Mastering Engineer Chris Frasco

Chris and I go back to my Sweetwater days. I met him when he started his first studio called “The Brooklyn Outboard” in New York before he moved to Nashville where he currently runs “Master Frasco Audio Lab”. He toured with Gina Sicilia as the bass player and came through Lincoln where we ended up having a night of great debauchery. He also mastered the soon to be released Drunk Pedestrians album F# and the above photo is actually one I took sitting behind him while he was working on it. Chris and I have had some great times bar hopping in Lincoln and Nashville discussing life, the universe, and everything. I had wanted to officially interview him for a while and he graciously agreed. While working with him in both studio design and as an artist where he masters my record I was just blown away at his attention to detail and patience.

Q: What first attracted you to music?

My earliest memories are singing in the car with my mom. She was always an appreciator of music, while not a musician herself. She helped me learn the rhythm to Smoke On The Water when I was in 3rd grade by singing the tab numbers to me. So, music was definitely a part of my childhood.

Q: When did you start playing guitar and writing?

I started playing guitar in 3rd grade, but I really got into it in 5th grade. I was an angsty 5th grader … I have no idea why. I had a perfectly fine life. But I was mad as hell! At what, who knows? Hearing Nirvana changed my entire world. It felt like somebody out there got it, and knew how I felt. And that changed me from a kid with a guitar, into a kid who lived for guitar.

Writing came later. I started writing instrumental rock-fusion tunes in 7th or 8th grade. I didn’t start writing songs, as in catchy tunes with lyrics and vocals, until college. I had been through some serious health issues from ages 17 – 21, which caused my jazz-fusion power trio to fizzle out, and I needed an emotional outlet. Songwriting was a lot more cathartic and fulfilling than I expected to be. It’s like the world’s best therapist, on call 24/7. I worked through some serious baggage that way.

Q: Why did you choose Berklee?

I grew up in Massachusetts. For those who may confuse it with UC Berkeley in California, Berklee College of Music is in Boston. It’s very revered within Massachusetts, around the world as well, but in MA you grow up hearing about it. “He went to Berklee” is on par with “he’s a doctor.” Maybe not, but that’s how it felt. So, I grew up thinking of it as the holy grail of music. And it didn’t disappoint. It was an extraordinarily difficult program to get through. During my first two semesters, I definitely wanted to drop out, like so many students end up doing. I was lucky to have mentors like Joe Musella and Scotty Johnson [teachers at Berklee] to give me a few words of encouragement when I thought I couldn’t handle it anymore.

Q: How did you line up your first tour?

This is a pretty mundane answer: Email. Basically, if you want to set up a 15 – 20 date tour, email 100 clubs. Beg. Plead. Grovel. And then do your absolute best to slay the gig, and hope they’ll ask you back.

 It wasn’t my first tour, but on the tour supporting my first album, we played this awesome spot in Cleveland called Roc Bar. We had driven there straight from Brooklyn, it was our first date of the tour, so we were pent up and READY. We got on stage and unleashed fire on the audience. Us being reserved nerdy-looking guys, I don’t think they were expecting much. And I may have made an arrogant comment about the stage gear that alienated them before we even started playing … “who do I have to blow to get a decent mic stand?!” … but within a couple minutes of the downbeat, we had them. And we got asked to play 3 more dates in Cleveland on that tour alone. That goddamn mic stand, though. It was wobbling the entire set, I had to chase it around with my face to sing. I should’ve smashed it.

Q: What inspired your second album?

My second record, Damage, was inspired by the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever met. She was (past tense because we’re not in touch anymore, not because I killed her and ate her body) smart, troubled, ambitious, a borderline alcoholic, and exactly what I’d draw if someone asked “what would your ideal woman look like?” We had a little fling, very short lived. Probably three or four months. She lived near my hometown and I lived in NYC and was on tour regularly, so the circumstances weren’t ideal. But the process of meeting her, being nuts about her, her being into me and loving my music, and then losing her to another dude … it left an impression. I wrote the title track of the record after our first date.

Q: Tell me the Lenny Kravitz story

I should really stop referring to him by name.  As much as it is “the Lenny Kravitz story” to me, absolutely none of what ended up happening was Lenny’s fault at all. Lenny heard one of my songs via Grooveshark, I believe, which was Spotify before there was Spotify. I only had like 2 degrees of separation from him, and he ended up inviting me [via one of his people] to meet up at a spot in Brooklyn. He was super cool and very kind to me. He introduced me to a lifelong friend of his that manages bands. This manager dude and I had a series of meetings over a couple months, and then we signed a contract. He was my manager. Long story short: He ended up stealing A LOT of money from me, and single handedly derailing my ability to tour and support my second record.

Q: Why choose outboard vs In the box?

I guess I’m a tactile person. It kinda makes sense. Music to me is about having an instrument. I was a guitarist long before I was a singer. So, I view music as something that you interact with through touch. When I’m using outboard gear, I get in a zone, and engaged in a way that a mouse and plugins can’t recreate. I know what all my analog boxes do, so it becomes almost like taking a guitar solo. You know the scales and arpeggios at your disposal, you know the sound and vibe they’ll create, and as you bounce from control to control, you’re completely caught up in every nuance of the sound.

