Eric Conn has mastered pretty everybody (except Van Halen) at his Nashville Mastering Studio, Independent Mastering.  When I say everybody, I mean Garth Brooks, Dixie Chicks, George Straight, Sebastian Bach, Ted Nugent, and about a billion other BIG records.

Eric is not only a hell of a mastering dude, he also puts on a clinic for running a service based business.  I had the chance to utilize Eric's mastering services back in January and couldn't be happier with the sound, service, price, and overall experience.

RecordingReview: First and foremost, the average dude attempting to make ruckus at home can see your list of credits and feel intimidated in a hurry. Is mastering a Garth Brooks record any different that mastering a record produced by Brandon Drury (me!)?

Eric Conn: An album is an album is an album. Artists, producers, engineers & record labels differ, but when a project comes in it gets 110% attention no matter who it is. There are no interns here, no 2nd engineers.

RecordingReview:What is the main objective to mastering?

Eric Conn: Mastering is the “presentation” portion of the recording arts, it’s the frame around the painting. You really shouldn’t notice it, but it should draw you into the record, make a fluid piece out of many parts. That’s the creative side. The technical side is making sure that the manufacturing plant receives a quality master, free from defects.

RecordingReview: Is it possible to make a great record at home? Why or why not? Is is possible to do a great job mastering at home or should this be left up to the professionals?

Eric Conn: First, let’s define “home studio”: Any reasonable space free from the sound of the neighbors lawnmower is a space in which to record! Unless the lawnmower is an effect you want, then call it art and proceed.

If you can fit a 5 piece band in the living room and your wife doesn’t mind, the neighbors don’t mind, and the band doesn’t mind, I say go for it. There are many great recordings done in unorthodox places. Anyone who has seen the Tom Dowd movie (and if you haven’t, you need to go buy it) will discover that many of the early Atlantic recordings Mr. Dowd engineered were done in an office building.

But, if you’re spending more time fighting ground loops, bad cables, funky acoustics, and bleed from poor isolation than you are capturing music, you might be better off in a professional studio. If time is no object and the band / artist doesn’t care, then the best learning experience you can have is solving those problems.

As far as “home mastering” goes, I’m biased, and here’s my biased opinion: You can pay your buddy $35/hour for his bedroom setup between the hours of 7pm - 2am (after he’s put in 8 hours at his day job) and then spend 3 or 4 days mastering if you want. Your buddy then sends the disc off to the plant and they send it back because it’s been done “track at once” instead of “disc at once” in a cheap computer program. The next disc goes off to the plant and it gets rejected because there’s un-correctable errors on the disc. So, now there’s a time crunch, and the master is cut at 48X, sent off without anyone listening to it and you’re going to press up a thousand discs from that?

Or, you could send it to a professional facility that will most likely be able to give you something of better quality in a day or less, and with the confidence that the master part going to the plant has been checked, verified, has the proper paperwork, etc. Even at a professional place, mistakes happen, but the difference between a professional and an amateur is that the professional knows how to fix his mistakes.

RecordingReview: Many young guys new to recording think that professional mastering is going to drastically improve their sound quality. Is this the case?

Eric Conn: There’s only so much you can do in mastering. Mastering can make a good recording great, it can make a great recording even greater , or mastering can make a great recording terrible, but what mastering can’t do is make a really bad recording great. You can make it a little better, but overall my opinion is: Garbage in, garbage out. You can polish the garbage, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still garbage. It might be louder garbage, it might get flattened to look like a pancake or airbrushed with lots of colors, you can put legs on it and make a coffee table -- but, it’s still garbage.

RecordingReview: What are your thoughts about plugins vs outboard gear for mastering? Are there specific elements that are more important to have outboard than others?

Eric Conn: The most important thing about any piece of equipment, be it analog, digital, or plugin, is knowing how to use it in the situation that you find yourself in. Don’t use a crowbar to open a Tiffany locket unless your intent is to destroy the locket.

RecordingReview: I see all kinds of "mastering" plugins out these days. Are these plugins really any different than the plugins used for standard tracking / mixing? Is there any reason a person couldn't master with the same EQ they use for vocals?

Eric Conn:The real question here is, what do you like? It comes back to knowing how to use the tools you have. If you like what it does, use it.

Ultimately, there are no rules, you can use a trash can lid for a splash cymbal, you can eq something with a radio shack graphic eq... I have a client who records to an out of date Roland hard disc system and then mixes to an old 1/4” deck at whatever tape speed his machine is running at that day. No tones, no reference level, I doubt he cleans the machine, and he brings the whole deck in to mastering. He has no money, his equipment isn’t great, but he has some time and a creative spirit. The music is raw and often distorted--just they way he wants it. And it’s great! The last time he came in we had to jerry rig a pencil and a paper clip to get the tension on his deck right.

