The master bus

42:42

Icarus get their tracks professionally mastered, so they prefer to keep the two-bus almost empty, as Ian describes. “We don’t tend to put a lot of plugins on or use any hardware compression or EQ on our master – we leave it as open as possible. We’ve been using the same mastering engineer for years – a guy called Beau at Ten Eight Seven Mastering – and he knows exactly what we want out of each track now, so we’re in good hands with him. Occasionally, though, we’ll use the UAD Pultec [EQ] plugin, just as is, no boosts or cuts on anything. We’ve just found that sometimes it’ll slightly change the mix of the track and bring out a few elements, like the drums, especially. It kind of toughens up certain parts – it gives a bit more oomph to kicks and snares. We don’t use it every time, but it improved the mix a little bit here.”