RA sits down with the veteran mastering engineer to demystify the perplexing process.

Interesting and informative article/interview, especially for people like me who know very little of the technical side of music.

Yeah, this was really nice. Sounds like an excellent bloke.

excellent interview. great respect to those such as Pole who are happy to impart some hard earned knowledge

Great insight into this area of production/mastering. Good stuff, Ryan!

Great article, fascinating read, thanks RA

Great article and very nice of the guy to share his knowledge so generously. 10/10

Great!
I remember buying Pole's 2007 album in New York, it became the soundtrack for my trip - and I remember thinking that the tracks were some of the clearest i've heard in electronica. Now I understand why!

Cool guy.

Nice interview, fairly certain he didnt mean -2 or -1dB RMS though ! (that would be slightly more than a tickle of compression) - something lost in translation I think

Fantastic article and interview, very informative and essential reading for new producers, artists, and label owners.

great article... lucky enough to be going to watch pole's mastering session at this academy on friday for an article im doing...can't wait now!

Quality piece, definitely feel like I've gained some understanding of the processes involved

fantastic piece. when pole came to play in edinburgh he did a workshop on mastering the afternoon before his performance in which he covered similar ground to this interview. a really nice approachable guy really willing to share his experience and perspective with everyone.

i'd advise anyone to check out his live show too, he's not lying about the bass!
punchy!

Very nice info about a very nice artist!

would love to have an internship with stephan (or rashad from d&m even more).

!!!

yay! about to read this article. i'm sure it will be interesting. i have all of pole's albums except steingarten so far. i remember listening to 1, 2, and 3 and thinking about the fact that this guy is a true innovator. broken waldorf synth if i remember correctly? love the hiss and static of those recordings making rhythmic structures. love the plain (dare I say minimal?) artwork of the cd's also (all blue, all yellow, all red - check it out).

Pole is a pretty impressive guy...
"The good thing is that my bass sounds really good! [laughs] I think I know how to make a bass sound good. "

Damn true! I remember the first time I put Steingarten on my turntable at home being blown away by how round and punchy the bass was. In general his albums sound remarkably clean and precise...

Maximum Respect

great feature

it is really good that people are starting to take an interest in the mastering of music. so much of what gives a certain format its sound (radio, vinyl, CD, etc) comes from this. it really isn't enough to just have an artist toss a limiter on their shit, bang up the volume, and then encode to mp3 and think it's gonna sound the bomb on a serious sound system. good sound takes time and costs $$$$.

superb interview, thanks

great to see all the tech & production stuff getting coverage on RA - 2 days on a bass drum!? that's dedication

As a fan, producer and musician I think this is one of the coolest written pieces I've ever read in RA, thanks Ryan and Stefan!

again, another one of my all time favorite producer that has worked for Dubplates & Mastering... this place is really something. As is Pole. a very interesting read!

Thanks a lot to Keeling and Pole for this article! Both informative and entertaining.

I have had mastering done by Pole and I must say it s a great experience to work with some one who cares about what he's doing deeply!

Because of the tight coupling between closely spaced 3-D elements, parasitic effects often degrade the overall performance of complex MEMS circuits. A single-pole-double-throw (SPDT) switch in CPW technology consisting of a T-junction with one series-resistive and one shunt-capacitive MEMS switches per arm has been fabricated and tested. Parasitic coupling is shown to significantly affect the isolation of the isolated arm. While full-wave EM simulators would lead to unaffordable computational efforts to master such phenomena, a simple yet accurate planar approach recently presented is employed to effectively model and predict the behaviour of both the whole SPDT and its components. Having identified the portions of the circuit responsible for the spurious coupling, the planar approach has been used to modify the geometry of the shunt MEMS so as to minimize the parasitics, yielding a significantly improved performance of the SPDT.

download software

One of the best articles I read here so far... Thanks RA!

Great article. Shows the depth and character which proper mastering delivers to a record, rather than the 'paint-by-numbers' mastering which seems to be the norm now-a-days!