Well I will have to agree on a 50/50 standpoint. Yes, the room does matter, and yes equipment is important but then again they are not. You see you may have a bad room, but if you know your room you can achieve great mixes. For ex. If an engineer knows that his room adds too much bass, he can compensate for that and still achieve the goal. Remember that half of the mastering equipment they are using now did not exist back in early 80s and those recordings still sounded great. Plugins can at least sound that good. (IF YOU MIX YOUR MUSIC WELL THAT IS) Mixing is what is really important.

All and all remember. Equipment doesn't master songs, people do. I promise you, take an experienced engineer and place him in a bad room and his ears will still prevail before too long. Most engineer test their work in settings outside of studio anyway which helps them compensate for the room. No room is perfect and even professional room can make the mistake of over perfection, and tailor the sound too much.

I will agree there. Some artist have already mastered the song in their heads and do not know that it cannot sound that way in reality and therefore master it themselves and convince themselves that is is great

CalvinB, post: 392655 wrote: Well I will have to agree on a 50/50 standpoint. Yes, the room does matter, and yes equipment is important but then again they are not. You see you may have a bad room, but if you know your room you can achieve great mixes. For ex. If an engineer knows that his room adds too much bass, he can compensate for that and still achieve the goal. Remember that half of the mastering equipment they are using now did not exist back in early 80s and those recordings still sounded great. Plugins can at least sound that good. (IF YOU MIX YOUR MUSIC WELL THAT IS) Mixing is what is really important.

All and all remember. Equipment doesn't master songs, people do. I promise you, take an experienced engineer and place him in a bad room and his ears will still prevail before too long. Most engineer test their work in settings outside of studio anyway which helps them compensate for the room. No room is perfect and even professional room can make the mistake of over perfection, and tailor the sound too much.

Yes this is precisely what I'm getting at really, it's about the recording and the mix! You need something good to start with. I recently got given to me a poorly recorded track with the timing off in places and pitch problems. So firstly I had to make it sound good in the mix which was the hardest mix I've ever done. Even after working on it, I still thought it was shocking for quality and that's after I'd used all high end plugs and hardware on it. And then to my surprise the band thought it sounded great?! So this reinforces the point below by Calvin. The band thinks that music sounds great but of course they don't hear it like we do as an outsider and someone whose listening with fresh ears.

While I wholeheartedly agree on the principals for a "legal" room as Paramadman laid out, I suspect that most The Beatles recordings were originally "Mastered" in a small booth. Of course the recordings sounded stellar in the first place. In those days, "mastering" was more of a transfer process than an creative one. Do no harm was the paradigm. Limiting and Eq were applied only to accommodate the limitations of vinyl with the requirements for 45 singles and 33&1/3 Albums being different.

As analog vinyl gave way to digital CDs the Mastering profession had to redefine its self in order to survive. I cannot fault those in the business for doing just as I have always advocated for all of the recording business that being we need to keep it an expensive proposition in order to weed out the talentless and the weak hearted, not only for our own personal survival but for the survival of the art form and business altogether. After all just look what cheap "affordable" gear has done to the recording studio model in the past 15 years.

Ooh, nice one there Kurt, couldn't agree more.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I love Kurt's avatar. I mean you can hear him! I look at the picture and I read the words. It's perfect. You can't mess with that kind of straightforward thinking. Because if you did you'd be nothing more than a sitcom. Kurt isn't a sitcom. He's the real deal. He reminds me of a lot of the old engineers at NBC. When I got on board 30 years ago, these guys had already been there between 30 and 40 years. They certainly weren't up to my standards but I learned a whole hell of a lot from those crusty old characters. They've all passed on but even in their passing they've left behind a couple of new old crusty characters that got in on the tail end of the golden age of studio recording and broadcasting. And it's us. Yet we're still not old and tired enough to stop squabbling what is the best blah blah thingamajig Doo Hickey, gizmo.

Wish I still had my Western Electric 23 C. Just a fond memory. Good thing I have a picture of me behind it at nine.
Mx. Remy Ann David

I was reading an interesting article the other day about Jack Whites new record "Blunderbus". Recorded all analog, on two Ampex (two inch!) 8 tracks running at at 7 1/2 ips. It was mastered by Bob Ludwig, again all analog for the vinyl release.

One of Whites requests for the mastering was NO COMPRESSION! Another was no digital processing. It was all done with editing, Massive Passive EQs and level rides.

