Master masterer

Jonathan Wyner unravels studio mysteries

by Brett Milano

To laypeople and technophobes, what happens in a mastering studio may be the most mysterious part of the album-making process. An album goes into the mastering room as a stack of reels or digital tapes from the recording studio; it comes out ready to hit your CD player. What happens in between is anybody's guess; it conjures visions of a guy crouched over heavy machinery, working a lathe to cut the groove by hand.

That's not what we found when we went to visit Jonathan Wyner, one of the Boston area's most prolific CD mastering specialists, at his MWorks studio off Inman Square. Down in the office/condo building's basement is his mastering studio, a relatively spartan setting that looks more like a small college radio station. There's a reel-tape machine in the corner, where the master tapes of Jennifer Trynin's new album are currently sitting. And Wyner is working at a computer screen, making adjustments to a tape and listening to the result through the four speakers pointed right at his chair.

This is where Wyner has mastered a good chunk of the albums that have come out of Boston in the past five years. Recently he's done the latest efforts by Dennis Brennan and Todd Thibaud, national compilations for the Windham Hill label, a new Richard Thompson live album, and most of the albums that have come out of Q Division. "There are three parts to this job," he explains. "The dullest is that we do insurance -- making sure that when you get the CD the indexing will be accurate and that track one will be followed by track two. The second part is making sure that the space between songs is right and the volume is consistent -- which can be a challenge if it's a compilation album. And the third part is the one that people would think is the mysterious one: to try to impart a really good polish."

But, you may ask, isn't an album already done when it leaves the recording studio? Almost, but not quite. The sound of the master may be great in the studio, but it often requires some psycho-acoustic tweaking before it translates to a home stereo. "Here we only have two channels instead of 48. I can't remix, but I can change the contour of something. In the studio they pay attention to the minutiae. We can't do that, but we can change the relative volumes and overall effect of a mix -- we can make it brighter, or airier, or more open."

As an example he plays the master he's now working on, a Berklee-esque dance-pop tape by a singer named Jan Shapiro, and his ears go to work. "I feel that the vocal is a little distant, that it's getting sucked into the track. I wouldn't mind this being a little more open, and I might restrain that snare drum a little bit." After he turns a few dials, the tape does indeed sound different: the sound becomes warmer and less brittly digital, the snare is still loud but less blatant. "I've just made four or five little tweaks -- each of which is subtle but together they add up to something substantial. It's the same music, but to me it now works better emotionally."

Wyner moved here after getting a degree in French-horn playing from Vassar, where he learned technical basics by mixing classical concert tapes for airplay. "I was always one of those tinkering musicians. I worked at Northeastern Digital [where he did Rykodisc's popular Bowie remasters] before starting MWorks; at the time I was one of the few who had the aesthetic sensibility to address pop music." Not to mention the patience to deal with musicians' last-minute emergencies. "About two years ago, I got a phone call on a Saturday. He said, `Hi, this is Nuno Bettencourt and I'm 30,000 feet over Kansas City. I've got to master this tune tomorrow.' I thought he'd just come in with a tape, but he walks in with a guitar in his hand." Disregarding a mastering-studio no-no, he proceeded to lay a new guitar track over the European version of an Extreme single.

In fact, the hardest part of Wyner's job may be dodging the requests of local bands who want to try weird tricks on their CDs. No longer content just to stick on an extra song after a long pause -- "the original stupid CD trick," he calls it -- they're now making more outlandish requests. "We have people ask for things that can't be done, like making the disc play in the wrong order or having the display read 666. Basically they want the thing to misbehave." He did honor the Jigsaws' wish to stick a backwards version of their entire album as a bonus track, and Mistle Thrush's request to put a bunch of blank tracks at the end of their first CD. And then there's Seattle's Supersuckers, who repeated their whole album as a bonus track. "I believe their rationale was that if the CD were on a jukebox, people could play the whole thing with one quarter."

That wasn't the only job that Wyner's done for Sub Pop. Several years ago he was called on to master the debut album by a Seattle band. "I remember thinking it was kind of interesting but nobody would ever get it." Of course, the album was Bleach, by Nirvana. "This is why I'm not in A&R."

