Audio Technology - Issue 16

The Great Vanishing Act I was going to write this column on the trials and tribulations of tuning my new studio using 'passive equalisation'. I mean really passive EQ, not some Pultec or Manley device, but the other kind of 'passive EQ', the kind created by your room. My new room is filled with lots of odd-shape devices made of wood, metal and interesting stuff - Helmholtz resonators, and phase grating diffusers, (you know the kind you see in most studios but wished you knew more about, just so you could get some?).

I was going to tell you all about the hassles of passive architectural equalisers but my new room sounds so dandy and I'm so pleased, I figured it would save it for some time in the future. I want to forget about the hassles for now, well, the building kind of hassles anyway.

So let's skip architectural passive EQ and talk about a new kind of 'passive' catch phrase... passive income.

Passive income should be on your mind but it's probably not. Instead, you're probably obsessing about the sound of your room, or your mics, looking for a new compressor or just flicking through this mag to find something else you think you needed. But let's face it, to buy this stuff you need money and passive income is the money you get for not working, or more rightly stated, the money you get for something you did some time ago that keeps on earning you income. Its not a difficult concept but it seems like no-one cares about its musical future. Passive income has another name: royalties. I betcha you've heard of those, we have all heard of royalties, some lucky folks even get them and some luckier ones actually live off them well into the future.


To get yourself some royalties you have to be involved in the creation or ownership of some intellectual, and sometimes physical, property. You have to be able to ask someone to pay for the right to use, view or even listen to something you invented or own. It's that stuff called copyright; it's the stuff the music business is founded on (err., aside from the music that is).

Here's the process: the record label records a performance, makes a master tape, and presses up CDs, LPs, cassettes, DVDs, music videos, holograms or whatever scam they can pull on the public. Joe Punter hands over the cash and the record company doles out the money to everybody involved. Well, almost everybody, and almost eventually They pay the current label staff, the current factories, the studios, everybody involved at that moment, and every one gets a one-time payment for services rendered. The copyright owner of the record material then pays a small royalty (based on the amount of product sold) to the original creator of the noise (the artist and the producer). That process continues for the length of the copyright contract.

I'm hoping you're keeping up with all this, but let me simplify it: the workers get paid once and once only, while the artist, the producer and the owner of the copyright get re-occurring payments as long as the copyright is being exploited - and it's no small irony that 'exploited' is the technical term that record labels use.

The advantages of this passive income are fairly straight forward, and it's the reason why I am going to such pains to describe this process - it is the only way to make any real source of income in this business. I don't know if you ever made the connection, but Dire Straits had a song about it. What was it again? Ah yes... Money for Nothin'. [Actually I'm keener on the 'chips for free' bit, or was that 'chicks'? - CH.]


Most people never get a crack at a royalty-based income. Why? Because it's only the artists, producers and sweet-talking managers that get a look in. The workers, engineers, the studio owners and the tech crew get the once-only, 'better be enough cause that's all you get' payment. But it is the passive income that floats the whole process, so its best we all look after it.

So why the fuss? Well the historical model for music royalties is based on the exploitation of copyright by selling and reselling the same old products to new buyers. First we put it out on vinyl, then cassette, then we invent a new format like CD or DVD and we release and repackage it all over again. We make compilations, we remix tracks, we remaster the classics and remodel the oldies - it is a constant flow of exploitation of the original recorded performance of the song. The more they do it, the more passive income the artist receives. In fact, there are lots of artists who hadn't seen any money from the music business in decades and because someone used a track in a movie or remixed a song for a dance track, suddenly the cheques start rolling in - passive income, show me da money!

Anyways, everything worked fine while the recording process cost an enormous amount of money - record labels owned the studios and it was in their best interest to take good care of their assets. By 'assets' I don't mean the studio equipment or the artists. A record label's assets are its copyright product, and in record company vaults all around the world that product is gathered up and filed as master tapes.


Master tapes are the traditional asset, and on a scale of worldwide released music it would be safe to assume that 99 percent of what is out in the world resides as a master tape in a vault or stored in a box waiting to be rediscovered.