Obviously tape makes the need for compression less and these guys are pro's. But I'm not big on most compression or aggressive compression anyway, except for drums and the pop culture, but I do love my LA2A's for the sound they add and not necessarily the compression. They glue things together like nothing I've experienced.
I think the newbies use all this compression because their gear sucks, their techniques lacks, their converters are edgy and lack headroom and if you have 20 instances of 10 flavours of plug-in compressors, you must need them. Plus its hip to compress certain styles of music regardless so all this is is another story don't you think so?

But, I like hearing about analog and vinyl indeed! What goes around, comes around.

I just bought a new Techniques AT-LP1240-USB / analog turntable and a few cartridges (AT440MLa, AT120E/T). I'm loving it. But the sound I get now is so superior to what I have on vinyl. The big difference I'm hearing, missing today are transients that add life. I think this next decade will change that because we have the best of both worlds in the hybrid studio.

yeah I'm a dinosaur

You will need a very high end turntable and cartage and pristine vinyl (no scratches) to really hear what the hub bub about vinyl is.

I still prefer to listen to Led Zepplin or old Cream records on my "record player" rather than a CD. It makes me feel better . The reasons for this are plentiful and over debated. I just know I like vinyl / analog better than CDs.

I'm old, just shoot me! duh

kurt

Look you guys... back in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, RCA Studios in NYC had a series of something like 15 small cubicle like secretarial like office spaces, each one with a disc cutting lathe and either an RCA or Ampex reel to reel deck and a couple of speakers. There were a couple of limiters and a couple of EQ's and that's it. The Big Studio still looked like those early pictures with those huge and some movable poly-cylindrical, natural wood diffusers. Large enough for a Symphony Orchestra, 200 voice chorus and an audience. And just like NBC Studios, it was a huge box suspended within a huge box. And then, at the recording studio, I noticed there was this typical small wooden ancillary symphonic orchestral, percussion instrument storage box, shoved into the corner of that gargantuan studio, that still had stenciled on the side "NBC Symphony Toscanini" still, in 1981. I got a kick out of that because my mom, was a Metropolitan Opera star, late 1940s, also sang with the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Toscanini. It was then I realized what goes around comes around and there I was. In RCA Studios that was in the process of closing within the coming year. I was able to walk around it since I was there for both a rehearsal and because I was a new NBC employee and we were all working for the same company, RCA, all I needed to do was show my ID which read NBC broadcast engineering, NABET and I could play with any of the equipment that wasn't currently in use. And since I wasn't the one doing the rehearsing, my partner was, I had an entire day to kill. I was on a weeklong vacation from NBC-TV, Washington DC. Though I could not get into an SNL show, dammit.

Strict fire codes are heavily enforced.
Mx. Remy Ann David

I have read / heard somewhere, that at Abbey Road during The Beatles tenure that "Balance Engineers" were the top of the heap.

Apperantly EMI put a lot more emphasis on getting the recordings right in the first place. The order of accent as an engineer at EMI was tape operator, then transfer engineer (mastering) the balance engineer I think. I am not sure if it was tape then mastering or the other way around. Probably tape / then transfer, so the balance enginners would understand what they could and couldn't get away with when it came time to cut the record. But it does seems EMI considered mastering as not as critical as getting the mix/balance correct in the first place.

At Abbey Road / EMI they had 1" 4 track. After all four tracks were recorded they would bounce to a second machine in what was termed an alarmingly quick mix. It was important for them to work quickly with accurate results. Can you imagine having George Martin and "The Beatles" standing around twiddeling their fingers while you did a bounce? Talk about pressure!

Further overdubs were then put down with the bass going down last. No wonder McCartney came up with such great melodic bass parts filling in just the right places.

It was the same at other studios too. From studios like Mussel Shoals, Stax, Sun and The Quonset Hut in Nashville, there are stories where the masters were on the way to the pressing plant the same day of the session with the records on the air within days of being recorded. In those days not all that much emphasis on the mastering stages. It was a process of transferring the final mix to disk with as little loss as possible and not so much a creative process.

My guess is the need for further tweaking in the mastering stage didn't arise until the "dippy hippies" took over the recording studios in the 60's and 70's. I'm thinking there was a real need for correctve surgery to some of the really horrible high budget recordings being produced by people who really didn't understand the requirments of the mediums.

