Greg Obis, new owner of Chicago Mastering Service – Chicago Reader

This month Greg Obis formally becomes the sole owner of Chicago Mastering Service (CMS), founded in 2007 by Bob Weston and Jason Ward. Weston, best known as the bassist in Shellac, moved to Portugal in May with his wife, Carrie.

Originally from Oak Park, Obis attended Bennington College in Vermont. In 2011, during his junior year, he interned at Electrical Audio, and upon graduating in 2012 he moved to Chicago and started at CMS. The studio also employs mastering engineer Matthew Barnhart and assistant engineer Manae Solara Vaughn (cofounder of the band Oux). 

Outside Chicago Mastering, Obis works as a tour manager and live sound engineer (notably for Protomartyr, La Luz, and Jessica Pratt) and picks up occasional gigs mixing or recording at other studios. His record label, Born Yesterday, folded in 2024, but he still plays guitar and sings for local postpunk band Stuck, who open for the Jesus Lizard at Metro on Wednesday, November 19. In this interview, Obis attempts to demystify mastering—while explaining why it might still be a good idea to let a professional handle it.

As told to Philip Montoro

Mastering is the last creative step of finishing an album and the first manufacturing step of finishing an album. It’s really to make the mixes sound more like themselves, in the same way that salt makes food taste more like itself. So if your mixes are there—you’re hearing the guitar, the bass, the vocals, the drums, et cetera—but it’s not quite sounding like you wanted it to in your head, we’re the part that brings a sort of cohesion to the mix elements. 

The more manufacturing side is, we’re the last stop before an album is going to be made into CDs or sent to Spotify or pressed to vinyl or made into a cassette. So making sure there’s no problems with the audio, no song titles that are misspelled that are going to show up on the CD. And then also just knowing the specific needs of each production master: knowing what the CD plant is going to want, knowing how vinyl works and knowing what specific things that the pressing plant is going to need, or what Spotify is going to need.

One thing that Chicago Mastering has done is cut lacquers, which is the first step of the vinyl-manufacturing process. We cut the lacquers, and we send them out to get plated and made into metal parts. And then those metal parts get sent to a place like Smashed Plastic here in Chicago to be actually pressed into the final records. 

Bob has taken the lathe with him. He’s opening another room in Portugal, where he will continue cutting lacquers. It’s something that we have historically done, and I’m intimately familiar with the workings of vinyl. It is a very highly specialized skill, for sure. It’s cool to feel like I have some sort of arcane knowledge.

The biggest difference, in terms of what vinyl specifically needs on the mastering end, is that a vinyl record can only be so loud—or rather, you can only cut music onto a lacquer disc at a certain level before it starts to distort. The level at which digital audio distorts is way, way higher, and so when digital audio came along, you had these “loudness wars” in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, where people were making stuff as loud as you possibly could. There’s always been this perception that music that is louder is going to get more commercial success. 

The overall level of the audio that is going to get cut onto [vinyl] is quite a bit quieter. And certain high frequencies can get you into trouble. Or if there’s too much high-end information, if there’s too much stereo low information, that can create problems. Ideally, a good cutting engineer, what they’re trying to do is make it so that when you play back something on your turntable, it sounds similar to the digital version—because the digital version is what the client approved. 

I have no immediate plans to replace the lathe. They stopped making cutting lathes in the 1980s, I believe. And those machines are archaic, often, like Frankensteined things that are fragile and expensive and wild. It’s really cool getting to cut lacquers, and it’s been really cool getting to learn about that process. But for the time being, I think we’re just concentrating on keeping the ship afloat on the digital end.

If I’m working on your record, and you need a production master to get sent to a vinyl pressing plant, that still requires some know-how and expertise on our end, and we can totally provide that. But we’re not cutting lacquers specifically. We could send those files out to somebody like Bob, or to Carl Saff here in Chicago, who has a cutting lathe, or just send it to Smashed Plastic and let them figure it out. Many pressing plants in the U.S. work like that, where they don’t have a cutting lathe in-house, but they contract that out.

Mastering daddy Bob Katz—he’s kind of the GOAT of mastering and mastering education—declared the loudness wars over some years ago. I don’t know if I’d say that’s totally true. The reason why he declared them over is because, with streaming becoming the dominant mode of music consumption, they have systems and policies about loudness that basically incentivize artists and producers to make their music at a reasonable level so that it’s more dynamic. What that usually is is loudness normalization. 

