Adam Ayan, founder of Ayan Mastering, boasts a client list as vast as it is stellar, featuring the likes of Paul McCartney, Foo Fighters, Katy Perry, Bob Marley, Taylor Swift, Madonna, Nirvana, Bruce Springsteen, and Gwen Stefani to name a mere few. Here, he talks to Headliner about the art of mastering, how he fell in love with the process, and how Merging Technologies has shaped his work.
When did you first develop an interest in audio?
I started out as a musician and as a kid played in rock bands and thought that I'd be a professional musician. I had an experience with one of my bands going into a recording studio and cutting a demo in a small multi-track studio and I really enjoyed that experience. When it came time for me to move on from high school, I decided I would go to school for both music performance and sound recording and there was this great program at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell that covered both of those bases. Basically, the degree I ended up getting was in music performance and sound recording technology and as I started to get into the audio and studio part of it I knew that’s where I wanted to go.
While I was at University, I also worked part-time at a small project studio where I cut my teeth as a young engineer and quickly got into the driver's seat with clients. At that time I was recording and mixing and became really interested in mastering, which is what I ended up following for virtually all of my career.
What were the first steps in your career outside of university?
Out of school I ended up interning at a mastering studio in the Boston area, which led to a job there I then ended up with a job at Gateway Mastering and I've just followed that as my career path ever since.
Why did mastering hold such an appeal for you?
I think it's the overview that you get as a mastering engineer, or the viewpoint that you have within that part of the creative process. Firstly, the fine tuning really spoke to me. As a mastering engineer you’re hearing it as a whole, as opposed to a recording engineer. What spoke to me was that I could hear it and affect it at the very end of the process. I hear the whole arrangement, the whole recording is done, the mix is done.
How much room for creativity is there in the mastering process?
There is more creativity involved than most know. There are certain things that we just can’t do at all in mastering, like changing the mix etc. so the creative tools end up usually coming down to equalisation and dynamics processing. In a way, the mastering engineer can take the baton from the mix engineer to finish things up and there's usually a fair bit of room for creativity there.
One of the other great things about being a mastering engineer is you get to work on a large swathe of recordings, much more so than producers or recording and mix engineers, just by nature of the work. All of that work takes infinitely more time than it does for me to master. So, where a record producer might work on a handful of records a year, because they might take weeks and months or longer, I'm working on a handful of records a day sometimes.
Is working on a vast range of songs spanning styles and genre different or more challenging than working on an album by a single artist?
They're vastly different from each other, and the expectations from one artist or producer to the next can be very different. For instance, with a lot of Latin music there's often a lot of percussive elements, and one of the last things you want to do is anything that might round off those transients and those edges. On records that are sung in French, whether they be records in, marketed in markets like, like francophone markets, the vocal tends to be a little louder and a little brighter than we're used to with American pop music, so you need to be sensitive to that. If that happens on an American record, maybe I would do things to bring the voice down a little bit, but I know that this market dictates a certain thing.
Equally, working on 10 songs for one artist can have its own complications. Sometimes those 10 songs could be three or four different producers, four different engineers, three or four different studios and they’ve all been made over a long period of time. So, it has its own set of things that you need to get through in terms of making it sound like one cohesive album.
Tell us about how Ayan Mastering came together.
Ayan Mastering started in July 2023. I spent 25 years at Gateway Mastering Studios, also here in Portland Maine, and had my own mastering room for 22 of those years, developing a reputation and clientele. I knew Gateway was going to come to an end at some point and in late 2022, the owner, Bob Ludwig, said he was retiring and that it would be closing. I knew I would continue mastering records as long as people were willing to hire me, and I have a lot of exceptionally great clients, so I started my own studio.
