Stephen Marsh on Mastering Music Scores, Movie Soundtracks, and the DC Universe

Mastering engineer Stephen Marsh

For over 20 years, mastering engineer Stephen Marsh has been using his golden ears to bring expert detail and focus to hundreds of records, scores, soundtracks, and reissues.

It was a quick decision while working at Taco Bell one evening that determined the New York native’s audio fate. A friend of his was moving to the West Coast, and Marsh figured he’d tag along to attend a 6-month recording program at Musician’s Institute. After arriving, he stumbled upon a phone number on a bulletin board that led to an internship at Sony Music Studios in Santa Monica, CA.

Soon deep in the trenches of a major label studio, Marsh spent the next six years learning from a handful of incredible engineers, including his main mentor David Mitson, who made a name for himself working with the likes of Willie Nelson, Johnny Winter and Dolly Parton.

Today, Marsh runs his own mastering facility in Hollywood. And business is good—really good. During the past two years alone, he’s mastered soundtracks for TV shows including The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, Hannibal, Narcos, and The Man in the High Castle.

Throughout his career, Marsh has amassed an impressive array of music mastering credits filling his discography to the brim with names like Rage Against the Machine, Alice Cooper, Kenny Loggins, Los Lobos, Bob Dylan, Incubus, James Taylor, and Keb’ Mo’.

His secret? Marsh claims that he’s simply attentive to what the end listeners really care about:

“I always try to listen like a consumer,” he tells me. “If it’s hip hop, I want to feel that bottom right away. If it’s rock, I want those guitars to hit me. If it’s pop, the vocal performance needs to grab you.

“As you critically listen, you need to remain in the audience and not join the band onstage. Remaining as objective as possible is key. It’s not a math equation you’re finding the solution to; it’s an emotional equation that you’re trying to solve.”

What led to your initial interest in mastering?

All my early listening experiences were with vinyl. As a kid, I’d sit down, put a stack of records on my dad’s Dual, lean my back against one of the big [floor standing speakers] he had, and let the bass rumble through me as I poured over every little detail of the album cover, credits included. I kept seeing the same names pop up over and over again and started to question who this small band of folks were that were making all these records.

My interest in all things music production sprung from those experiences. Each and every time I sit in the studio and crank up a new tune for the first time, I think I’m doing that in part—maybe subconsciously—[trying] to recreate that feeling of wonder and discovery, and that heavily informs the decisions I make behind the console. At the end of the day, what we take away from music is how it makes us feel.

What did your early days at Sony Music Studios entail?

My first gig there was as a runner, so I made a lot of rather strong coffee, fetched a great deal of food, and shuffled a multitude of tapes about town.

[After] a few months of keeping my head down, never saying no, and doing my best to learn the ropes, the chief mastering engineer, [David Mitson], recognized something in me he could mold and took me on as his apprentice.

That was in 1995 and I continued to work with David as his second and night-shift engineer through to his retirement in 2001.Our bread and butter was reissue mastering for Legacy Records, Sony’s in-house catalog label. Our focus was primarily blues-oriented and we worked on classic recordings by everyone from Big Bill Broonzy to Willie Dixon, with a couple hundred stops in-between.

After Sony, was it difficult to go independent?

Marsh Mastering

I departed Sony when they closed their West Coast operation and while the post-9/11 recording business had its fair share of obstacles to success, there were a lot of opportunities as well. It happened to coincide with a time of massive change in the way money flowed through our industry.

Prior to about 2000 or so, if you controlled the means of production—the physical recording infrastructure that is—then you had a great deal of leverage in setting rates and establishing the terms of working relationships with labels. They needed you, there were a lot of them, they had lots of money and the work typically followed the facility.

After that time, things began to shift pretty quickly to the independent model. A billion private studios sprung up and now labels wanted streamlined systems, they didn’t want to get an invoice for the producer and the engineer and the studio and the cartage and the rentals—they wanted it “all-in”. The producer was expected to bundle in whatever it was they needed to do the job they were hired to do. All of a sudden, the work didn’t follow the facility, it followed the person doing the work, and that was pretty much the beginning of the end of the classic “big analog console/big tracking room” recording studio paradigm as a commercial venture.

A few still maintain, but both coasts have largely been gutted of a lot of the places recording artists used to call home. This work is primarily done by smaller groups of people working in well-equipped homes or private facilities.

It just so happens that with mastering, the work following the person has always been the model. When that massive shift happened, I was more or less ideally positioned to just keep on plucking along as I always had, somewhat insulated from the upheaval going on around me.

Many people—even seasoned artists and engineers—consider mastering to include a little bit of sorcery. What do you feel is the most ‘magical’ aspect?

