. 

Location has been never been more important than with my Between CD on 12k. It was a meeting of not only friends, but also a very particular and amazing moment in time and location. We recorded spontaneously in a 200 year old Japanese building on this particular day, tour, and everything that was a part of our experience. This recording could not happen anywhere else for all of those reasons. If the five of us including Marcus Fischer, Simon Scott, Corey Fuller, Tomoyoshi Date and I, got together to make an album under different circumstances, it would have had a totally different outcome. The location, time and story unfolding around us were absolutely vital to the music.  

In how far are the objective, universal and measurable parameters for what constitutes quality in a recording? What are currently your main challenges and ambitions in terms of your approach to mastering to further these quality standards?

Mastering to me is very personal. It can’t NOT be personal, because I’m the one doing it. So when I’m mastering I try to achieve what I think sounds better, whatever that means. Maybe it’s more space in the high frequencies, maybe it’s a tighter, punchier bass, and maybe it’s a narrow, more focused sound. It’s totally subjective.

The hope is that MY vision and the artist’s vision are in sync and we’re both happy with the mastering. Fortunately this is the case 99% of the time. There are times, however, when I’m mastering a song and I think it needs one thing, but the artist doesn’t agree. In this case it’s my job to always do what the artist wants, it’s their music after all, and they absolutely have the final say in the matter.

I don’t think there are, or should be, any universal rules for what constitutes a good recording. It’s so dependent on so many factors. An example that quickly comes to my head is Iron and Wine’s The Creek Drank The Cradle. It’s absolutely his best album in my opinion, and that happened to be recorded in very lo-fi means on a 4 track cassette. It’s a far better album than anything he’s done since, given his constantly increasing budget for recording expenses. Fancy studios and the greatest equipment mean nothing next to great songs, great sounds and passionate songwriting.  

Tell us about your studio, please. What were criteria when setting it up and how does this environment influence the creative process? How important, relatively speaking. Are factors like mood, ergonomics, haptics and technology for you?

I’m actually building a new studio outside of the house. This began about two weeks ago and has been in the planning for over a year. It’s being designed not only for acoustics but also for comfort and vibe. Mood and ergonomics, to me, are as important as acoustics and more important than any technology. If I don’t want to create in a space, if I don’t feel inspired, then all of the technical perfection in the world won’t mean a thing.

But at the end of the day it is absolutely a balancing act between acoustics and design. The locations I really wanted to have windows, simply would not be very good acoustically, so window placement became very important and we did many redesigns of the back wall for the best acoustics.  The toughest thing, ergonomically, is designing a layout that works both for mastering and my own songwriting.

I need to keep my main listening area as clear as possible of furniture that may cause negative acoustic reflections but at the same time I need access to my equipment. I think I have found the best way to balance that.   I’m very excited about the construction. It’s going to be a beautiful, small building sheathed in rusted steel and cedar and hopefully inspiring the minute you walk through the door.  

What do you usually start with when working on mastering a new piece?

The first thing I do is listen to the piece and make mental notes of what needs to be accomplished. After that I’ll usually begin with precise, subtractive EQ to even out any resonant frequencies that may be eating up a lot of space. Then I’ve got a well-balanced version that’s ready to go onto the more additive and sweetening types of process.

Of course, every song is different and requires different work, but this is a common way of starting for me. Lately I’ve been doing very little additive EQ. I find I can achieve the sound I want by cutting certain frequencies instead of adding others.  

Certain sounds seem to be inextricably connected to particular genres or styles of music or even to different formats, like the CD or vinyl. Do you consider these as limitations, as a given or as a compositional tool which can be used in an inventive way?  

I pay very little attention to genre or style classifications. They really mean very little to me and as such I’m not really concerned with where a sound may belong or not. All that is important is what sound works best in the composition at hand or what a particular song may need, sonically.

The line between production work and composition is blurring. In how much do you feel that these two areas could mutually influence and inspire each other?  

I think this line has been blurring for a few decades now that high quality recording tools are available to everyone at home and even more so in the last 10 years. I think the roll of “producer” is pretty much something only used by those people who aren’t recording at home and that number is getting smaller as the years go by.

With experimental or electronic music, production techniques go hand in hand with sound design and composing. It’s all sort of the same thing now because the process has become so technical. For me, sound design and songwriting are nearly one and the same.

Engineers can’t just give up and let the cell phones win.

The irony of analogue

Budgets for productions are being reduced and more and more people are choosing to listen to music in compressed formats and on low-quality playback devices. In which way is this affecting music and how would you rate the state of production today?