It is the master tape that I am most worried about because it cannot survive in the cheaper, ever-changing recording formats we have today. The newer artist-driven digital world has nothing to do with quality control and little to do with maintaining royalties -people are beginning to stop stock-piling master tapes as if they're too much trouble and not relevant. In fact, it seems everybody has forgotten the economic cornerstone of the whole music business -the master.

A recording engineer's job at its very minimum requirement is to make a permanent record of the music performance. Without that permanent record the owner of the copyright (the entity that paid for the recording session) doesn't have a master to re-release that material again and again in a series of changing formats. And if they can't do that, they're not exploiting its full potential and they're not creating passive income from the high-risk venture of actually spending money on unheard of music.


A master tape used to belong to a standard (analogue, or acetate lacquers or, even longer ago, Edison disks), and they were always created, stored and formatted in a set way. But master tapes are part of the great disappearing act that will rob the lazy and punish the foolhardy. If you don't create permanent records of what you do, you won't get reoccurring passive income every time they switch formats. And believe me, they will switch formats every time they can.

And, pay attention, because here's the thing: A stereo finished mix on CD will not do.
In the very near future a 5.1 mix will be needed and that means a rework of the multitracks. The multitracks are also masters and they are the passive income sleepers - the ones that will get reworked years into the future with whatever formats that arrive. Multitrack masters are the ones that are vanishing.

Let's just assume you're making a record on ProTools or something similar, you record all the parts on to hard drive, do your mix, send your two-track masters off to mastering and then to the factory. Nobody will need the multitracks for now because the job is finished, but because you know all about passive income you back up the multitracks to something like a set of CDs - you figure this method is fine, you can always reload them if you need to. You erase the drive and start tomorrow's job. It would be nice if that last job is a hit but you've been paid for your time, so you move on.

If you actually ever have a hit, boy, are you in trouble. Those multitracks you backed up... guess what? The label wants 'em bad, the only problem is that they are not the masters, they are backups. The master, however inconvenient and unconventional, was the hard drive. That's the information you should be handing in - not the CDs. If you have a hit, you're going to get a huge surge of interest in that useless pile of backup CDs you have in your drawer, so be prepared, because the client will assume you have looked after their valuable asset and will not understand if you haven't. Let's suppose you have been meticulous. Let's suppose you have labelled the CDs and every file they contain. You assume you will not be available to reload them so you put them in easy to read ProTools templates. You recorded every sound, even the treated plug-in sounds (as used in the finished mix) on the CDs and erased and removed all the unused takes so the only sounds that load up are the tracks used in the final product. If you have done all that and checked and verified that every sound reloads into ProTools then you have done all you can currently do. That's about as close to a master tape as things get - it's not a real good system but it's the current system.

But I bet you haven't even done most of that. It is hard, slow and tedious work. It's work that you won't get paid for, but if you don't do it, there will be no future passive income outside that stereo mix you handed in, and, believe me, we all would have benefited in that future income.

What to do? Well, I don't really know. The best I can figure is this: buy a new hard drive for every project. It's ironic that a hard drive for an album costs about the same as the reels of two-inch 24-track they replaced, but things are always getting cheaper.


Stop relying on a huge stack of critical backup CDs for master. They were meant for backup and that's what they are. Hand in the hard drive, the thing with the master recording on it with a ProTools template included, and charge the client for the drive. Slip them the backup CDs if you're nice and the problem is no longer yours - no more unpaid midnight to dawn sessions trying to resurrect some corrupted backup data and no more confused record label folks hassling you 10 years in the future. It will not be your problem, it will not cost you money to fix and somewhere somebody will bless your clever little butt.

There are some bright sparks who are insisting that at mix time a Sony 48-track digital machine be used to store all the final tracks, and they are probably onto good thing. But a 48-track machine will cost you about $400,000 new.


Sony have heard the call and are promising a cheap blue laser recordable disc. A bit like a CDR optical drive but real-time multi-track 24-bit/96k and tenfold the storage of anything we have right now. It could be the sound of the future but is could also be vapourware... who knows, don't wait.

The great thing about ProTools and its friends is that when no-one can find a G4 computer running Tools Mix Plus in 10 years time for that 10.1 hologram box set, at least the whole damn world will be hard at work looking. After all, everybody's passive income is at risk... the vanishing act has begun...


Let's see what we can all do the stop it.

Money for nothin'...? Sure, send some on over.

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