The reason they do this is because—I’m sure you’ve received a mix tape or a mix CD when you were in high school where you went from, like, an acoustic ballad to a heavy metal song, and suddenly it just gets way louder and you jump out of your seat. They don’t want their platform to work like that. The result is that music that’s ultraloud and ultralimited and ultracompressed gets turned down. Your music sounds a lot dinkier. And so we’re at a stage where there’s a much broader awareness that there’s only so far you can go. You don’t really get a lot out of making stuff as loud as you possibly can. 

Chicago Mastering Service was very ahead of the curve on that. If you go on the website now, there’s a whole page on loudness, which I think was probably written in 2008. But it’s still quite informative, making people aware that there are incentives to having quieter music that has a larger dynamic range. They have a waveform of a My Bloody Valentine song, which looks super dynamic—it isn’t totally bricked out and has high highs and low lows. And that’s My Bloody Valentine, one of the loudest bands of all time. That’s how people think of them—like, they’re massive. So it goes to show.

It behooves you as an audio engineer to remain open, because it’s a freelance lifestyle—like, you eat what you kill. It’s very rare for somebody to just step into being a mixing engineer or being a mastering engineer and have that be the only thing they do for the rest of their life. Starting out, most people wind up getting into a position where they have to be prepared to—like, if somebody asks me, “Hey, can you mix my band on tour,” I’m like, “Oh yeah, sure, I can do that.” And sort of learn how to step into these different roles.

Not to say that it was easy to own and operate a studio before, but it is a challenge to do it when people can be recording and mixing and mastering at home. That sort of scarcity certainly does put pressure on an engineer to broaden the scope of what they’re doing. 

Business here generally is going strong and feeling solid. Obviously not having Bob is going to be a challenge, just because he’s the engineer the business charges the most to work with. But I think we’ll be fine. I hope everybody wants to have me master their record and have Matthew master their record! Any support is greatly appreciated as I step into this new role. 

At Chicago Mastering, we do stuff at a pretty high level. In Chicago at least, there’s probably us and Carl Saff that are doing this. This room is totally nuts—it’s like listening to music underneath a microscope. And we have all the latest tools in order to get music to where it needs to be. But frankly, not everybody has a budget for that, and it’s going to continue to be a challenge in the future to convince people that doing it at this level is worthwhile. 

You can really make beautiful, wonderful-sounding stuff recording at home and mixing at home. But I think mastering, because it’s this highly, highly technical thing, it’s really good to trust that to a professional. This room is a pristine, hyperaccurate listening environment where I can hear issues. I can hear stuff that I know is going to cause a problem on different playback systems. 

Probably the most obvious example is bass. Low-end frequencies are really hard to reproduce accurately—especially when you’re talking about people who are mixing at home on headphones. And here we have it so dialed in, I can hear that stuff really accurately and know: OK, there was a node in this person’s mixing environment, like a hole at 80 hertz. And so they made 80 hertz really loud. And I’m hearing it, and I know that this is gonna fart out a car stereo. That’s a problem. And now I need to back it down.

In a mix, if you take, like, 0.25 decibels out of the vocal at a certain frequency, probably nobody can hear that. But if I do that on a master, where I’m taking that same frequency cut from the top down across the board to all the instruments, that might make a big difference.

The most difficult part of communicating with clients is people will be like, “Oh, can you make the background vocal in the second chorus quieter?” And it’s like, I kinda can’t. It’s sort of after the fact. If you want to make a new mix and turn that down and send it back to me, that’s fine, but I probably can’t do it. 

I mean, there’s some stuff I can do. I always encourage people to ask, because they might not know what’s possible. Like, making a lead vocal quieter or louder is actually pretty simple for me. There’s some really wacky technical stuff that I can do to really reshape a mix. And so I want people to ask, because I want them to get what they want in the end. 

Sometimes I just like giving the artist space. I send them two songs; they spend some time with it. They give me an approval. Then I go back and work on the rest of the record. Having that long gestation period for the audio, especially because it’s such an important part at the end—sometimes that helps, to have a little bit of distance there.

You want to have a clear and accurate room. You want to have an engineer with a lot of experience and, if nothing else, just a second set of ears. Just to hand somebody this thing that you’ve been working on that you probably don’t have a lot of perspective on, because you’ve been working on it for six months and saying “Big things coming!” on Instagram for three of those months. It’s good to just hand that off to somebody else and be like, “Here, what are you hearing?”