Grammy award winning mastering & mixing engineer Thomas Johansson talks to Weiss Audio

We will not hold it against you if you have never heard of Skövde before. It’s a small town in Sweden that happens to be home to a high-end mastering studio called The Panic Room. The studio is run by Thomas “Plec” Johansson, a multi-Grammy, platinum, and gold-awarded mastering and mixing engineer who refuses to let go of his hardware Weiss units.

Let’s get the nickname out of the way first. As a young boy, Plec was an avid guitar player, and among his schoolmates, the nickname evolved from the word “plectrum”. Today, Plec’s main instrument is the mastering studio, and it has been that way since he started his first facility in 2001, at the age of 20. Plec says:

“I mostly work on aggressive music, which means a lot of metal but also EDM and other styles of electronic music. But the aggressive style is what people typically hire me to do”.

Loving all sides of Mastering

That doesn’t change the fact that Plec has also worked on a lot of lighthearted pop music, particularly in the early years. He continues:

“And I do like it when I get to master something else, like jazz or other acoustic music. But it doesn’t happen a lot, to be honest. I personally enjoy aggressive music, but there was never a specific point in time when I decided to focus my work on metal and similar genres. Things just gravitated towards that – I mastered a metal album, some other metal band thought it sounded good, so they hired me. Things just evolved from there”.

But one decision Plec clearly did make was to focus on mastering rather than being in a band. What was it about mastering that attracted him to the job?

“It just suits my personality. I enjoy receiving a finalized mix and trying to make it even better. As a mastering engineer, you need to enjoy the more administrative tasks as well, because let’s face it – it’s about half the job. I actually quite enjoy that bit too, even if it might not be particularly creative to deal with metadata and making sure the music gets exported to all the correct formats et cetera. It’s important to be on top of those things as a mastering engineer, whereas a mix engineer can largely ignore it”.

Which brings us to the different roles of mixing and mastering engineers. It would sound like Plec views mastering as more of a technical process than mixing.

“Absolutely yes. Some mastering engineers get more creative and impose bigger changes to the music they’re working on. That’s fine, that’s their thing. But my school of thought is that the mix should be as finished as possible, and I should, in principle, not add or subtract anything. The people who mix the music know what they’re doing and know what the song should sound like. What I contribute is, first and foremost, the routine you get from listening to music all day, and the fact that I have a world-class monitoring system that reveals flaws that can very well escape the mix engineers. I view it as my main task to fix such issues and, more importantly, to get the mix to translate to any possible listening situation. If I identify any serious issues with the mix, I prefer to get back to the mixing engineer and suggest they make the necessary adjustments. Maybe the lead vocal is a bit soft, or you could lose some low-end from the guitars. If there’s a chance those things can be fixed in the mix, it’s much better. But sometimes, that door is closed. The mix is done, you are perhaps not even in contact with the mix engineer, and you’re working against a tight deadline. In such cases, I’ll work with what I have and do my best to correct the issues I hear.

What is a well-mastered musical piece?

So what, then, constitutes a good master? After a short moment of consideration, Plec concludes that it’s all about optimization. He expands further on that:

“I separate optimization into a subjective and an objective part. Subjectively, I make the music sound the best it can according to my taste, and objectively, I get the music to translate as well as possible to various listening situations”.

Plec shares some examples of what he considers to be great recordings:

“Oh, well, I like the things a lot of audiophiles agree on. I love Infected Mushroom; their productions are very nice. Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly is excellent from a sonic perspective. Diana Krall sounds great, like almost everything Al Schmitt has recorded. As for the more aggressive stuff, I like the American metalcore bands like Architects, Bring Me the Horizon, Falling in Reverse. But it varies a lot, my listening habits are more like — ‘what’s interesting to me right now?’

In the day-to-day work of a mastering engineer, what struggles does one face? Plec mentions that there are two things he commonly needs to deal with when processing the music.