Mastering engineers always talk about how ironic it is that we use all of this expensive analogue outboard equipment only to have songs listened to by people on their phone speakers as they walk down the streets. But at the end of the day we have to keep striving for the best audio quality we can because it really does matter. The loudness wars and low-quality MP3 formats have been a driving force in the decline of music sales alongside pirating and streaming services. 

There are still a lot of people out there who care about great sounding music and those are the people for whom I work hard to please. Engineers can’t just give up and let the cell phones win. If we care about what we do, if we’re passionate, it will come through in the music and ultimately make the industry a better place.  

The equipment-industry suggests that new equipment keeps making productions better. How much do you believe in the idea of progress in mastering? What are areas where you could imagine real improvements?  

The equipment, computer, and most other industries love telling you that what you have now isn’t good enough and that it won’t be good unless you upgrade to the latest and greatest tools. It’s a cycle we all get forced into by software updates and the addition of useless features and the continual dumbing down of the computer experience.  

The equipment in my studio ranges in age from the ’60s to the present. While I love the sound of vintage recording equipment, I also love the conveniences of digital tools and the possibilities we’ve been given thanks to our computers. I have a wonderful range of equipment, both old and new, that allows me the best of both worlds; modern convenience and innovation mixed with vintage character and vibe.  

There is also a lot of mastering gear made today that is based on designs from a few decades ago. These aren’t software emulations I’m talking about – although there are some wonderful ones there – but circuit and tube designs that capture the character of 50-year old equipment.  

A lot of the progress in modern mastering has been made to combat the ill effects of modern recording and listening. It’s sort of a circle of problems and solutions.  I don’t think there is, or needs to be, a lot of innovation in hardware recording equipment design. Besides boutique companies releasing classic or upgraded versions of classic designs, we get rewarded with more choices or cheaper prices, which is great.  There’s been amazing progress in the quality of software, however. From both the analogue emulations to really amazing restoration algorithms. Those can be real time-savers and yield wonderful results.

I’ll often be able to fix a spot of distortion or noise in a client’s recording without them having to go back and re-record the song. That’s a win-win situation for everyone.  I’m not so concerned anymore with upgrades or improvements, as I feel I have a very solid, working system.

I am a bit obsessed with more options, especially when it comes to sound design and synthesis. I’m quite happy to see the knob-laden analogue synthesizer making real a comeback with current big manufacturers and the passionate world of modular synthesizer makes and users. For me there is no comparison between using a well-designed hands-on hardware synthesizer versus a plug in.  

It has often been suggested that “the future of music is in live”. How do you feel about the ongoing relevance of recordings as an art form? What can recordings provide what a concert cannot?  

The future of music has been foreseen in live performance because it’s getting harder and harder for musicians to make money selling albums thanks to the pirating and file-sharing.  Unfortunately, the majority of musicians making music out there either aren’t able to, or don’t want to tour and play live. It’s a real negative view of the state of things if people write-off the enjoyment or innovation of the recorded art form.  

I enjoy playing live, but I much prefer to work in the studio. There, I have the time to craft the exact output I want, over months of time in the comforts of my studio with all of my equipment. Playing live usually means a limited amount of gear in a more-often-than-not terrible acoustic environment. Not that wonderful things can’t, and don’t happen in live situations. 

I’ve released a lot of live recordings because happy accidents and magic can happen when you least expect it. However, I think most innovation and beautiful music still comes, and will come, from studio sessions. We just need to get listeners to stop stealing from artists and for the artists to get the respect they deserve as hard-working thinkers and creators.

Usually, it is considered that it is the job of the producer and/or mastering engineer to make a recording sound great. But listening is also an active, rather than just a passive process. How do you see the role of the listener in the musical communication process?

Well, let me clarify that a recording cannot sound great unless it is MIXED well. Some people falsely view mastering as a crutch, to save poor mixes, but there is only so much that mastering can do. If a mix is really bad there is very little mastering can do to save it, but a decent mix, if mastered well, can sound great.  

Listeners have to be aware of good versus bad quality audio. Music is so much more enjoyable and encompassing when listened to on a proper system, in the way the artist intended it. The art of listening is so important and so easily forgotten in the world of mobile phones and Spotify. The album, as a whole, as a concept, is very important to what I do. Start to finish; sitting and listening. There are times to fast-forward your life, but not when you’re listening to great music.  

Please recommend two recording/mixing/mastering engineers to our readers, which you feel deserve their attention.  

I don’t follow the careers of other mastering or mixing engineers, but everyone should listen to late-era Talk Talk and the solo album of Mark Hollis, the lead singer of Talk Talk. These are among the most beautiful productions captured very naturally with spirit and vibe.

These albums were recorded by Phil Brown. If more albums today were recorded like this, then less people would feel that music is disposable and maybe start listening again.

Visit Taylor’s mastering website at 12kmastering.com