Q: How did you get your first clients for The Brooklyn Outboard?

I feel like the success of The Brooklyn Outboard was some good karma that I had coming after all that money was stolen from me. At first, it was more or less fans of my first album. I had some pretty intense guitar tones on that first record, and people would come to me and say “I want that on my record.” I’d assure them that I had no idea what I was doing.

In Light and Shadow, my first album, started entirely as an experiment to see if I could self-produce and engineer my own music. I had a background in composition and arranging, but nearly no background in audio. My friend Liam, known as yellowbirddd, and I were in touch every day at that point. We would text, email, send carrier pigeons all day, every day about songwriting. I kinda strong armed him into letting me produce an album for him around the same time. IL&S had a song called “Anchor” that somehow became an FQMB Adult Contemporary Top 100 hit. And the first yellowbirddd record, Hard Feelings, did well on the college campuses and charts.

 So, from there, I was in it. My second record was so sonically superior to the first, and that kind of opened the floodgates. After that, audio engineering became my full time job. 

Q: Why did you leave New York for Nashville?

It was purely a business decision, minus how frickin’ sick of New York I was. I was writing high end product reviews for B&H, running The Brooklyn Outboard, and was recruited to teach audio at Long Island University. I was making more money than I ever expected to as a musician, and yet I was still BROKE. So, I looked at it objectively. If I had stayed in New York, my income would probably grow 10 – 15% over the following 5 years, where as my cost of living (as Bed-Stuy became a cool, gentrified neighborhood rather than the grim, frightening place that I moved into) had the potential to double.

By that point (2013,) I was working almost entirely in mastering. Nashville’s most Googleable mastering engineers were all getting older, I figured many of them would probably retire within 6 – 10 years. I wanted to be ready and established when they did. So far, none of them have retired. And I grossly overestimated how impressed Nashville people would be by a hotshot NYC audio engineer. So, like I said, it was purely a business decision … based on a lot of dumbass assumptions. Nashville has taught me a lot of hard lessons, and I’m grateful for that. I clearly needed them.

Q: What is the best way to learn mastering?

This is a tough one. There are amazing mastering engineers with no background in music. Unless you have someone to mentor you right off the bat, Step 1 is the Bob Katz book Mastering Audio. That book is the entirety of my formal mastering education.

In my opinion, you should spend some serious time in tracking and mixing before you try mastering. One of the most important parts of the job is understanding a recording. How it’s made, edited, manipulated, and mixed. If I need revisions to create the best possible master of a track, I need to be able to communicate effectively with the mix engineer … especially if I want him or her to respect my opinion, and want to work with me again. I try to give very specific mix notes, borderline directives. Mix engineers have to juggle so much, you can’t send them on a wild goose chase. I tell them exactly what I want, so that [if they agree] it’ll take them 5 – 10 minutes. My point is, in order to communicate effectively with mix engineers, you should be a damn good mix engineer in your own right.

Q: How do you balance the art vs the science?

They are one and them same to me, nowadays. It takes a whole shit-ton of mistakes to get there, but after a decade of constantly mastering music, I don’t separate the two. You’ll spend a lot of time getting put in your place by artists and mix guys before you really have command of the artistic part of the job. Nobody wants you to make sweeping changes to their recording. And of everybody on the team, the mastering engineer spends the least amount of time with the music … and often times never even meets the artist. So, in the beginning, it’s easy to take yourself too seriously and go overboard trying to blow clients away with your genius tweaks. And it turns out, they’re not genius. You’ve fundamentally changed the tone of the record in a way that you had no right to. And even if it does sound great, “great” is subjective. They didn’t come to you to decide on their “sound.” They spent countless hours with the producer and mix engineer carving that out. Don’t screw it up!!

Q: How mastering has changed over the last decade, and do you have any comments on the loudness wars?

I'd like to think that mastering overall is getting less loud, and allowing the music to breathe... but that's only true about 50% of the time. The other 50% of clients absolutely do want their tracks as loud as possible. This is sometimes genre related. I have done terrible things in the name of hip-hop, loudness that I'd flat out refuse to create in any other style of music.

As annoying as worrying about it is, I agree with YouTube and Spotify stepping in and imposing attenuation. Something has to calm the loud. It's not musical, it doesn't sound good, and it makes the listener's ears fatigue.

I know that Ryan Adams has become something of a controversial figure, so I apologize for using him as an example, but he's the first guy that comes to mind who gets it. I think Heartbreaker, Love Is Hell, and Ashes and Fire are great examples of responsible loudness. Musical loudness. A joy to listen to loudness.

I think mix engineers have gotten the picture too. When I listen to new mixes for the first time, my first point of reference is the input meter on my API 2500. That sucker should be bouncing around freely, not pinned to the right. And more and more, I see mix engineers using less compression overall. Even better, I think it's finally become an agreed upon rule that there should be no limiting on the mixbuss.

As a mastering engineer, the most annoying and difficult task is trying to breathe dynamics back into a mix that has been peak limited into oblivion.

