Abbey Road Studios’ mastering engineer on cutting the vinyl for some of the best-selling records of all time

What Hi-fi? visited the studios to talk about mastering vinyl, including some of the best-sellers of all time

With records, one man’s apples is another man’s oranges,” says Geoff Pesche. “It’s a fickle mistress.” The Abbey Road mastering engineer began as a motorbike messenger at Tape One Studios, working his way round some of the UK’S top studios – and cutting some of the best-selling records of all time – before setting up home in St John’s Wood, NW8.

Having worked through vinyl’s original heyday, its decline, and now the second coming, few people are better placed than Pesche to tell us about how our records get from the studio to the platter, and to explain just why we’re still so obsessed with those thin black discs.

What is it about vinyl that makes it such an enduring medium?

Records have always been cool, haven’t they? It’s good that mastering rooms like this one never dumped the disc-cutting gear. There was a time, in the late ’80s, where vinyl really dwindled, and cutting lathes became once-a-month things, but the advent of Record Store Day changed all that three or four years ago.

When I came here 13 years ago – I work every other day – I would be using the cutting lathe once a week; now I use it every day, I’ve got to recut something in a minute. I’m doing recuts again, because factories have so much to do they’re making mistakes, so you’re often re-cutting music, because the factories just can’t press enough records. There aren’t enough factories left in the world.

Is most of your day-to-day now working with vinyl?

I’d say as much as 30 per cent – that’s a lot considering we’re in the age of the digital file. Record companies are looking for people with expertise to do these recuts – a lot of records I’ve recut in the last couple of years, I cut the originals. So it’s almost the same job again.

Talk us through being a vinyl master – what do you have to do?

Nobody wants to pay twice and have the CD files mastered and then start again without digital limiting for the vinyl, so we cut the record from the mastered CD files. At the disc-cutting stage, we add some de-essing, and there’s got to be volume adjustments as you can’t make a record as loud as you make a CD. For me it’s mainly de-essing from the CD files. I don’t do any half-speed, that’s down to Miles Showell.

When we spoke to Miles, he told us that a half-speed master played at 45rpm is pretty much the ultimate for vinyl. Does that ring true for you too?

It depends on many facets – the cut, obviously, and the processing. If the

processing isn’t up to it then you’re not going to notice the difference. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not worth twice the price – it takes twice the time so it costs twice as much. But there’s a niche market, as Miles has proven, who think it’s worth double. Personally I don’t, but that’s why I don’t do it, because I’ve not really ever championed it.

So what would you say in terms of things like heavyweight vinyl?

Again, 180-gram pressings… it’s all about a moving, stable mass. If the platter’s stable then, in theory, a heavier disc should be better. But I’ve got almost floppy-disc pressings of records they’re so thin, and they sound amazing. It’s certainly more tangible, a heavier pressing, it feels like you’ve got a bit more for your money. But if everything’s good from the cut through the process, I don’t see how a 180-gram pressing can sound much different. It’s a bit cosmetic.

What are the most important sound elements to get right on a vinyl master?

With a vinyl record, you can’t have excessive sub-sonic or ultra-sonic frequencies, you can’t get too bright, your vocal sibilance has to be good, dirty esses – all of that has to be contained when you’re actually cutting it. If the recording is clean, the disc will be clean, but so much depends on the processing when it leaves here. You can have the best set of lacquers in the world, but if the factory drags it through the mire then it’s going to sound rubbish whatever we do to it.

It’s more important for me to know where the record’s going to get processed a lot of the time than fine-tuning the cut, because with my experience I know there’s certain types of records where certain factories can benefit it or not.

How much listening back is there? Unfortunately, no two records are ever the same. You put a CD into the computer and it pumps out the CD master and it’s done, but because no two bodies of work react the same within a lacquer cut, it is a bit trial and error. And it’s so subjective: you could listen to a pressing and think it’s fine, with just a few clicks, but to the man involved in the record, it’s like, ‘if it isn’t CD quality, I’m going to shout and scream about it’. With records, one man’s apples is another man’s oranges. It’s a fickle mistress.