Shoot me, I'm just an old work horse who's outlived his usefullness.

kurt

I remember meeting some of the old-school Mastering Engineers. They were all in their 60s and beyond. And nobody of that age has acute hearing at that age anymore. Because it really was nothing more than a technical transfer process. And they were making sure not to waste any lacquer masters. I even knew some engineers working for CBS Masterworks that were so hard of hearing and so old, they couldn't hear the phone in the control room ringing off the hook. And that blew me away. OMG! They're deaf! And this was a primary recording engineer for CBS Masterworks label. I even knew this guy who had been a music teacher in the school systems until his retirement. He loved audio. Had lovely equipment. And then showed me his brand-new fangled, state-of-the-art, computer-controlled, hearing aids! Frank was trying to tell me that he had perfectly flat hearing response. I told him, "Frank, you can't be any kind of a good audio engineer with any kind of hearing aids." He flatly disagreed. LOL well good for him. Yeah that's the engineer I want to have do all my recordings. I'm sad to say that shortly thereafter, Frank went to join Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Jim Morrison.

Can you really take your hearing aids with you?
Mx. Remy Ann David

Well, I'm 55 soon and still hear pretty damn good. Good enough at least to hear the phone lol.

Yeah, I couldn't believe after the phone rang 10 times. I told him his phone was ringing. He looked surprised and thanked me and then picked up the phone. Me, him and the phone where the only things in the room at the time, LOL. To me he appeared to be over 65? Good old CBS union guy. It was pretty funny seeing the A 2, standing on the Carnegie Hall stage, looking at the surveillance camera with a phone (ringdown intercom) up to his ear waiting for the recording engineer to pick up. The recording engineer was doodling around with some equipment and notes while sitting at the console, never looking up at the monitor during the break. I thought this was maybe some kind of TV sitcom? I was only an observer and really wasn't sure if I should have told him his phone was ringing? At least he seemed pleased when I told him. You know we've got to help the elderly LMAO. Even when they're making recordings LOL.

57 in a month and a half.
Mx. Remy Ann David

I understand that a lot of older sound engineers blew their hearing by not paying attention to the volume in the headphones. I'm afraid that the iPod ear-buds are cooking the hearing of a lot of potential mastering engineers these days. Maybe that's why I'm hearing so much of this slammed, ultra loud, limited to square wave "mastering" on amateur Cds these days.

audiokid, post: 385848 wrote: Good thread though and I share your dream while doing other things to survive. Family and parenting has kept me from diving in full time again. Back in the day when I was full time however, the business was thriving and money was never a problem.

I want to lease a building, partner up with another engineer and do it again but fear the worst as the passion burns inside me. I own all my gear this time round so it wouldn't be difficult to make it work if there was in fact people prepared to pay us. So I like this thread indeed.

I echo moonbaby, what sparked your thread?
Do you really need a 30 ft deep room for mastering?

