To paraphrase Mark Twain "The Reports of of the death of the mastering engineer Were Greatly Exaggerated"

Enough said!

*popcorn*

Sorry but I don't see the entertainment in this at all. I think its pretty serious, sad and obvious its dying.
If you all don't start being more like Chuck, I still think it stands.

Pass the fries....

I have been a mastering engineer for 20+ years. I have owned my own mastering business for the past 20 years. There are more and more people doing "mastering" and less and less people needing their services. It is called over supply. Fees are way down as more and more people want to divvy up the pie and are willing to cut their fees down to almost nothing in the race for the bottom. When I started my mastering business 20 years ago there were two mastering engineers in this area, myself and my mentor. Within 100 miles of my mastering studio there are 600 "recording studios" and I believe everyone of them now offers "mastering" as an add on service. Couple that with the online mastering studios that are "advertising" their services on the WWW for $5 and $10 per song and you have a mess.

A lot of people do not know what mastering is all about and so they figure they will go the cheap route if they decide they need mastering (which they think is less and less needed in this day of direct posting to the WWW). They find someone on line who has a very nice website and who seems to have all "A" list equipment and they send off their magnum opus to be mastered. What they don't know is that the pictures of the mastering room is usually stolen from someone's website and these people are actually doing the mastering in their bedroom or basement with nothing but some computer speakers and some hacked plugins. If people would stop and think for a while they would realize that it is impossible to have $50K to $150K worth of equipment and another $50K plus in the room and the speakers and selling their services for $5 per song. It really makes no financial sense to anyone who knows about making a living but there are some very gullible people in the world looking for cheap mastering.

There are the heavy hitters like Glen Meadows, Bob Ludwig, Howie Weinberg, Ted Jensen, et al, all of whom are charging a lot for their work and doing a very good job with the mastering that they do. They work for big labels and "A" list artist and they can keep up their very expensive setups by catering to this high end clientele.

In the middle you have a lot of people who do a great job with mastering but are not "recognized" as "famous mastering engineers" because they don't have a lot of "A" list clients nor do they charge a premium for their services. THESE are the people who are having the most problems with staying in business. They are not the top and they are not bottom feeders so they get the "B" and "C" list clients who really appreciated their work but the artist name is not household word.

I think that in the next ten years there will be a culling of mid-level mastering engineers and what you will basically have is the BIG MASTERING engineers still working with "A" list clients and the bottom feeders doing mastering for next to nothing. I hope and pray I am wrong but that is the way I see it.

Good luck to everyone doing mastering. FWIW

Thomas W. Bethel, post: 425987, member: 4527 wrote: When I started my mastering business 20 yeas ago there were two mastering engineers in this area, myself and my mentor. Within 100 miles of my mastering studio there are 600 "recording studios" and I believe everyone of them offers "mastering" as an add on service.

WOW!:cry:

Thomas W. Bethel, post: 425987, member: 4527 wrote: Couple that with the online mastering studios that are "advertising" their services on the WWW for $5 and $10 per song and you have a mess.

Well, we just had someone here offering to Master for free a day ago. There ya go...

Thomas W. Bethel, post: 425987, member: 4527 wrote: If people would stop and think for a while they would realize that it is impossible to have $50K to $150K worth of equipment and another $50K plus in the room and the speakers and selling their services for $5 per song. It really makes no financial sense but there are some very gullible people in the world looking for cheap mastering.

If its any support, its not much different for mixing because no one has any money. I turn down more work then I could ever do , but not because I want to, I would go broke if I didn't own my studio clear and have an actual paying job today.

Thomas W. Bethel, post: 425987, member: 4527 wrote: In the middle you have a lot of people who do a great job with mastering but are not "recognized" as "famous mastering engineers" because they don't have a lot of "A" list clients nor do they charge a premium for their services. THESE are the people who are having the most problems with staying in business. They are not the top and they are not bottom feeders so they get the "B" and "C" list clients who really appreciated their work but the artist name is not household word.