Unless you have unlimited resources, you must learn to use the tools you have to accomplish what you need to accomplish. Ultimately, you will have to jump in and buy a piece of gear--- be it a plugin or an outboard piece. And at some point, you will eventually buy an expensive boat anchor. Don’t worry about it. Learn, surround yourself with people who also want to learn. Push yourself, push your peers, raise the bar for yourself and others.

RecordingReview: How important is your gear when compared to your ears, experience, and room?

Eric Conn: Everything effects everything, but, over all else, (in my opinion) if you have no experience, you have nothing to base your creative or technical decisions on and therefor no benchmark for creating quality. You may know what you like, but do you know how to get there? So my suggestion is to experiment and listen. Listen listen listen. I can’t emphasize that enough.

RecordingReview: As a mastering engineer, do you ever miss out on engineering and / or producing records?

Eric Conn: Great question, because this afternoon I’m in the studio recording a solo guitar project with another engineer. I get to do one, maybe two recordings every few years and that’s enough for me. They’re usually direct to 2-Track, or maybe 4 track.

RecordingReview: Do you consider mastering to be a creative process or a necessary, objective process?

Eric Conn: See the question about the main objective of mastering. I try to preserve what comes in, make it better if I can. Sometimes, all I will do is level the album - adjust for volume - and other times I’ll have to figure out how to dig out the sound that I know is in there, maybe it’s masked by too much low end or something else is clouding it. Maybe the recording needs compression to help it come together a little better. Maybe the project has been mixed by 3 different engineers and every other song sounds completely different. My job then is to make the songs blend as well as possible without loosing their individual character.

Objectively, I feel I have the responsibility to my client to advise them if there are technical artifacts such as distortion, clicks, ticks, pops, tape print thru etc. in the recording. The rest is opinion, and subjective. Objectively, there my be too much low end it may rattle the walls, but subjectively, it may be what the client wants.

RecordingReview: Does the modern trend of mega loud mastering have any correlation to CD sales or music industry profits going down?

Eric Conn: In my opinion, the music industry is suffering from several different trends, and “mega loud” CD’s are only a part of the problem. Overly compressed, loud recordings won’t let the music naturally breathe, and this wears the listener out. Don’t get me wrong, I like some loud angst music, but, as you turn up volume on the stereo the older AC/DC will sound better as it gets louder, today's hyped rock sounds worse as you turn it up.

RecordingReview: Do you have any thoughts on the Bob Katz K-System metering in Spectrafoo? Eric Conn: I haven’t used it, so, I can’t really comment about it, but I do have Spectrafoo. Fun lights and colors, great eye candy, and a useful tool. My opinion is that one should use metering tools, scopes, and other equipment for the technical side of recording -- seeing where your noise floor is without putting the monitor to stun level, checking polarity, checking azimuth, checking to see if your A/D is set for 24 bit or 16 bit or if something else is truncating the word length in the digital world. These are great tools, but use your ears to tell you what you need to do. People get too tied up in what sound looks like. Use your ears not your eyes, it’s music, remember?

RecordingReview: Could you give some advice to the beginners starting out with a Presonus Firepod and a handful of $100 microphones?

Eric Conn: I have no idea what a Firepod is, but, if you’re really serious about audio engineering, find yourself a mentor and learn hands on. Read the old text books, (Tremaine is a good place to start) then practice your craft with what you have to work with. Gain some electronics knowledge so you can understand the basics of ac theory, learn how to solder and make good quality cables and you’ll save yourself a boatload of cash, and for peets sake don’t waste your money and time on an “engineering school”. If you’ve got $20K to burn on the audio engineering school, go to a state college or university, major in music, or EE, or business, or english, or psychology and learn to be a well rounded member of society. If school’s not for you, then take your money and invest in some good mic’s and mic pre’s and jump into it on your own. 1 or 2 good mic’s, 1 or 2 good pre’s and a good A/D converter will do wonders for you.

In a world where home recording gear is cheaper than gasoline (yes, I'm aware that this comparison doesn't make much sense), how does a musician stand out from the crowd?

Eric Conn: You have to do everything out of the love of doing it, and you have to love everything you do, not for the possibility of being famous or rich, but for what you get during the process of the doing the work. No matter what it is, you have to enjoy the work--be it practicing your instrument, or writing/composing music, or learning how to use the gear and make recordings.

So, be yourself. The world needs artists who are aware that the art they create helps other people understand their own lives as much as it helps the individual artist understand themselves.