About Our Guest

Greg Obis is a mastering engineer and the owner of Chicago Mastering Service, where he has worked since 2012. He has mastered records for artists on labels including Sub Pop, Matador, ANTI-, Numero Group, Sacred Bones, and International Anthem. He also co-founded Born Yesterday Records and plays guitar and sings in the band Stuck.


Topics We Covered

  • From intern to owner. Greg's path from Bennington College and an Electrical Audio internship to offering Bob Weston studio chores in exchange for a foot in the door, then a decade climbing from QC and archiving to a full mastering workload
  • Buying CMS. How Bob's move to Portugal turned into a handover instead of a shipping container, why building a new room from scratch priced itself out of the running, and the "child emperor" phase of suddenly running the show
  • Wearing every hat. Taking over project management, invoicing, and scheduling while keeping his own clients happy, and how coming up through quality control made him a better communicator
  • Revisions and being the fall guy. Why the mastering engineer, like a monitor engineer, is the last one in the chain and the first to catch blame, and why recall requests are the most valuable education in the business
  • Reference mixes. Greg's listening playlist: "Bastards of Young" by The Replacements, Yes, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Kendrick Lamar, and Converge for when he needs something absurdly loud. Plus the legend of a Daft Punk record allegedly mastered twice
  • Lacquer cutting. Learning on Bob's Neumann VMS 70, the fear of a blown cutter head, how cutting changed his digital work, and the great lathe-versus-house-down-payment debate now that the VMS 70 lives in Portugal
  • Peak limiting and loudness. Greg's "limiter on or limiter off" philosophy, asking clients for unlimited mixes, 32-bit float delivery, and talking a client back from the loudness ledge with help from Tone Projects Uni-L
  • When to say no. Mostly when it's a mix problem mastering can't solve. Otherwise: offer the professional opinion, then respect that it's their record
  • Life outside the racks. Stuck's new album Optimizer, touring while running a business, cooking, weightlifting as a third space, and Greg's dream of a gloriously unlistenable side project made purely for the joy of it


Links

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