VELVET CRUSH IN LIMBO

The good news first: Velvet Crush's third album -- called either Heavy Changes or just Velvet Crush, depending on which band member you ask -- is among the first great pop albums of 1997. Building on the strengths of their last disc, 1994's much-praised Teenage Symphonies to God, this one streamlines their sound and rolls the last album's influences -- country, acoustics, arena rock, and '60s echoes -- into 10 concise tracks of flat-out, hard-edged pop. Sporting wonderfully detailed production by the band and longtime associate Mitch Easter, it's a creative but accessible set that seems likely to give this Providence outfit its long-deserved breakthrough. In particular, "Fear of Flying" and "Used To Believe" sound like hit singles waiting to happen, both boasting the bruised-yet-hopeful feel of the band's best numbers.

Now the bad news: the album isn't coming out. In fact it's gotten them dropped from their label (they were on Epic through a distribution deal with Creation, the English label best known as Oasis's home base), and the band's future is currently up in the air. Thus Heavy Changes joins Talking to Animals' Manhole and Janet LaValley's solo debut on the list of local albums being left to gather dust in the vaults on Sony-associated labels -- though in Velvet Crush's case, it was Creation who did the dumping and Epic who wouldn't come to the rescue. (Talking to Animals, by the way, will acquire ownership of their Manhole.)

The problems began last winter when Creation heard their demos and didn't hear a single, according to guitarist Jeffrey Underhill. "We were thinking, come on, it seemed pretty obvious to us; the songs we gave them were already pretty classic-rock sounding, without being too blatant about it. But they were looking for that Oasis-style blast, which isn't the kind of band we are."

Originally set for release in the middle of last year, the album was put on delay, during which time the band scratched the songs they felt were weaker and plugged in some new ones. They wound up whittling 20 completed songs down to the best 10 before Creation rejected the whole thing last month.

The band used the opportunity to negotiate themselves off the label. Creation gets to keep the tapes, and Velvet Crush are free to re-record the songs -- but given their careful work pace, that isn't likely to happen anytime soon. "Getting off Creation was pretty much a blessing," says Underhill. "Otherwise they would have put the album out, not done anything with it, and dropped us two weeks later. Now we're free of any obligations, so we don't feel we've been fucked over."

Underhill insists that the band aren't breaking up, but its members will be busy with side projects for the immediate future. Drummer Ric Menck and bassist/singer Paul Chastain have rejoined old friend Matthew Sweet's band and will be touring with him for the next six months. Menck is also releasing a solo album, and Underhill has a second band, Honeybunch, who will be playing and recording this spring. The only planned Velvet Crush release is a vinyl single ("Going to My Head" and "Heaven Knows," both recorded since the album was wrapped up) on the small Parasol label. "Everyone in the band is pretty much at peace with this [the album's being discarded], but I'm not sure what people outside the band will make of it," Underhill says. "If we broke up, it wouldn't be because of the layoff; if anything we'll probably be healthier because of it. Don't count us out yet; don't even count us down."

COMING UP

Bo Diddley hits Harpers Ferry for his annual visit tonight (Thursday). Smithereens leader Pat DiNizio is at Mama Kin for his first local show in years. The Middle East has a Cambridge Center for Housing Justice benefit with Ramona Silver, Sam Black Church, Honkeyball, and Bison. And prog-rockers can head to the Rat for Architectural Metaphor and Xixxo . . . Miracle Legion and Swizzle play the Middle East tomorrow (Friday), Gang Green are at the Rat, Scatterfield are at the Attic in Newton, and the Connells and Odds play the Paradise . . . CherryDisc celebrates CD releases when Underball and Boy Wonder play T.T.'s on Saturday. Skavoovie & the Epitones headline a ska bill at the Middle East, Trucker and Swag are at Mama Kin, and Big Brother & the Holding Company -- probably without Janis Joplin -- are at Harpers Ferry . . . Former Kustomized/Volcano Suns main man Peter Prescott debuts his new project, the Peer Group, at T.T.'s Sunday, opening for the Cosmic Psychos . . . The best of old-school plunk lock at Bill's Bar Tuesday, with the Outlets and Mung.