Sound judgment

Music stars find a master's touch in Maine

By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff, 11/8/2001

PORTLAND, Maine - Bob Ludwig is pushing a massive speaker down the hall with the offhand ease other people might summon for a daily vacuuming. Don't be fooled. This is no ordinary piece of audio equipment. Whatever you shelled out for your home system, no matter how state-of-the-art your woofers and tweeters, rest assured they are extremely poor relations to the technological blue blood running through this baby.

Ludwig guides the sleek cube past walls filled top to bottom with framed works of art that all look strangely alike, until you take a closer look and discover that there is writing in the center of each shiny gold and platinum disc. The words are different in each one. Joshua Tree. Like a Virgin. In Utero. Born in the U.S.A.

As in U2, Madonna, Nirvana, and Bruce Springsteen - all of whom made Ludwig's studio, Gateway Mastering, the last stop before sending their albums off to be pressed and shipped to record stores. They were dazzled, of course, by the custom Neumann console, the Genex Magnito-optical recorder, and Mark Levinson Cello Performance Mark 2 amplifiers. They marveled at the acoustic perfection of the floating studio, where speakers rest on concrete pedestals that extend down into bedrock beneath the building.

But they came, along with most everyone else in the recording industry, for Ludwig's ears.

''He comes up with these little increments of sound adjustment that just open up the music in the most amazing ways,'' says Springsteen's co-producer and manager, Jon Landau. ''Bruce will describe what he needs in the most nontechnical terms - `this is too harsh,' or `I don't mean it that way' - and Bob will know how to translate that to a usable result.''

Over a 35-year career, Ludwig has worked with everyone from Jimi Hendrix and Philip Glass to Beck and Green Day. During one two-week period last month, he mastered music for Dave Matthews, the Bee Gees, Creed, Spiritualized, and Nine Inch Nails. A few days ago, Ludwig received a call from Columbia Records. Could he do a rush job on the Concert For New York City? A two-CD set, DVD, and Superaudio Surround CD? Of course, he would find the time, probably in between Bonnie Raitt and the Kronos Quartet.

Mastering is the crucial but little-known final step in the record-making process, when the sound of the music is tweaked for the last time before an album's release. A typical session lasts eight hours and involves an extraordinary level of fine-tuning - one that requires both creative and technical expertise. Ludwig is widely considered the finest craftsman in the field. His job, Ludwig says, is a little bit like fiddling with bass and treble controls on your home stereo - except master engineers have access to any frequency imaginable, limitless band width, and compressors that will constrict or enhance the music's range to suit the sensibilities of industrial headbangers and classical conductors alike.

Pressed for the ultimate layperson's description of his job, Ludwig explains that ''the raw tape comes from the studio and in my head I hear what needs to be improved. I know what knobs to move to make it sound the way I hear it in my head, to make it as musical as possible.''

Sometimes an artist's studio tapes arrive in great shape - Elvis Costello's, for instance, as well as recent Eric Clapton and Destiny's Child albums have all shown up, Ludwig says, sounding nearly perfect. Ludwig's task might amount to removing tongue clicks and vocal hiss. Other discs call for more drastic measures. On Nirvana's 1996 live release ''From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah,'' Kurt Cobain loosed a scream so bloodcurdling on one song that the engineer recording the concert dropped the volume level mid-scream. When the tapes reached Ludwig, he broke the vocal down into tiny pieces, and reconstructed the second half of the scream so it matched the force of the first.

Several times Ludwig has asked to have his name removed from the credits of a record. He won't name names. In fact, the entire staff of Gateway is instructed in the critical art of protecting clients' privacy. Under no circumstances is information about which artist is in town, or when a famous band is expected, to become public.

Sometimes word does leak out, such as the time Springsteen decided to pump iron in a local health club, which happened to be next to a major radio station. Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson feel no compunction about strolling through the city when they're in town. And Tori Amos fans have an uncanny knack for locating their hero, who cheerfully greeted admirers gathered on the sidewalk in front of Gateway, a nondescript brick storefront situated under a parking garage.

At 56, Ludwig is a soft-spoken man with a quick grin that belies his passion and focus. He chats about cyclical redundancy and filter anomalies the way most people might remark on the weather, and raves about John Cage and Tool in the same breath. It's not surprising to learn that Ludwig used to play trumpet with the Utica Symphony Orchestra, and that as an 8-year-old child he was so fascinated with his first tape recorder he used to make recordings of whatever was on the radio in South Salem, N.Y.

In 1968, as a master's student in the recording department at the Eastman School of Music at Rochester University, Ludwig attended a workshop taught by the rock producer Phil Ramone. At the end of the session Ramone offered Ludwig a job as an apprentice engineer at A&R, his New York studio, A stint at Sterling Sound recording studio led to a position at world-famous Masterdisk, where Ludwig worked for 17 years.

In 1993, he decided to turn the dream of owning his own mastering studio into reality. With an initial investment of $1.6 million, Ludwig opened Gateway Mastering in Portland - the first time a major mastering facility had been established outside the music business epicenters of New York, Los Angeles, or Nashville. Now, Gateway does more than 200 sessions annually; the average fee for a session is about $5,000.

''It's really beautiful here, and my folks live 120 miles up the coast,'' says Ludwig, who knew it was a gamble luring busy clients to a small, out-of-the way city. Both he and the musicians, however, have been pleasantly surprised, and not just by Portland's first-rate FedEx service.

''A lot of these people are millionaires,'' says Ludwig of his clients. ''They like good living, and they've found that Portland has great hotels, spectacular restaurants, and is easily accessible by air. They've also discovered that they can really concentrate here, rather than being bothered by label people who want to come by to put their stamp on a session.''

Ludwig's reputation followed him to Maine, and from the start Gateway has had to turn down work - usually from first-time clients and independent labels. All six rooms at Gateway, which has expanded in the last couple of years to include DVD and Surround Sound services, are generally booked six months in advance. To accommodate the overflow, Ludwig recently opened up mastering room B, which is run by Adam Ayan and Laurie Flanner, both of whom were trained by Ludwig.

Gateway's original staff of three has grown to 10, including Ludwig's wife, Gail, who is the studio manager, and a handful of talented young apprentices who cannot quite believe their good fortune at having landed positions here. All of them had to pass Ludwig's job applicant's test, which consists of a tape loaded with defects - some of them so subtle they're discernible only to the most sensitive ears.

It is, after all, about the ears. All the technical wizardry in the world would add up to so many tubes and knobs without the extraordinarily human component Ludwig brings. He hears everything. But he also listens.

When the Foo Fighters come to master an album at Gateway, his job is to recreate the visceral thrill of a live concert for a fan listening on a boombox in her bedroom. On another day, though, Ludwig will painstakingly follow a George Crumb score bar to bar, mellowing out the sound of one brittle-sounding violin. It's his innate sense of what music should sound like, and who the musician wants to be, that sets Ludwig apart.

''I think a good masterman can hear a raw tape and immediately have a concept in their mind about what could be better about it,'' says Ludwig. ''But I feel like my job is to enhance and contribute to the artist's vision as much as I can. It's their record. I'll be doing another record tomorrow.''

This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 11/8/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.