Master & Commander: Q&A with Mike Kalajian

In an effort to learn more about the people who finish your favorite artists’ records, we got in touch with a few mastering heavyweights, the first being Mike Kalajian, chief engineer at Rogue Planet Mastering. Given his impressive portfolio featuring artists like Senses Fail, Circa Survive, Saosin, and Papa Roach, it’s safe to say that you’ve heard his work. We had the opportunity to chat with Mike via Zoom recently, where he answered some of our questions.

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On Mastering

“So my process is basically to put the song on and pretend I’m the listener. Then, I react to the song. Then, I try to make that reaction as positive as possible.”

What’s Rogue Planet Mastering all about?

I was engineering and producing for years. Doing that, I had worked with every mastering engineer under the sun. I didn’t really see a correlation between how much money you spent and what the quality was -- I mean, there are guys who are unbelievable who are really expensive and it’s justified, and then there are guys who are a great value. But there are also a lot of outliers. It’s not super correlated. So I was tired of paying a lot of money for people who I thought were going to be really excellent and getting something back that I didn’t feel was really excellent. 

I kind of wanted to be the shop that gave you the amenities of a big name studio without having to spend a million dollars or having to go through three people to get to your mastering engineer. I wanted to offer the same attention to detail as a big name studio -- not just in regard to mastering. I wanted to be able to get an email two years after a project was completed and still deliver the requested files, unlike a normal home studio. 

Different mastering engineers have different approaches and philosophies regarding the mastering process. What’s Mike’s mastering style?

The short answer from where I’m sitting, is that I don’t know. It’s so instinctual now. I sit down, I put on a song, and I listen to the key reference points of the song: the verse, the chorus, and maybe the weird harmonica solo or something. I get a feel for where the different coordinates are, sonically, in a song. and then I just kind of start twisting knobs. There’s certainly a thought process behind it, but it’s gotten to a point where it’s like, there are so many different routes you can go when a song comes in -- sometimes it needs nothing, sometimes it needs compression, sometimes it needs EQ, sometimes the immediate thing that stands out is the low-end, sometimes it’s the top -- you just hear it and decide “Okay, this is where this needs to go”. And it comes down to the fact that by doing the same things so many times with the same gear, I just know what changes I can make to take a song in the direction that it needs to go. So my process is basically to put the song on and pretend I’m the listener. Then, I react to the song. Then, I try to make that reaction as positive as possible. 

Mastering Engineers are responsible for delivering a listening experience to consumers. How do you want your listeners to feel when they hear your records?

It’s different from song to song, but I also think that there’s a general threshold of how loud people like to listen to music or how soft. And then there’s some sort of a guideline to what tends to sound bad, you know. I always look at it like there’s a range. And if you can get everything to kind of sit within that range from a dynamic perspective and from an EQ perspective and it serves the song, it’s pretty good. 

One of the guys I worked with said that you want to have the kind of song that makes you want to turn it up, not down. It’s a moving target, but you know it when you hear it. When I hear a record that has that sound, I make a note of it to use as a reference. 

As a certified member of the Knif crew, how have you been using your Vari Mu lately?

I’ve been using the Vari Mu for the same thing for close to 5 years now. So I demo’d the Soma from ProAudioToys first and I loved it so much that I ordered one for myself. Then I bought two more Knif pieces, sight unseen. The compressor, specifically, sits on one position in the chain and it’s a slow attack, super fast release with the bass rolled off in the side chain. It’s getting almost no compression at all. I feed it a little bit of gain to get that needle moving and to me, it does some really magical things to the mix. 

I think that it could do other things really well, too, but I think that all of the Knif stuff is great at giving me this big, huge, tone. So I’m kind of afraid to change anything in my chain because, well, I feel like I’ve solved this puzzle that does some of the work for me. 

Not your average home studio. Sporting Bowers & Wilkins 802 Nautilus Floorstanders and gear from the likes of Knif and Elysia, Rogue Planet Mastering is a home studio that is far from typical.

On Audiophilia

“I almost don’t want to tune in to anything else other than my studio because I don’t want to listen critically anywhere else.”

When you’re not in your mastering suite, what’s your leisure-listening system like?

So I have these JBL L100s that sound 50% cool, 50% terrible. Basically, some of the drivers are designed to be out of phase and it sounds weird. Like one of the drivers is literally playing out of phase with another one, it’s super weird. 

I had a set when I was 19 and I was mixing on them, which was totally inappropriate. But going back and listening to those mixes, I thought that there was something cool about them. Then, my father saw a set of them at a Salvation Army marked for $30 each. There wasn’t a chip, crack, or dent on these speakers. He knew exactly what they were and he asked the lady at the counter if they were priced as a set or each, arguing that when you buy a pair of shoes, they aren’t priced individually. So, she agreed and he bought the set for $30. Those were my listening speakers, but now my kids push in the tweeters so honestly I listen to music in my car, which has the best consumer stereo I’ve heard in a while, it’s surprisingly good. I almost don’t want to tune in to anything else other than my studio because I don’t want to listen critically anywhere else. 

We have one of those Bowers & Wilkins zeppelin things and it makes everything sound good, like a lot of modern Bluetooth speakers. And that’s totally fine by me. 

When you think about records as an audiophile, how far back into the recording process do you go in your assessment? Do you consider things like the signal path of specific elements of program content?

