DOUG MCBRIDE: Hi. My name is Doug McBride. I own and run Gravity Studios in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, and we’ve been in business 15 years, recording indie rock bands and just bands. I’m here to show you some equipment we work with daily.

Welcome to Gravity’s mastering room. Basically, we’ve got a collection of equipment here that we use for mastering, and today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite pieces, the Maselec MLA-3 multiband mastering compressor. A relatively esoteric piece, Leif Mases, the designer, also makes mastering de-essers, equalizers, and compressors, and he’s a pretty well respected guy in the business. I believe he’s got a relationship with Prism as well. He’s an engineer that worked with Led Zeppelin and a bunch of other famous bands back in the day, but for the last 15 or 20 years, he’s been designing audio equipment.

This unit is designed for mastering now. There was a period time when a number of years ago where mastering engineers started to work with multiband compression, almost all of which at that time were plugins, but the technology hadn’t come very far and debatably still hasn’t come as far. And a lot of mastering engineers kind of decided that it was a one-trick pony and kind of an esoteric thing to do and they just didn’t want to apply mastering -- multiband compression to their masters that often. So, at this point, a lot of mastering engineers choose to use it just on occasion. However, this piece was designed just recently, and it was designed to be used a little bit differently than a digital mastering compressor would.

So basically, what you get here is like three analog compressors that act on the low, the middle part of the frequency range, and the high frequencies, and you decide what frequencies are affected. Over here on the left, you’ve got two crossovers. The first crossover is selectable between 100 and 200 etc. Hz and the higher crossover frequency starts at 1.5 kHz and goes up to 12. So basically, if I set this right here at 200 and set this at 3 kHz, then my compressor here that compresses the lows is effective starting at around 200 Hz. My middle compressor is effective from 200 Hz -- around 200 Hz to 3 kHz and the high frequencies are being compressed starting around 3 kHz.

Now, the reason why I say around is that I believe there are 6 or 12-dB slopes, so there’s a little bit of overlay, which is very musical and well chosen. Additionally here on the left side, we got a master threshold. So, you might have noticed that the LEDs are quite lit up. That’s because I’ve got the threshold cranked down. If I were to raise this up, then the compression overall continues to have the same amount of compression and use the same attacks and releases, etc., but it just overall is less compressed, so we’ll go back here.

There’s a number of different ways that you can link the different bands. One is to have all three of them linked. As you can see, when I hit that all three of these are identical, and their amount of compression I can’t remember off hand. I don’t actually use it this way because I have other stereo compressors but I believe it derives its signal off of the sensor in the low frequency. Then you’ve got a choice for linking with the low with the mid and high, linking the low and high but leaving the middle alone, and linking the low and mid only.

These are the input potentiometers which will help you crank up your input in order to hit the compressor just the way you like, and then on to the individual compressors if you will. You’ve got ratio selections starting with zero which is 1:1 ratio and then a subtle 1.4 and a 1.6 and 2, 3, and 6. You’ve got -- it’s very useful to have slow attack times especially on your low frequency because if you want to maintain the low frequency impact of a kick drum or other such instruments, it’s good to have a slow attack time, so that this goes to 200 microseconds for the attack time. The release time also in most cases all goes to 100 milliseconds.

Here’s your threshold control and then you’ve got makeup gain. There’s times when if I receive a mix to master that’s got a lot of low frequency information that I might just use this almost like an equalizer, so I might select a frequency, perhaps 400 Hz, and if I lower the gain here, then it’s basically if there’s no gain reduction happening, this is basically just like a shelving equalizer if you will, so I’m just I can lower up to 2.5 dB from 400 Hz down or raise it.

And here in the high frequency range, these are -- These are -- All three are relatively similar. The attack and release settings are optimized for that frequency by what? Leif himself -- then there’s the side chain boost on the highs, which basically enables you to use this as a de-esser as well. I’ve got a Maselec de-esser above it, so sometimes I’ll use this subtly and this subtly which makes it more transparent.

The meters are really useful but they’re not quite as heavy handed as they are -- as they look. What I mean by that is that right now, for instance, its looks like we’re just pummeling the mix with compression but in fact the high frequencies are only getting about a dB, and here you’re getting up to 4 dB and 2 dB on the low end, and so they’re optimized again for mastering where you’re going to be doing very little compression but it’s real important what frequencies you chose.

And then here on the left, you’ve got a section that I find useful as well which is a section that focuses -- so basically solos up the frequency spectrum. So, if I select high, then this will just play me the frequencies that are feeding this compressor. So, if I’ve got 3 kHz selected as I do now on my crossover, then by selecting high I’ll be hearing just the frequencies above 3 kHz. The mid frequencies then, if I select mid here on the right, I’d be just hearing the mid frequencies. So, if you’re trying to -- For instance, if you have a troubling instrument like a kick drum that is way too loud, for instance you can select low and then mid and hear exactly the effect that you’re having on that instrument which might be the most important. And then you’ve got the output gain, and the wonderful thing about -- things about Maselec here is that the way they implement the gain is just really transparent and nice.