Mastering is really just a whole lot of very simple things lined up together and done in a specific sequence, and as such, any part of it taken alone is something I think most folks would understand fairly readily. However, when taken all at once, it may seem daunting, and my industry has typically done little to allay that belief.

The analogy I use most is that of an analog recording console: A layman looks at a big desk and is stupefied by all the controls, but once you explain that 90% of the desk is just one narrow strip repeated over and over, it immediately becomes easier to grasp.

All that is to say I think some of the “magical” business is more of an idea than anything tangible. However, I absolutely agree that when the right project gets into the hands of the right engineer, some fuzzy math does tend to occur, and suddenly 3 + 3 + 3 can equal 12 rather quickly. When the goosebumps hit and you can literally feel the other people in the room responding to what they’re hearing, that’s magical.

I’ll tell you a secret: Mastering with the artist in the room is like having a massive crutch to lean on. Artists just feel things in a different way, a deeper more meaningful way, and I swear if you can tune in to their frequency, you can just feel when they think it’s right.

Does your approach change when mastering an album as opposed to a single and if so, how?

Sometimes—but the desired result is always the same: Conveying the artist’s vision in the most musically comprehensive and sonically appropriate way.

If there are changes, it’s generally more about the release format than album vs. single. For example, an artist might want to push the single version a little more aggressively for radio play and streaming and will let the album version breath a little more—that kind of thing.

How about between a score and soundtrack? Do you approach the two differently?

A view of the console at Marsh Mastering.

Now those are really quite different. A soundtrack will typically be a compilation mixing some previously recorded songs—and sometimes previously mastered ones as well—and some new songs recorded for the film.

In this instance, I try to make the minimum number of moves required to get them sitting next to each other well. I don’t want to negatively impact the artist’s vision as presented on the finished tunes any more than I have to to get them lined up with the new stuff. And on the new stuff, I have the producers from whom to take direction. You put it all together and it should flow as well as an album by one artist.

With scores, we break away from the traditional “pop” music method of going song to song and take the entire body of music as a whole. In our shop, we use a multi-pass approach. After pulling all the elements together and discussing tone and direction with the composer, we begin our initial noise pass. We go through and flag any sound that distracts from the performance—anything that breaks the suspension of disbelief is cleaned. These might be performance noises like chair squeaks or page turns or they might be digital in nature like edit pops or click-track bleed.

Once we have a clean slate, we do our rides and levels pass. This is where I go through cue by cue and adjust the relative levels of the cues, do any “suiting”—that’s the combining of multiple cues to make songs—as well as perform volume rides within each cue on an as-needed basis to bring the dynamic extremes a little closer and aid in flow.

Once we have the levels right and the distractions removed, we do our third pass, which is the actual EQ pass, and capture each piece of music through the console with some gentle EQ and a little limiting.

On occasion, we’re asked to add reverb—sometimes just tails, sometimes we downmix from 5.1 or 7.1—those type of things are also addressed during the EQ pass. When you want to do it the right way, it can be quite involved.

I’ve done so much of this work over the years, hundreds of scores, and we’ve developed a workflow that can accomplish all this fairly efficiently with staff trained to handle all the clerical and technical aspects of it so that I can really focus on the creative. Even with our multi-step approach, we can turn out multiple score albums a week that still meet my admittedly anal standard!

When did you first become involved with mastering film scores and soundtracks? Was it something you had planned to get involved in?

I was at a Pearl Jam show with my friend Aubrey in 2002 or so, and she said I had to meet her old intern who was super cool and was now working at an indie soundtrack label. She knew we’d get on.

Well, turns out he had some work for me and once I got the hang of film music in basic, I found that I truly loved it. You can be so expressive with score—it has no set instrumentation, no set formula for the composition, no pre-determined ‘sound’ that must be met or bested—and it’s wide open for me to interpret in my way and really give the composer something bespoke to release to their fans.

You’ve worked on a lot of soundtracks within the DC Universe: The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl. How did those come about, and do you recall any unique challenges with those sessions?

I’ve had good fortune in that I get to work with many composers on multiple occasions, and you develop a kind of short-hand that absolutely comes through in the final product. I’m humbled that Blake Neely, in addition to being a genuine superhuman himself, is one of those people. If there are unique challenges to working with the DC Universe music, it’s frankly all on his side of the glass. Composing for so many shows, he somehow offers a fresh, unique take on all of them, while still working within the larger construct of the DC Universe and what that means to people, what that should sound like. He’s truly deft at navigating those waters. While we’ve done plenty of non-DC scores together to good effect, the DC stuff is its own kind of fun.