Indeed

Thomas W. Bethel, post: 425987, member: 4527 wrote: I think that in the next ten years there will be a culling of mid-level mastering engineers and what you will basically have is the BIG MASTERING engineers still working with "A" list clients and the bottom feeders doing mastering for next to nothing. I hope and pray I am wrong but that is the way I see it.

Good luck to everyone doing mastering.

I agree.

Thomas, please use our Resource, its been paid for from the last Master you did for me.:love:

Thanks Chris. I will...

I think the only people who are making any money today in audio are the people who are selling equipment. But even they are under the gun. It is looking like Guitar Center is going to be going through some very difficult times in the next few months. They have some outstanding loans to pay and they don't have the money to pay them. Some of the bigger audio equipment manufacturers are worried that with GC falling on hard times they will not be able to push as much equipment as they have in the past few years. I don't know the strength of places like Sweetwater and Full Compass but I imagine they are not doing as well as they did a couple of years ago. Too many people are out of work or working below their abilities and many people are just holding on and not purchasing new gear because they cannot afford to upgrade. The US government says things here are getting better but, at least for me, I am not seeing that happening and a lot of my friends, who are working day jobs are not getting raises and their benefits are being cut or they are having to pay more into their medical care. Only time will tell what is going to really transpire,

Gear pimps are dying too, Thomas. In the last year the used market prices have dropped to half the value of what something retails for a year ago. Its not getting better, in fact, its getting worse.

If you've been following some of the forum cleanup (pruning old forums full of dead links here) I am completely blown away on how many people that were in this business a decade ago are no longer. We had literally thousands of posts with astonishing amounts of dead links, dead domains, dead member accounts, broken emails and images to hundreds of companies including studios... I cleaned out just under 40,000 posts and close to 20 thousand members who are no longer.

What this does say to me, the cream is rising...

Thomas W. Bethel, post: 425995, member: 4527 wrote: It is looking like Guitar Center is going to be going through some very difficult times in the next few months. They have some outstanding loans to pay and they don't have the money to pay them

typical mode of operation for Bain Capital ... buy a company hock, it to the gills, take the cash and let the company suffer.

Chris, post: 425996, member: 1 wrote: used market prices have dropped to half the value of what something retails for

it's benn taht way as long as i can remember. i never pay more than 50% of retail for used stuff.

Not for high end gear Kurt. the cream gear holds its value but in the last 8 months its dropping and not even selling. People do not have money or ITB is just taken another leap of faith.

even the good stuff .... never more than 50% of mslrp. otherwise i don't buy. the real test of value is what you can sell for in a pinch.

Chris, post: 425996, member: 1 wrote: Gear pimps are dying too, Thomas. In the last year the used market prices have dropped to half the value of what something retails for a year ago. Its not getting better, in fact, its getting worse.

If you've been following some of the forum cleanup (pruning old forums full of dead links here) I am completely blown away on how many people that were in this business a decade ago are no longer. We had literally thousands of posts with astonishing amounts of dead links, dead domains, dead member accounts, broken emails and images to hundreds of companies including studios... I cleaned out just under 40,000 posts and close to 20 thousand members who are no longer.

What this does say to me, the cream is rising...

Chris,

Sounds like a lot of work. Thanks for doing all of that. I wish all forums would be as proactive.

The average life of a small studio here in these parts is about 6 months to a year. The person running the studio has a lot of gear that he or she has accumulated over the years. They decide that they will open a studio and get some money back for all that gear. They do not have the business skills to run the studio or the time and energy to put into it so after 6 months to a year it founders and they either sell off the gear or it goes back to being a "home studio". I have seen this again and again. Most times the push to open a "real" studio comes from the person's "significant other" because they suddenly realize there is a lot of money tied up in the equipment and they should be getting something for it. All the larger studios here and about have gone dark or are working with only one room out of three. One would think that the city that has the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would have at least one "world class" studio but that is not the case.

