On January 30, Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready teamed up with the Seattle Symphony and an all-star cast of rock musicians – from bassist Duff McKagan to singers Chris Cornell and Kim Virant – at Benaroya Hall to perform original compositions as well as songs from the band, Mad Season. The night of music, part of SSO’s fifth annual Sonic Evolution Series, where well-known musicians write original works tailored specifically for the symphony, was laid to tape and will be released August 28 on vinyl. And there is only one man McCready would trust to master this project: Seattle’s Ed Brooks.

But who is this master of mastering; this soft-spoken, gray-haired music magician?

Born in Charlottesville, Va., and raised in Slidell, La., where he lived in a trailer park as a kid, Brooks moved to the Seattle area when he was 5 years old. He came from an “unmusical family” but was “bit” by the musical bug as an adolescent when he heard the song “Indian Reservation” by Paul Revere and the Raiders.

“I was probably 10 years old,” he says. “I bought the 45 and from that point on I became a rabid record collector.”

Since 1999, Brooks has been the premier masterer of Seattle records, working with The Head and the Heart, The Fleet Foxes and mastering more than 200 live Pearl Jam records from his headquarters at the RFI studios. “I hear records before they’re finished,” he says. “It’s part of why doing this job is such a fun thing.” He’s also worked with countless others, including Stereo Embers, Noah Gunderson and Lemolo.

Things came into place for Brooks early in his career when he was handed an unfinished record from a band called Botch. “Math rock,” he says. “It was the angriest, loudest and heaviest thing I ever heard in my life. I’m sitting there going, ‘What the fuck am I going to do with this?’ So I just thought back to when I was 14, in my bedroom, angry at the world and cranking Black Sabbath. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to make this record as huge sounding as Black Sabbath.’ It turned out to be pretty popular and everything snowballed for me after that.”

When a band records instruments to tracks, the job of the mixer is to get each track at the right volume and level so that everything blends well. The job of a masterer is to get all the tracks on a record to blend together, to be balanced and for all the volumes to line up. It’s a subtle but essential job. But what’s the secret?

“When I first started,” Brooks says, “I had this mindset of ‘what can I do to make this record better’ and my natural inclination would be ‘what can I do to fix it?’ At some point, though, I came to the realization that rather than fixing it, I wanted to find out what I liked about the music and enhance it. I learned to embrace the artistic vision of what was given to me.”

As a teenager, Brooks would often skip school and drive to stereo stores with a friend and hang out. “We’d make salesmen play records for us and play them on different speakers and sit there and geek out,” he says. “We used to do that a lot, of course we were baked out of our minds. This led me to buying a stereo before I ever bought a car.”

Now, though, he has his plan of attack down: When he gets a mixed record, he takes ample time to decide what song he will begin to work with first. “Sometimes it’s because the song is in the middle of the road tonally, maybe some songs on the record are brighter or bassier. In the first song, I try a lot of things to see what the record responds to and with that I choose the gear the record will be processed with.”

Before Brooks worked as a masterer, he was a multi-track engineer at Bad Animals Studio in downtown Seattle. “As a recording engineer you get so focused on the minutia,” he says, “that there isn’t much time to love it. So when I started mastering I made the conscious decision that for every record I bought to learn about sound, I bought one that I loved. That got me listening to music again.”

In the last five years, he said, he’s been learning pedal steel guitar, gaining a more in-depth appreciation for old country and western swing. At the same time, he has noticed a trend in recordings not to have songs sound uber-polished, but rather more vintage. “If we go back even 15 years,” he said, “there were very few bands you could consider Americana in Seattle – now, though, there are quite a few.”

Along with that Americana mood – or “Ballard sound,” as he nicknames it – Brooks believes Seattle music is as diverse as any area or era. “There’s ’80s electronic pop, ’90s heavy rock, ’70s heavy metal,” he says. “When I walk in the door [to my studio], almost anything could be waiting for me – in Seattle there’s a huge variety.”

The Mad Season/Seattle Symphony/Sonic Evolution record mentioned above is available for presale here: http://pearljam.com/goods/product_info.php?products_id=3365 and will be released August 28.

This story was updated on August 26; Brooks was born in Charlottesville, Va., and raised in Slidell, La.