I don’t think I ever think about it from that far back. The more I got into just mastering and the less production I did, the less I was interested in the specific ingredients in a track. Like people will say “Oh I used this specific converter” and I’m like, “Okay!”. It’s not that I don’t care, but even with my best clients, I don’t know what kind of gear they’re using. I used to be the guy that would nerd out over 500k versus 750k potentiometers in guitars and stuff like that, like I would destroy guitars by replacing the pickups over and over. Now, as a mastering engineer, I play the song and react to the whole thing. I try not to get caught up in the minutia if it means losing sight of the overall experience.

If you google “Audiophile music”, you get a wide variety of results. What’s a record that you’d call audiophile-grade?

One of my favorite-sounding records is Peter Gabriel’s “Up”. I think that is one of the best sounding records. Like if you told me that I was going to go listen to a set of $250,000 speakers and asked me what record I was going to listen to, that’s the one. I just think it was recorded so insanely well. It’s super dynamic and it’s quieter than I probably have the guts to make a record, but if you’re Peter Gabriel, you can get away with it. Of course, there are standout records in every genre that sound fantastic, like Deadmau5 or something where the entire frequency spectrum is represented, but “Up”, to me, is a recording masterpiece that represents acoustic elements better than anything else. 

Is there a record that you’ve worked on that you would define as a standard for audiophiles?

Okay, I want to preface this by saying that I get a lot of great-sounding stuff, I could really give you dozens. But one producer that immediately stands to me when you use the term “audiophile” is Cale Hawkins. The dynamic range that he works with is so intentional and so good. When I get really dynamic stuff, I feel I need to reign it in, but with his stuff, I get the loud sections loud enough and then I let everything trickle down under it and let it get super, super quiet. My idea of “audiophile” is kinda using all the range you’ve got. Both Spectrally and dynamically.

Thrift store treasure. “So I have these JBL L100s that sound 50% cool, 50% terrible.”

Choice Records

“They were one of my favorite bands since high school and they hit me up to master their last record and I just couldn’t believe it.”

It’s date night. What record do you use to set the mood?

Oh man, my wife and I were just laughing about this. We both listen to stuff that is the opposite of a lot of the stuff that I master. Like I’m really into Radiohead, so Kid A would probably be one. I like Tycho and shoegazey indie-rock like Turnover’s Peripheral Vision if we’re hanging out, having a couple drinks. 

Recently, I got into this artist Sleepy Fish and they’re so cool. It’s like this trip hop instrumental stuff with guitar and piano. I’ve been into a lot of that instrumental stuff lately, like Nils Frahm piano stuff. It’s weird because I do a lot of hard rock and pop that’s vocal-driven. I’m trying to make these really energetic tracks most of the time, so if I’m driving or just trying to hang out, I listen to something that makes me feel like I’m driving through a movie montage. 

What’s your sadboi record? 

I grew up a late 90s/early 2000s emo kid, so I listened to all of the sadboi records. Jimmy Eat World, Get Up Kids, Promise Ring, all that stuff. I love them all, so it’s hard to just name one. But, if I got dumped tomorrow, I’d put on Saves the Day’s Stay What You Are. That would be my crying record. 

They were one of my favorite bands since high school and they hit me up to master their last record and I just couldn't believe it. 

Like us, you’re a big fan of Polyenso’s One Big Particular Loop. Can we talk about that?

So I was somehow given demos for One Big Particular Loop because I was a huge fan of Oceana’s Clean Head record. Oceana was like a Rise Records band doing that brand of heavy music Rise kinda put on the map. As far as I know, Oceana was made up of the same guys that are in Polyenso. Anyway, a buddy of mine knew that I was a big fan of them and gave me some demos of One Big Particular Loop and I remember hearing Danger Signs in my car and thinking “this is amazing”. Like there were parallels between Radiohead and this rock and roll thing with odd time signatures. I think Matt Goldman was involved with that record and I’ve always been a fan of his work. The first song in my mastering reference playlist is Falling in Rain. It’s a fantastic record and I could listen to it a million times in a row. 

On Mixing

“The silver lining is that if it’s a good song, it’s a good song, regardless of how loud or quiet it is.”

Some mix issues are more common than others. What are you seeing right now that engineers could do better?

The thing I see the most is a lot of buildup in the upper midrange where 2-way speakers crossover around 2k or 3k. And that’s because they can’t hear it. But with the 802’s, all that stuff is pushed right in your face. That’s usually not a problem because you don’t get a lot of pushback when you clean that up. 

The thing that kills me is when I get records where the reference master is just slammed to death. It’s so easy to think that master is better than what I give them because it’s just so loud. So when that happens, I have to call them and tell them that what I give them is not going to be as loud as what they’re used to hearing. But then I tell them that it’s going to be just as loud, if not louder, than everything else in their genre. I have to ask them to trust me. I’ve always been about what the client wants, but I have to humbly and respectfully intervene when they’ve been habituated to a reference master that’s probably not what they actually want. 

I couldn’t imagine telling Mike Kalajian that his record isn’t loud enough. 

It happens. And when it does happen, I give them a master that’s louder than their reference master along with a “quieter” master that’s still really loud -- like -5 RMS instead of -3. The silver lining is that if it’s a good song, it’s a good song, regardless of how loud or quiet it is. 

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It was an absolute pleasure speaking with Mike — he’s a cool guy. Learn more about how cool Mike and Rogue Planet Mastering are by heading to their website.