The Glossary: Conor Dalton | Mastering Engineer
For the first in our series of Glossary features covering music tech roles, we caught up with Conor Dalton, mastering engineer.
This special Glossary series features the insights of workshop leaders and speakers from our recently announced programme – Doors Open UNLOCKED: Empowering the future of music tech with Ableton, which you can read more about and apply for a place on here.
Conor Dalton has 15 years of audio mastering experience with his company Glowcast Audio Mastering, working on music from Daft Punk, Jeff Mills, Amelie Lens, Kobosil, Sara Landry, and many more. He has lectured at Berklee School of Music (Valencia) and Abbey Road Institute (London), and is a musician in the band “Island People” (Raster). According to Muso.AI statistics, he is placed in the top 1% of mastering engineers worldwide in terms of streams and awards.
What is your role in music and what does your day to day look like?
As a mastering engineer, my role consists of finalising music, and taking it over the finish line to become a finished product. I spend a lot of time listening to music and making technical adjustments with analog and digital tools to make the songs sound complete and polished. There is also a lot of time spent talking to the musicians and organising my administrative side of file management etc.
How did you get into your line of work?
After university I began my audio mastering company, and rented a studio space with a friend, I began mastering music for friends and then local record labels. I tried to interact with the musicians around me and get to know them, and got involved in my local electronic music scene by putting on parties and DJing. The first steps were really just having fun and getting involved in my local surroundings, and offering a service to those people who I became close to. Things take time, and evolve slowly, it was a long term game to evolve into doing mastering for a full time job and required a lot of patience
What skills are important in your job?
Understanding people, for me working in customer service for many years helped me to learn how to communicate with customers, resolving tension, really understanding customers' concerns etc. This is number one. The techniques to get music to sound good come later. This takes a lot of research, and incremental improvements towards being able to make consistent decisions that translate well.
If someone is excited to do what you do, what advice would you give them?
Trust your instincts, interact with the musicians around you, find smart and kind people that will help you grow personally and technically, if you show enthusiasm and a good attitude people will help you. Practice daily. Incremental improvements are what this game is all about, so don't get comfortable, you should always be a little bit uncomfortable, this is where growth happens. Good monitoring and acoustics are way more important than anything else and will help you make confident decisions.
What have you found surprising about your role?
The more you get deeply into sound and music, the more you realise that you're really dealing with a combination of time, maths, human psychology and physics.
What are your top 3 tips for someone who wants work in the music industry in general?
1) Make friends with like minded people who inspire you and energise you.
2) Improving your technical skills is a life long journey of incremental daily improvements.
3) Enjoy yourself. Enthusiasm is infectious. Don't just study music from a book, interact with your surroundings and people will feel your passion. This will rapidly accelerate your growth.
Applications for Doors Open UNLOCKED: Empowering the future of music tech with Ableton close at the end of Tuesday 18th March, apply for your place here.