I want to design a new plugin called EXPERIENCE

Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 3:43 pm

fourone3 wrote:

Frustrating. Very frustrating.

So being a guy who hasn't been doing this as long as some of the guys and gals here, do you think it's a battle worth fighting, or is it truly inevitable that the quality of music will decline?

And if it does decline, why have all the nice gear? Who'll care about high sample rates, quality converters, clean mics and pres? Why not just record everything using a USB mic straight to MP3? I ain't fartin' on no snare drum.

What's the point of all the nice pro and pro/consumer gear if it's not being used properly?

-Intrigued and confused ...

People spend big bucks on equipment. They don't seem to spend the same amount on the acoustics which are just as important and they never seem to get around to reading the tech manuals or operator's guides and NEVER EVER take time to really learn the equipment before they start using it.

Anyone past the age of 18 probably knows how to drive an automatic transmission car. In the old days most cars were basically the same and you could go from one to the other without much problem they had a gas pedal, a brake and a steering wheel. You started the car in park, put the drive selector in R or D and drove off. Today most cars have so many safety lockouts and electronic devices that it is sometimes overwhelming and you can't just start the car. You have to have your foot on the brake the doors all have to be closed, the transmission selector HAS to be in park etc etc etc. So our lives are changing and EVERYTHING is becoming more and more complicated the same can be said for audio. We have a lot more choices and lots of processes on our DAWs that 10 years ago would not have been possible. But just like with cars you have to keep up and not ASSUME that you know what you are doing. In a car it can lead to accidents and maybe even death. In audio it can lead to a total meltdown and really bad audio being produced.

Audio is for the most part NOT rocket science. It is easy to learn how to do things the right way if people will take the time and gain the experience. This is a really good forum and there are lots of people here willing to share their knowledge but they can't give the people reading this forum their experience(s) and they cannot be inside their heads when they decide to record the bass smashed at 0 dBFS and then wonder why the bass has no dynamic range

When I got into audio the equipment in a pro audio studio and what was available for use in a home studio were light years apart. The consumer stuff was good but not in the same league as the pro stuff. Today the lines are more and more blurred and you can spend $1000 and get something that 20 years ago would have cost you $100,000 if you could even find one. You can have more audio power at your fingertips today than the Beatles had at the height of their career and you don't need Abby Road tech staff behind you making sure everything is working.

People today have almost unlimited resources upon which to draw but they do stupid things like use 31 presets on every track in their Pro Tools rig because they can not because they need them.

They have not learned the whys all they have learned is the hows.

Best of luck in trying to figure this all out.

Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 10:10 pm

I can tell you my story... I had a great advantage when I started working in audio: in my country few are great engineers with great sense of artistry, in the city I live in, EVERY so called "engineer" was either a DIY or a just-out-of-protools-recording-school type of "pro". So I just started out experimenting. My first recordings were crap of course I was totally aware of that, but I had some clients-pals that were willing to pay me to experiment recording their CDs, so i did (they had nothing to lose), I charged them about 5 bucks an hour or so, using nuendo 2 and a few mics I inherited from my brother in law (he worked at a radio station and owned 2 re27s and an AT4050, I bought 2 sm57´s and a couple of samsons to complete the rig). The best part is that at the time, many people liked the crap that I recorded and more clients came. So now I remodeled the studio, I have a 2 room (one live 17 square meter room and one 10 square meter isolation booth) studio with decent gear that I´ve been collecting these few years that passed by, and I still think I suck compared to the real pros (I only have like 3 or 4 years of experience). I´ve learned tons though, it´s not an easy business and I´ve improved a lot (obsessing with making better recordings every time). I´ve been experimenting with analog tracking and mastering, the new acoustics in the room help a whole lot and I´m really happy to know that I still have a bunch of new stuff to learn, but I can´t help hating when clients come and ask me stuff thinking that they know everything when they know absolutely nothing. Do you use pro tools? I´ve heard that everything sounds better in pro tools, that´s what the pro´s use, why doesn´t my Zoom 505 pedal sound like Zack Wilde´s guitar?, etc.