Another thing people tend to like about records is the fuller body. When you cut a record, the cutting system rolls off the top and brings up the bottom. So, if you compare the CD at the same level to the vinyl cut, the CD will be brighter because it’s not gone through the cutting system. So when people say, “Oh, the analogue warmth”, it’s actually the analogue knackering the top, but people like that. It’s part of the sound.

The amount that it does is quite radical. If you listen to the source file against the pick-up, my mum would know the difference – the record is duller, generally. But in a nice way, smoother and rounder, like a fluffy old armchair, compared with a brittle digital file.

People make records warmer now, because most are made in smaller studios where they don’t have large studio monitors. They can’t really hear the low end, so they put loads in. When they bring them in for mastering there’s always tons of bass on the files, so we nearly always end up trimming the fat. If you looked at my notes over a year, you’d see I’m rolling bass out of the music all the time to make it sound nicer in here.

So has the job changed much from using analogue tapes to digital files?

The process is still the same. I work in the same way, but with digital machines. I have two computers that are like two tape machines: one’s a player and one’s a recorder, with all the analogue kit I use for processing in the middle. And that’s how it was in 1980 – we had one tape machine playing the master, the desk in the middle and the EQ production master, which is now created in a digital workstation, as the other tape machine.

I still work with old school kit, which is our crown jewels. We’ve still got this old stuff that they built the plug-ins around, but the hardware is infinitely better. If you can process your music through this, you’re doing it through stuff you can’t buy off the internet.

Were there different pitfalls in the process then compared to now?

It was real engineering. Now anyone can get something for recording – your phone will record a digital file and you’ll get a decent capture – you don’t have to go to a studio like here to record something properly, you can just buy a digital workstation for two grand and call yourself a recording engineer. The craftsmanship has gone out of it, because digital technology lends itself to anyone recording things – you can imagine how bad that can be. But people don’t come in here with trash, because it’s all stuff with some kind of budget, so people who are making music in their bedrooms don’t come in here.

You cut the lacquers for Blue Monday, and that was a surprise for everyone…

It was for me, too. You don’t know how many records the record you’re cutting is going to sell. I’ve had people come in here and tell me that I did a record for someone else on their label and it sold 35 copies – not 35 million. So you cut a record to the best of your ability, put the lacquers in the tin and off it goes. Here we are years later, and that record is still being played in a nightclub.

But whoever cut it, that record would still be played now. It all starts with the song, doesn’t it? I was just lucky enough to cut two sets of that one afternoon and people still ring me up and ask what the signal path for it was. I’m not taking away my ability for cutting a record, I did my best, but whoever cut that was lucky.

Did you know you were lucky as soon as you heard it, then?

No, I thought this is great, very different, but I didn’t really know much about New Order at the time. For instance, I did that record at a place called Tape One, where I trained, and a few years later when I left in 1987, the last record I did was Enya’s

Watermark. That was the last album I mastered there, and I was on my own because it was my leaving do at the pub. That record sold about 10 million, and all those people think it sounds great.

You get these projects because of the other records you’ve done, so would you do it any different, on the day you were leaving to the day you first started? You wouldn’t, because you’re professional and you want a record to sound the best you can, but you just never know. Back then when the mechanical units sold well, you never knew.

With vinyl records sometimes, if you were cutting three or four sets to furnish different factories at the same time, you would think to yourself, ‘this is going to sell a few, because they’re sending it to different factories’. A colleague and I cut 15 sets of Dire Straits Brothers In Arms over a weekend, the lacquers went to 15 different factories around Europe. And that’s one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, up there with Thriller. I’ve never heard of anything that’s been cut that amount since.

I would imagine some Pink Floyd records, such as Dark Side Of The Moon, a Simon & Garfunkel album or Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, those records that sit in the charts for years, they have been cut umpteen times because the metalwork wears out in the factory and they need to press some more. But the guy who cut

Rumours, he had no idea how many records that album was going to sell. He probably thought, ‘it’s Fleetwood Mac, they’re going to sell a few’, but he never knew what the sales were going to be.

“I’m not taking away my ability for cutting a record, but whoever cut Blue Monday was going to be lucky”