My Journey Towards Mastering
I was very fortunate that my first paying day job in this industry placed me right into Studio A at the famous Little Mtn. Studios in Vancouver. I was actually employed by the renowned advertising company GGRP up on the 2nd floor to work in their Library/Dub Room/Tape Vault, a room with a veritable wall of ¼” analog master tapes, all or most recorded in the studios downstairs.
In the studio I was a fly on the wall, watching legendary talent put their hands and voices to these incredible radio and TV ads they produced there. When mix time came, I would sit at the Studer ¼” 2 track analog recorder at the end of the control room and get ready to record the stereo mix. ‘Record’ is armed, levels are set, here it comes and I’d better not mess it up. No pressure huh? The take is good, the reel is wound tails out and I take it upstairs to the dub room…
The GGRP Dub Room
As you walked into this room, the left wall and work benches housed a multitude of ¼” open reel recorders (Revox, Ampex and Scully if memory serves me) and audio cassette decks, some basic analog processing gear along with a few patch bays for connecting one device to the other, like an old school telephone switchboard! Here, we assembled promotional cassettes, market specific, for the sales staff as they shopped for new business. Maybe the target was New Car Sales, so the sales rep would have reviewed the library for similar ads, collected those reels of tape with a list of the various ads they wanted transferred to the cassette tape to give to the new prospect. We did the assembly one cut at a time, making sure the overall sound and loudness were the same basically, and the start and end of each track sounded correct. This task, in this very room became the seed of everything else I would eventually learn.