For example, the other day I was in a recording session that was turning out quite nicely, my Tascam 32 was in a friend´s house for repairs, so I used another friend´s Revox stereo reel to reel. I was taking my time tweaking the reel2reel and the eq for the bass tracks in the console to get "that" sound that we wanted when one of the guys in the band said "I would´ve recorded that in digital with my Pocket Pod (Line 6), it sounds just as good and it´s done in like 10 minutes, besides you have presets from all the famous guys and all the great amps". That really bothered me, but in the end it came out great, and the rest of the band was happy with the result, so in the end the results are the answer to stupidity, people that won´t pay for a great recording or a great master will feel really bad when they compare their bad recordings to great records, and they´ll learn from their experience like everyone else in this forum has.

By the way, there are NO good mastering engineers in this country, please move here and set up a good mastering studio you´ll have tons of work I promise, I have nowhere to send mastering gigs

Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 11:31 pm

maybe the problem with the Midwest music business is all the crappy music coming out of there. maybe i'm just an asshole

Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2007 7:30 am

On another forum a person recently said that mastering as we know it will probably go the way of the DODO bird fairly soon. There are too many places doing "mastering" with less and less clients going to them since everyone seems to be doing it themselves. He went on to state that there will only be some of the big guys left who will be around to do work for the big clients. It should be noted that he is one of the BIG GUYS so he maybe more than a little biased.

When I made the switch from classical recording engineer to mastering engineer 12 years ago and started my business things were indeed different from what they are today. There were more mid level clients, the material they brought was in most cases well done and most sessions were fun to do, it was real hands on mastering and people were looking to me to make their stuff sound GREAT before it was replicated.

Fast forward to today. There are less and less mid level clients, the material they bring in is not as well done as it was 12 years ago, much of what I do today is in the realm of "sonic surgery" to get the material to the place where I can master it and people have the expectation that no matter how bad something sounds coming in, after it is mastered it will sound "commercial" (what ever that term really means) and will be the loudest baddest thing out there.

Clients don't budget for the mastering and they plan CD release parties before their stuff is mastered and ready for replication or in some cases before they are done mixing the music. So when they come here they are out of time and money. They don't understand what mastering can and cannot do, they are argumentative, they are in a hurry and the sessions can be, at times, almost confrontational because they see for the first time that their stuff is poorly done and they are now out of time, out of money and upset that I cannot wave my "magic mastering wand" and make all the bad notes, poorly played and pre distorted music sound like what they think it should sound like.

A good friend of mine is a terrific mastering engineer. He is very talented and a GREAT musician in his own right. He started doing mastering about three years ago and his studio was doing VERY WELL. He was doing 4 or more projects a week and everything seemed to be going his way. Recently I spoke to him and he is now doing graphic design and print jobbing and is no longer doing much mastering. He was hit with the same problems that everyone else seems to be going though right now. Too bad because he was providing a GREAT service at a reasonable rate and yet people could not see that they were getting a good value for their money.

I have another good friend who owns the best acoustic recording studio around. He is another GREAT musician and engineer and his studio was custom built by his he and his father and sounds REALLY REALLY GREAT but he has had to go out and find other employment since the studio sits empty for much of the time. His rates are more than reasonable, he does a good job of advertising and he is a GREAT person to work with and has very good ears. For some reason, known only to them, people don't want to use him preferring to go to their local GC and lay down four to six thousand dollars for a bunch of mismatched equipment and try and do it themselves. One of his former clients called me up and wanted to bring in some material that they had done after spending a bundle at GC. Their material was pre distorted the mix was really really bad and the vocals were buried. I asked the client why they did not use my friend anymore and he said " because we can do it ourselves and save money" I beg to differ...

Where will this all end???? I am not a mind reader or a mystic but I too can see the writing on the wall. It is not a pretty picture but I think that we have sunk as low as we can go and so it is only up from here and hopefully people will start to understand that just because you have a
boat load of equipment you still have to have the experience and the knowledge to be able to use it and maybe things will turn around. I can only hope.

Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2007 9:53 am

Tom -

I feel your pain and most other "mid-level" mastering engineers as well.

After I shut down my commercial studio about a year and a half ago, I decided to take all the money from selling off the excess gear and buy a bunch of mastering stuff - Manley VariMu, Massive Passive, Crane Song Ibis, Prism Compressor and a few other things (to the tune of $15K - mostly used.)

Well, I finally just got rid of the last piece of high-end mastering gear.