“One is the low end of the frequency spectrum. It’s incredibly difficult to build a mix room that delivers the low end properly, which leads many mix engineers to make poor mixing decisions regarding the bass and sub-bass in their mixes. That’s an advantage to checking the mix on good headphones, it’s often easier to get an accurate representation of the low end from them. The other thing is that there are often issues in the mids, where I think many lesser studio monitors make it hard for people to make the right decisions. Things like poor crossover filter designs can make it difficult to make a proper judgment of your sound. Musically speaking, most mixes I get are great. The songs have all the balance and energy they need, but people do get tricked by poor monitoring. That’s something a mastering engineer should use their experience and proper monitoring to correct.

Much Love for the Weiss DS1-MK3

Plec has been a long-time fan of Weiss Engineering’s mastering tools; he owns an EQ-1 and no less than three DS-1s!

“DS-1 and EQ-1 are on nearly every master I do. I also use the DS-1 plugin version from Softube. I know the code is 1:1 ported, but still I’m certain I can hear a bit of difference between the hardware and the software. The software is cleaner, which is great, but the hardware has a slight crunch to it that I also find really useful. It has some sort of mojo, and it’s not just in my head! I’ve run comparisons for over a year and even some blind tests, and there is a tiny, tiny difference. To be clear, both the hardware and the plugin are equally useful, and everything the hardware does, the software does extremely well too.

Plec goes on to praise the DS-1 for its flexibility.

“You can really tailor its response to the music you’re working on by balancing the attack and release settings. I tweak those settings quite a bit, but I’ve also created four or five presets that do what I think the unit is best suited for. It took me quite a while to create those presets, though. It’s definitely a tool you need to familiarize yourself with to make the most out of. I still don’t feel like I’m done exploring it”.

Mastering for Audiophiles and Consumers Alike

These days, Weiss Engineering also caters to the high-end audiophile user group, and our conversation shifts to discussing the various audiences and how distinct they can be. Is there ever a compromise between mastering for ultra-quality playback systems and less expensive consumer systems? Plec quickly replies:

“No. My job, as I see it, is to create a master that translates across all systems and situations. That includes all quality levels of the playback system. So I don’t consider myself to be in a situation where I have to consider one listening situation over another.”

It’s difficult to discuss with a mastering engineer without bringing up the loudness war. What are Plec’s thoughts on that?

“For the aggressive music styles I usually work with, I think compact, loud masters with a controlled degree of distortion suit the style — so that’s what I’ll typically do. It’s an aesthetic choice, it adds something positive to the sound, and that’s why I should do it. But I do appreciate that most streaming services use loudness normalization these days, because it means we’re free to choose whether we want to push the song against the limiter or go with a more dynamic sound. Things are louder nowadays than they’ve ever been, and in a way that’s just how genres and sounds have developed over time. Music and productions have incrementally evolved to sound and work better when they’re being mastered very loud. So even though things are super loud these days, I’d say that the loud stuff has never sounded as good as it does now. That said, we’re not forced to push things just because there’s a competition going on. It’s very much an artistic decision these days”.

The Challenge of Emerging Playback Formats

We round off the conversation by discussing how various listening formats emerge and disappear, and how that affects the work of a mastering engineer. For example, over the last few decades, portable Bluetooth speakers — typically mono — have taken over the role of traditional stereo hi-fi setups in many homes and workplaces. Does a phenomenon like that change Plec’s approach to his work?

“Not really, no. It’s still the case that one of my most important tasks is to ensure the music translates to any, absolutely any, listening situation. Also on mono Bluetooth speakers. But I’ll add that it’s also very much something that needs to work all through the process of making the recordings. The production and mix need to be good and cater to the end consumer and their playback systems from the get-go. If, for example, the mix is filled with fancy stereo widening effects and bass frequencies, and the translation onto smaller speakers hasn’t been properly worked out, those sounds will disappear or at least sound odd in mono with a weak sonic foundation. I’ll do my best to correct it, but it’s not always possible when the recording is too flawed to begin with”.

In conclusion, mastering engineers are not magicians — even with world-class tools at their disposal.