Thanks again for all the work you do to make this a GREAT forum....

There are still some engineers who don't do their own mastering, who still send their work out to M.E.'s - but that list is a short one.

Thomas mentioned 600 "studios" in the Northern Ohio area... but maybe some didn't catch the quotation marks when he used the word. "Studio" implies that there are that many people who own recording gear, who record others for money. I suppose that in the broader sense, they could be considered studios, if we also considered those who owned computers with a word processing program to be "writers". What he's saying is that there are a lot of people doing it - that doesn't mean that they are doing it right, or that they are true engineers.

Nevertheless, they do impact the business. Mastering isn't any different than recording or mixing in that regard. Everyone who has a computer with an audio capture device a copy of PT are considering themselves to be "professional" studios... and the same goes for mastering. There are people out there who will take a song, import it into their computer, throw a Waves L2 limiter on it, gain it up, and call it "mastered".

I worked on a project a few years ago, mixing tracks recorded by a band in a home "studio". I did the best I could with what I had to work with. When I was finished, I asked them who they were going to use for mastering, and that if they hadn't thought about that, I had some names for them. (Thomas was one of the names). In the end, they sent it to one of those "five dollars a song" places, and the end result was a squashed mess, uber-loud, bordering on distortion, dynamics totally wiped out, and, they had also re-EQ'd all the mixes I had done. There are several obvious downsides to this of course, but there was one that effected me personally - you see, my name was now on an album that sounded terrible.

Very few people listening to that mess would be able to make the distinction between what I had done, and what the "mastering engineer" had done.

My point? These cheap "mastering services" can damage more than just the audio. They also have the potential to damage the reputations of others who were involved in the project. The album - not to mention my reputation - would have been better off if I had just done the mastering myself, and I'm not even a mastering engineer.

FWIW

d.

The 600 "studios" were places that had a presence on line or could be contacted via email or telephone or had real street addresses. I sent them all a nice letter and a brochure about our mastering services but never heard from any of them.

I can tell you horror stories after horror stories about artists who decided to go with the cheapest solution to getting their stuff mastered. Many times after they have had their mastering done by the mix engineer, looking for some additional cash, or an on line service for $50 to $100 they come away with their music sounding squashed and shrill and basically unlistenable. Then they bring that to me and ask me to make it sound good, which is impossible. When asked why they decided to get their stuff mastered on the cheap after spending weeks and months doing their album they say "well I thought all mastering was the same and some people just overcharged for their services" When I tell the artist that if they want this to sound good then I have to start with the mixed materials and not what someone has done to it they usually get upset saying they don't have the money.

There also seems to be a growing trend for some mix engineers to "pre-master" the material which makes my job just that much harder. They say they are doing this to please their client who wants to listen to what their material will sound like after it is mastered. I usually ask for the "un-mastered" version but in a lot of cases what is saved is the two track mastered version and there is no un-mastered version.

I just did an album for a repeat jazz client. It was very well recorded by a professional recording engineer and what I got to master was very well done. After mastering the CD has topped the CD charts in Ohio for the last few weeks and the artist is ecstatic. This client always tells me that he gets his mastering money back very quickly and it is worth it to him to get the stuff mastered professionally. I wish more people would feel this way but these are hard times for musicians and they seem to think anywhere they can save money is worth it to them. Unfortunately getting bad quality mastering done for a cheap price is not where to save money.

Maybe someday they will learn...

Just to put some light on what may have seemed flippant from me :). I think we've all been under siege in music since the dawn of public internet. And cheaper gear with DAWs.

The music industry is like a game of 52 pickup, except, a tornado took the cards and blew them all over creation. I've never made a living off music on its own (small 6 mth tour aside). I feel for those that do.

Tony

Thomas W. Bethel, post: 426025, member: 4527 wrote: There also seems to be a growing trend for some mix engineers to "pre-master" the material which makes my job just that much harder. They say they are doing this to please their client who wants to listen to what their material will sound like after it is mastered.