I still do mastering, but almost every one of my clients wanted to do it all in the box. They'd ask why I was using old, outdated analog gear when plug-ins were the new rage. They'd want it pushed louder and louder and louder and frankly, the analog stuff just starts to sound too raw when pushed that loud (the digital stuff just sounds shitty.) I mean, I could push that VariMu to insanity, but the distortion became VERY clearly audible (likely around 10-15%), the Prism was a bit cleaner but when it started to distort, it was NOT pretty, much less so than the VariMu.

Now, I keep all my mastering in the box using UAD plug ins and a few others. The sad thing is, in doing this, I've only seen my business increase.

Another service I've been offering lately is mixing.

So many kids (or even adults) record a lot of tracks and the recordings themselves aren't half bad. It's the mixing that sucks. EQs and Compressors on every track, limited to hell, etc...

I have them bring me the tracks and I mix them for them and get much better sounds. Then, I break a cardinal rule and offer to master the tracks as well (or I've sent a few of the really good sounding clients up to Charlie Pilzer at Airshow Mastering just up the road).

The funny thing is, mixing is easy in comparison to mastering. It's sometimes a little more time consuming, but I have to say, you could almost follow a formula for the whole process whereas mastering is unique for each and every track. I have to often step away when I find myself falling in a rut - using the same chain all the time or the same EQ settings from track to track...

Mixing is where I'm taking my business right now and it seems to work pretty well.

Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 3:54 pm

Michael Fossenkemper wrote:

I personally think this kind of purchase is great. A few guys go out and buy a ton of gear (great for the economy) they dive in and record their CD. After they record their CD they listen to it. Needless to say the value of the experienced engineer goes up at this point. What better way to put a value on experience. They have their CD, they compare it to their friends CD who used someone who knew what they were doing.

Agreed Michael.

I always thought that; a newbie tries to master their own CD, screws it up, gives up, and takes it to a real ME to fix it, who tells them to take it to his AE friend to remix it, maybe even recut it. A few weeks later they come back to the ME for mastering.

btw I thought of a PT plug-in. It's for music that's had the life edited out of it with PT or Nuendo... overly tuned and quantized if you will. It's called the Intoxilizer... makes everyone sounds as they'd had a few drinks during the session and played really loose.

JT

Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 6:39 pm

Thomas W. Bethel wrote:

Quote:

I was in a studio in Kentucky. It was one of the best home studios I had ever seen. The acoustics were fantastic. The equipment was all nicely racked and the whole place looked (and that is the operative word) great but there was ONE small problem and that was that none of the equipment was hooked up to anything and all the wall plates in the studio had not been wired and there were no cables from the amplifier to the speakers. Turns out that the person who owned the studio in his house was doing this so he could go down and lay down some tracks when he wanted to but never got around to wiring up anything or using the studio. So here was a very nice studio completely useless and very beautiful to look at. According to him he had about 40K invested in the studio and the equipment and it all had a layer of dust on it.

Hmmm, must be nice!

I wanted to be a recording engineer since I was a teenager. I even took a couple of quarters of electronics school as a start. but I was married and the economics of life won out and I eventually gave up my dreams, gave up being a working musician, and even stopped playing or listening to music at all.

Fast Forward thrty years... Technology has now made it possible for me, with a relatively small $$ outlay compared to the $100 - $250K it took to build and outfit even the local studios I had recorded in, to record and mix music. Unlike many of the people who think they can "make it big in the music biz" with their DAW and Plugs, I just want to learn how to properly record and mix. I have no illusions of ever becoming a commercial studio engineer. In fact, a friend of a friend wants to bring her son over to record a vocal track to a pre-recorded CD, and I'm uncomfortable about that because I don't want the kid to be disappointed in his 1st "recording studio" experience. She even asked what I charged. I told her she could return the favor by singing on a couple of my tracks.

The point to all this rambling is that there are some of us out there that are willing to take the time to learn how to get the best sounds they can within the budget they have to work with. I was lucky enough to earn a little extra money this past year, so I could invest in some very budget gear to get me started. Now that I can actually record and mix sounds, I am trying to get the space to be better acousticaly. Then, as I earn a little extra money this next year, I'll invest in some better mics and preamps, continue to tune the rooms I record and mix in, continue to experiment with mic placement, and continue to read and try all the sugestions people in this forum offer.

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