“Mastering: Bridging the Gap Between Artist and Consumer”

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Time-Based Arts & Technology


Mastering: Bridging the Gap Between Artist and Consumer

February 16, 2019 | 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM

Margaret Luthar

Description: Mastering can be thought of as the last stage in the creative process and the first stage of the manufacturing process. In this presentation, Margaret will talk about critical listening, discuss different distribution formats, general best practices, and showcase an “in-person” mastering demo where she’ll walk through her approach to the song.


Presenter Bio:

Margaret is a Mastering Engineer at Chicago Mastering Service. She is a 2005 graduate of Syracuse’s Music Industry program (instrument: trombone), and holds a Master’s in Music Technology (2007) from New York University. After completing her Master’s, she was an Audio Engineer in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts (2009), then later that year a Recording Engineer at the Aspen Music Festival (the latter of which she repeated in summers 2010 and 2016). In 2009 Margaret moved to Norway to attend the year-long post-graduate program in Music Production and Recording at the University of Stavanger. After a brief assistantship in 2010 at Galaxy Studios (Belgium), she moved back to Norway, where she was employed as a Mastering Engineer at Sonovo Mastering and an Audio Archivist at the Norwegian Institute of Recorded Sound until 2016. In addition, during her time in Europe she was involved in acoustic recording projects throughout Western Norway, and a location recordist for a handful of independent films throughout Europe. In January 2017 she accepted her full-time position at Chicago Mastering Service, where she works with all genres of music and also cuts the lacquer masters used in vinyl record pressing. Labels she’s worked with include Merge, Fat Possum Records, and Super Secret Records. She is an active member of the Audio Engineering Society and the P&E Wing of the Recording Academy, enjoys giving workshops on critical listening and mastering to students, and spends a lot of her free time running.