My only comment about the loudness wars is that we need to evolve beyond these Neanderthal ways of determining what's "good." Louder is NOT better, maniacally bright and/or boomy is NOT better. Vivid, spacious, emanating music is not only more enjoyable, it's much more realistic. And I can't stress this enough, a great piece of music will always shine through. A crappy recording of a great song is better than a hyper-produced poorly written song. Some of my all-time favorite recordings are just my friend Liam (who I mentioned earlier,) demoing songs via a built-in laptop mic. Recorded music is more than just a commodity that we buy and sell, it's a performance and a moment in time captured forever. In my book, sincerity will always be king.

Q: How do you maintain a work/life balance?

This is an easy one; I don’t!

When you’re self-employed AND you work from home, it’s pretty much hopeless. I have a small house; my bedroom, the kitchen, and the bathroom are the only rooms that aren’t fully dedicated to music. The vast majority of my clients know that I work from home as well, so if I get a ‘911’ revision request at 11:59pm, I can’t say “I’ll take care of it when I get to the office tomorrow.” I get my ass out of bed and take care of it. It’s absolutely unhealthy, but I prefer it to having a boss. I have no patience for arbitrary life things being decided for me: when I have to start for the day, how many days per year I can be ill, when I can go on vacation, etc. Fuck that. I’ll take my ‘on the clock 24/7’ life. No disrespect to other people’s lives, they probably make a lot more money than me and have paid time off. It’s just not a compromise I’m willing to make.

Q: What are some of your favorite records?

Nirvana’s entire catalogue.

Nevermind was the record that I really connected to as a young kid. And then Unplugged was a life lesson in indie rock and early grunge.

John Scofield’s entire catalogue:

He’s like the Jerry Seinfeld of jazz guitar. If you watch too many episodes of Seinfeld, you start to talk like Jerry. If you listen to a lot of John Scofield, you’ll catch yourself phrasing like him. His time-feel is so distinct. 

 Jazz is Dead: Laughing Water. 

Jimmy Herring is such a beast of a guitarist, yet to play Jerry Garcia’s vocal melodies on guitar, he had to have such a delicate touch and lyrical phrasing. Then they break into a jam, and his tone hits you like a freight train. Goosebumps every time.

Counting Crows: August and Everything After

A neurotic maniac poetically pouring his heart out over a few chords. That’s kinda my wheelhouse.

Mahavishnu Orchestra: The Inner-Mounting Flame

John McLaughlin’s guitar playing and compositional style changed my life. Seriously.

Beatles: The White Album

Every song is so good, but there are at least 6 enduring hits … from one album. Who does that?! It’s insane. 

Miles Davis: The Cellar Door Sessions

Miles says ‘fuck your nostalgic ideas about jazz, we’re going to outer space.’

As Tall As Lions: self-titled

This album came out in 2006, but it’s my idea of a perfect modern rock record. The songs are fantastic. His voice is raw and elastic. The snare sounds are nothing less than ideal. I don’t know who the audio engineers were, but they did a killer job.

A Social State: Everyone’s Your Friend

I was playing a little acoustic gig around Scranton, PA, and the kid that was opening for me handed me a CD. I totally prejudged what his sound would be based on his anti-authority sort of look. I expected him to be rebelliously bad at music. I was 100% wrong. His set knocked me on my ass. He closed with the tune “Dads and Cigarettes,” and I had to collect myself and swallow the lump in my throat, so that I could get up and sing. This is the record he was supporting at the time. It’s excellent.

Everything I’ve mastered

I really enjoy helping bands and solo artists finish their records off. It’s fun to know and love the music for months before it gets released. You have insider knowledge of this amazing art that only you and a few other people have heard. Then you get to relive that high all over again when it comes out, and people are talking about it on social media, etc. Anyone who entrusts their music to me, I’m in their corner. I know how grueling it is to bring a record into the world, and I want to be their foremost cheerleader.

Q: What’s your favorite novel?

I’m not great at reading novels or watching movies. I tend to read nonfiction. I want to learn something. I love to write, love reading really artistic prose, but I’m a very slow reader. I can be easily distracted; I’ll end up reading the same sentence over and over again with no idea what it says. So, if I’m going to read a book, I generally go for something that will teach me new facts.

I read The Street Lawyer by John Grisham as a teenager, around the same time that I read some Ayn Rand. I think the dichotomy [of these entirely unrelated books] really influenced my political/societal thinking: Why would you be a self-centered piece of shit, when you could be kind and help people? Not that I’m a particularly charitable individual, but I don’t believe that each person is an island owing nothing to the world around them.

Q: Where else do you look for inspiration?

Travel is a big thing for me. If I’m in Nashville, I’m always at work. Being self-employed, you’re forever pitching and chasing down the next gig. Instead of expecting anything less than a 7-day work week, I make it a point to get the hell out of the studio, the city, the state, and usually the country for a few weeks every year. I walk for hours upon hours, taking in the nature and architecture of cities in Europe. Drag my guitar around, make new friends, and try to reconnect with music, people, and culture in a completely different way than I do at work.

Q: What is your favorite hot sauce?

Marie Sharp’s Beware Comatose Habanero for eggs. Mad Dog 357 for chicken. Crystal for most other things.