Credits

Cutting a regional lacquer is not working with the artist#

Here is how a big album was typically made in the '90s and 2000s. It gets recorded, mixed and mastered, usually in America, by well-known engineers. Only after the masters are approved by the artist and the label does the label send them out to its regional partners in the UK, Germany, Japan and so on, who handle manufacturing locally rather than shipping records across the ocean.

For vinyl, the regional office sends the master to some local cutting room to have a lacquer cut, then on to a factory to be pressed. The artist does not choose that engineer and almost certainly never hears of him. He is cutting flat, which means operating the lathe without touching the sound. At top studios that job usually goes to a junior engineer in a side room while the senior engineers get on with the actual records. He operated the lathe for three minutes and now he has magically worked with a global pop star.

Bios get taken at face value#

The trick works because most people don't understand how regional releases and licensing work, so when a bio lists a row of famous names, they assume nobody would simply make it up. Look the names up in the credits, though, and you sometimes find a regional cut of a single that was already mastered by someone else, a compilation CD, a remix the artist had nothing to do with, or a track by someone else that sampled him.

When I was an intern in the mid 2000s, one of my jobs was making Red Book masters for obscure catalogue reissues. I took audio that someone else had mastered, mostly before I was born, ripped it into the editor, made a PQ sheet and sent it to the factory. Most of the time I had zero impact on the sound. So if I played the fake credit game, I could list multiple world famous bands from the 1970s.

The artist has to have approved your work#

You can honestly say you worked with an artist on a record if the artist personally approved the specific work you did. Being in the room while someone else did it does not count. A regional cut or an edit the artist never knew existed does not count.

I have always been open that I mainly master techno and other underground electronic music, and that the work comes through word of mouth and respect in that niche, not through Grammy-winning pop. Some of what I have done has millions of streams, but the records I am proudest of are mostly ones the person down the pub has never heard of. The test I care about is whether I could call the artist up and he would know who I am.

A long discography does not make anyone right about audio; see evidence.