This is pretty much how the trend of putting GR on the 2-bus started - years ago. Engineers would throw a comp or limiter on the stereo bus, just to give their clients an "idea" of how it would sound after is was mastered. I did this myself, many times.
But very few of these engineers (myself included) would send that limited mix to the M.E., instead,they would send the mix they had before they strapped a limiter across the 2.
Putting the limiter on the mix was for no other reason than to let the client hear the similarity to it being mastered.

The problem really started, and became noticeable, when these processing tools became available to even the smallest facilities, and in being so readily available, they ended up in the hands of people who didn't really know how to use them... and more and more started sending out the post mix - the mix with the limiting - to be mastered... which is when ME's started receiving squashed mixes, pushed balls to the wall at -0.5, (or sometimes even with digital-overs) leaving the M.E. no room to work, or as Thomas mentioned, receiving a 2 mix that is unrecoverable.

In doing so, whether they know it or not, the "studio" has already 'mastered' that content - and very often have done so very poorly.

So now, instead of doing what a mastering engineer should be doing - which is to take a great mixes, and make those mixes sound even better, and for the album to flow nicely - and just as importantly, translational to virtually every playback system - the mastering engineer is now forced instead into doing the job of damage control ... attempting the recovery of lost sonics, dynamics, everything that makes a mix sound good.

It's like trying to un-bake a cake.

Another thing that was common - and has all but disappeared - was the ongoing relationship that recording and mixing engineers developed with the mastering engineer, and vice versa.
Both were familiar with each others' work, and each trusted the other to do their jobs in a way that was most beneficial to the record.

Anytime I was sending projects out to be mastered at a facility I hadn't used before, I always spoke withe the M.E. first... not only to tell them what I needed, but to make sure I knew what they needed.
I gave them exactly what they needed to do their jobs in the best way possible. And, over a period of time, a relationship was developed, and I didn't need to call them and ask for details anymore, because I knew what they needed, and they knew that whatever I sent them would be what they needed.

I haven't worked with Thomas in quite a few years, ( he doesn't remember... LOL, but he did several projects for me) and everything I ever sent him always came back sounding great.
Smooth sounding, nice warmth and punch, translating very well to every playback system I played it through - and at the same time - and this is a biggie for me - he also respected and treated the dynamic range beautifully.

Part of that is to his credit as an M.E. - and part of that credit also goes to me ... because I gave him what he needed to do his job the best that he could. ;)

FWIW

d.

^^^ Thanks for the nice comments.

I always try and respect what the artist wants and I always like to work with the mix engineer to do a better job on the mastering. Some people make it easy some are less willing to let go of their "baby".

I did a job for a well known jazz musician and the material was recorded and mixed in New York. It was very well done. I tried contacting he mix engineer after I received his mixes but he was always "unavailable" for my phone calls and never returned my emails. I did the mastering the way the client said he wanted it done but afterwards the recording and mix engineer was not pleased. The CD had an initial run of 1000 copies the way I mastered it and then I redid the mastering the way the mix engineer said he wanted it. The next run was for 200 CDs and that is the last I heard of the project. The artist seemed pleased with both masterings but did not want to upset the mix engineer and was willing to pay for and reissue the CD in a limited run. A good mix engineer is the best and someone who is willing to work with me on getting a perfect mastering is even better. When you have good songs, well recorded and mixed and mastered you have a winning combination.

Buy the way the CD for the jazz artist was well reviewed but the reviewers only got the first pressing. I have never gotten a copy of the second CD.

FWIW and lets give a big cheer for the mix engineers who can literally make or break a song and work under lots of time pressures and with artistic temperaments that can be challenging and always do a GREAT job every time.

My hat is off to them!!!

What? You have a problem mastering mixes from rooms like this?

bouldersound, post: 426047, member: 38959 wrote: What? You have a problem mastering mixes from rooms like this?