Speaking of superpowers, are there any ”secret weapons” in your studio that help you out the most?

Most people probably want to hear about a cool vintage EQ or the tape machine we have here, but honestly, the two things that have truly revolutionized the way I work are pretty simple:

The first thing is the room itself, which is a GIK Acoustics design. I asked Glenn Kuras and his team to put together a completely free-standing solution, so that I could take it with me to any other room that had about the same dimensions in the future with minimal required adjustments. He accepted the challenge and it totally worked. I’ve already moved the studio once and I was up-and-running in the new place in a couple of days after the move—no extended tuning or endless listening sessions to dial it all in. I put up the main volume and it just sounded right.

It so happens we were working on an album with drummer Bill Ward at the time which we started in one studio and finished in another. Bill commented almost immediately that it sounded exactly the same. When clients understand what they’re hearing in a room they’ve never set foot in instantly, they can give you such amazing and valuable input—that’s secret weapon #1.

Secret weapon #2 is the move I made away from Pro Tools and Soundblade over to Pyramix from Merging Technologies. I can’t do justice to just how much more efficient the Merging Technologies system is compared to everything else out there. It does everything, up to and including DSD 11.2 and SACD authoring, which we do a fair amount of here. It’s well-supported and development is ongoing with things like complete immersive audio support. If you need something fixed, they fix it—need something added, they add it. I’ve never experienced that kind of commitment to the user with other DAW manufacturers. Now, I rely on it.

What is a common problem that you continue to find in mixes these days?

There are a couple of things that may never cease to raise their ugly heads. The two biggies for me are unevenness song to song in the bottom end and plugin overload, a.k.a. ”too much stuff” syndrome.

The first one is logical: Dialing in the bottom end in a room that’s less than ideally tuned and getting it consistent is a challenge—most things are mixed in less than ideal environments. As for “TMS” syndrome, well, search YouTube for gear and plug-in tutorials and you’ll have a pretty fair idea of what I think the problem might be.

How can mixing engineers make your job a little easier?

It goes for mixers or any artist mixing themselves: Communicate and be as open to getting mix notes as I promise to be when getting mastering notes. Together, we’ll get it exactly perfect.

What is a rule of mastering that should never be broken?

First coffee, then do no harm. Frame the picture, don’t paint over it.

Was there a session when starting out that really motivated you to continue pursing this profession?

I’m a tape junkie. I love everything about it. I love the machines, the tapes themselves, reading the labels. I love the musical archaeology that takes place when you pull something out and put it up on a machine for the first time in decades—you get it lined up perfectly and press play. Then, it hits you, and you hear something in a whole new way. I always imagine the studio it was cut in, who worked on it, and paint a picture of that in my mind while listening.

If you listen closely, you can hear so much more than just the song being played—[you can hear] the breathing and the shifting as well as the thoughts and ideas being stretched and manipulated for emotional effect. It’s a powerful thing getting to listen to original masters in a prime acoustic setting—it teaches you so much. Any time I get to handle vintage tape in a session, it’s a memorable one for me.

What’s an album that you didn’t work on that you consider to be unmatchable?

I still stand in amazement at some of the classic blues recordings I heard when I first got to LA and was on a steady working diet of blues reissues at Sony. Even with primitive recording technology, they captured humanity in a way most would readily donate spare body parts to do today.

Listen to the classic Elmore James recordings—or Freddie King, my personal fave. Let those guys sit in the room and bleed their hearts out for you and tell me there’s something in the recordings to be improved upon!

How has the mastering industry changed most over the years?

The basic function has expanded to include more specific steps, but the overall it is unchanged: You’re prepping content for release and distribution. However, when I started, that meant one thing and now it means another.

Most of the changes I note have more to do with the business structure than the creative aspect of it. When I started, most engineers worked in big multi-room facilities on the coasts. Now there are more folks mastering than ever, and the disproportionate number of them are solo acts or two-person operations, at most. Maybe 95% fall into those categories now.

Another pretty big shift I see now that I think will be a major factor in the next few years is automated mastering. It’s here already and that is going to continue to cause disruption within the mastering community.

I can see a time in the very near future where the predominance of commercial music for the mass market is both created by AI and mastered that way as well. The simple fact is that there are a lot of people who aren’t all that concerned with sound quality these days. The mass market, frankly, isn’t that picky nor need they be—music should ultimately be enjoyed as the listener sees fit.

However, just as I see most “Musica Generica”, as I call it, going the way of AI, I feel just as strongly that there will always be artists that demand something more, something bespoke to themselves and their art, and specialist mastering engineers like myself will continue to provide that for them.

Michael Duncan is a record producer, engineer, and writer living in NYC.

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