No if the engineer can do a good job more power to him or her. I would find it impossible to work in that area but...

That's a big if.

bouldersound, post: 426047, member: 38959 wrote: What? You have a problem mastering mixes from rooms like this?

A Classic,
and the same guy who sits in this room is most likely going to end up on GearSlutz telling people those speakers are to mid forward lol. Or bass traps are BS. Or, he loves the sound of a particular preamp.:cautious:

A Classic bolder, thanks for adding this. Who's room is this btw? If its one you are in, forgive my smearing around it.

PS,
Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Wondering what you guys think about re mastering? In alot of cases I like it. But It would also be weird to me if someone re mixed my work every 15 years.

Chris, post: 426053, member: 1 wrote: A Classic,
and the same guy who sits in this room is most likely going to end up on GearSlutz telling people those speakers are to mid forward lol. Or bass traps are BS. Or, he loves the sound of a particular preamp.:cautious:

A Classic bolder, thanks for adding this. Who's room is this btw? If its one you are in, forgive my smearing around it.

PS,
Sorry, I couldn't resist.

It's just some local guy with a home setup having some fun, nobody I know. I really can't blame him for doing what he has to do to record, he just doesn't have quite the right space for it. He has a bigger room with an acoustic kit, electronic kit, some amps etc. If I were him I'd move out there to mix and just use the control room just for tracking.

But I've had to work in similar, if not as extreme, rooms. I've found that I tend to mix vocals and anything panned center too hot without the crossbleed of properly arranged speakers. And who knows what the bass is doing in there.

bouldersound, post: 426047, member: 38959 wrote: What? You have a problem mastering mixes from rooms like this?

I think that photo wins the award for the smallest "production space" I've ever seen, and brother, I've seen plenty in my journeys as a "home studio" consultant.

Man, I'd go crazy working in that space.... I have no idea how someone could ever get mixes out of that area. Maybe some guys can... I couldn't.

My recommendation at that point would be to get a set of really nice headphones and ditch the monitors altogether.

LOL.. I see that whoever owns this area actually has 2 different sets of NF's... as if having that second pair would make any difference.

;)

kmetal, post: 426055, member: 37533 wrote: Wondering what you guys think about re mastering? In a lot of cases I like it. But It would also be weird to me if someone re mixed my work every 15 years.

I guess you have to ask the question.."why does this need to be remastered?" If there is a technical reason maybe it is a good idea but if the original album is well done why redo it? I think record companies like to "re-master" old albums and put them out hoping that people will buy the new album to see what changes have been done. There is a record label called "Blue Note" which reissues their catalog from time to time and all the really do is change the order of the songs. I have a couple of their albums and it is basically the same album with different art work and the songs have been changed around to make it look like a different album. Since CDs seem to be dying a slow death maybe remastering will no longer be done since there is no profit in redoing compete albums. I hope this helps!

bouldersound, post: 426070, member: 38959 wrote: It's just some local guy with a home setup having some fun, nobody I know. I really can't blame him for doing what he has to do to record, he just doesn't have quite the right space for it.

bouldersound, post: 426070, member: 38959 wrote: But I've had to work in similar, if not as extreme, rooms.

indeed! When I was a young man, a space under a stairwell was a dream come true. Having my own cave so I could begin working on music got me here. I can relate.

DonnyThompson, post: 426072, member: 46114 wrote: My recommendation at that point would be to get a set of really nice headphones and ditch the monitors altogether.

absolutely. Headphones and Avatones is what I'd be using.

I'll take unfinished open space any time I can over a spare room, I didn't always think that way. Considering I don't own any dedicated spaces, I can't comment on that setup other than, I hope he charges accordingly. Definatley would be doing car checks, if I was working out of that roo .

Thomas W. Bethel, post: 426079, member: 4527 wrote: I guess you have to ask the question.."why does this need to be remastered?" ...

Because it's not squashed enough, obviously. I kid...