I’m sorry that I didn’t get around to a full explanation for why I recommend 30 feet in depth nor did I, on second thought, get around to mentioning that the room should also have a width of 25 - 35 feet as well. This is needful as it allows one to construct broadband absorption traps (which work as “true” bass traps down to below 25Hz) and go on from there to reintroduce reflections into the room with a combination of splayed partitions of standard wood/drywall/etc construction and diffusors of various types. This permits easy control of those necessary reflections which allow for easy speech within a control room through the proper placement of diffusive elements. For this purpose my first choices would be to use a combination of 2D (2-dimentional primitive root) diffusors and 1D QRD's (1-dimentional quadratic residue diffusors) each strategically placed around the rooms surfaces. These elements are most important on the back wall and should cover about 2/3 of the rear partitions surface area and can be QRD, polycylindrical elements, or broad bandwidth 2D primitive root devices. The diffusive elements needing to be placed above the mix position have many possible choices but should allow room for necessary lighting. My choice for those floated above the mix position would be ones such as RPG's Omnifussor , [="http://www.rpginc.com/product_Omniffusor.cfm"]Omniffusor Product Detail[/]="http://www.rpginc.c…"]Omniffusor Product Detail[/], BAD Panels, [[url=http://="http://www.rpginc.c…"]BAD EXPO Product Detail[/]="http://www.rpginc.c…"]BAD EXPO Product Detail[/], or their Diviewsor^® 1D Acrylic Sound Diffusor [="http://www.rpginc.com/product_Diviewsor.cfm"]Diviewsor Product Detail[/]="http://www.rpginc.c…"]Diviewsor Product Detail[/] which have the great advantage of being transparent to light thus allowing for lighting to be placed behind them, or one of which I am particularly fond their Harmonix™ G unit [[url=http://="http://www.rpginc.c…"]Harmonix™ G Product Detail[/]="http://www.rpginc.c…"]Harmonix™ G Product Detail[/]. There are some units made by ART that a quite useful such as their translucent unit called The Transfusor® [="http://www.acousticsfirst.com/diffuser-art-diffusor-transfusor.htm"]The Transfusor - Translucent Art Diffusor - Acoustics First - Acoustical Materials for Sound Control, Noise Elimination, and Acoustic Enhancement or Suppression[/]="http://www.acoustic…"]The Transfusor - Translucent Art Diffusor - Acoustics First - Acoustical Materials for Sound Control, Noise Elimination, and Acoustic Enhancement or Suppression[/] designed to fit neatly into a standard T-Bar grid as well as their old standby’s the Model W (W standing for wood), [[url=http://="http://www.acoustic…"]Art Diffusor Model W - Acoustics First - Acoustical Materials for Sound Control, Noise Elimination, and Acoustic Enhancement or Suppression[/]="http://www.acoustic…"]Art Diffusor Model W - Acoustics First - Acoustical Materials for Sound Control, Noise Elimination, and Acoustic Enhancement or Suppression[/], their polymeric Model E (same as the Model W except for material construction) [="http://www.acousticsfirst.com/diffuser-art-diffusor-model-e.htm"]Art Diffusor Model E - Acoustics First - Acoustical Materials for Sound Control, Noise Elimination, and Acoustic Enhancement or Suppression[/]="http://www.acoustic…"]Art Diffusor Model E - Acoustics First - Acoustical Materials for Sound Control, Noise Elimination, and Acoustic Enhancement or Suppression[/] or their Model C (also designed to fit in a standard T-Bar grid) [[url=http://="http://www.acoustic…"]Art Diffusor Model C - Acoustics First - Acoustical Materials for Sound Control, Noise Elimination, and Acoustic Enhancement or Suppression[/]="http://www.acoustic…"]Art Diffusor Model C - Acoustics First - Acoustical Materials for Sound Control, Noise Elimination, and Acoustic Enhancement or Suppression[/]. Other options include such units as ½ round polycylindrical elements which can be placed above the mix position or, if your budget is limited, you could also chose to hang an absorbent cloud (2” OC 703/705 or equivalent semi-rigid fiberglass boards) floated above the mix position to prevent short path reflections confusing matters and hung from wire across the entire width of the console. Each of these treatments by the way should be place above the full width of the console to prevent unnecessary coloration or image shift as you move your body to reach this or that knob on your console.

The laws of physics are hard to get around and this is nowhere more true than the physics of controlling low frequency modal buildups in a small room. If you wish to make a room as sonically flat as is humanly possible—an absolute must in a mastering lab—you must have full control over the rooms properties and physics tells us there are a limited number of ways to do this. The only certain way is to “erase” the room with 4 foot deep traps all around the room, and above the mix position at least as wide as your console. This leaves you with a blank slate from which to work thereby allowing you to return sound energy to the room in a controlled fashion. Although methods do exist by which one can attempt to do it with panels of lesser depth such as Helmholtz resonators, membrane traps of various types or any of several commercially available panels whose claims of control below this or that frequency are (frankly) hard to verify, each—even when optimally implemented—have weaknesses that, if one wishes true accuracy, grossly outweigh their benefits.

Accuracy comes from starting with that blank slate and then ADDING reflections in a controlled fashion. Anything less than this is not only more difficult it is ultimately more expensive because when your Helmholtz units cure one problem you will find that there is another one needing to be addressed. In the end you spending far more money building panels to correct for modal problems one at a time than you ever could by first building your blank slate…

Paramadman :smile:

good post!
here - (Dead Link Removed)
is interesting post about using VPR panels,
it's interesting idea to have a panel not much more bigger then 'standard' 1200x600x10mm
it's a sheet of steel (1-2.5mm) glued or not to very dense foam (isoBond)
the beauty about this construction is it can tame down to 32Hz!! and it's broadband absorber
where helmholtz or other tuned absorbers are much bigger and tuned for certain freq

it's so far best solution for trapping below 100Hz in small room, and for kind of budget money to build

This is one of the longest running threads on this site. What was the question again? LOL.

My eyes are blue and the other stuff Brown.
Mx. Remy Ann David

By the time I finally get to a point where all my mixing/mastering experiences make me a mastering engineer... I won't be able to hear it!! That's why in 30+ years the music will be so bad that I won't want to hear it anyway. Sorry to be such a sourpuss but I hate music lately!! I get more thrills watching live cuts on youtube than crap I hear coming out of studios these days. I don't think we can blame the engineers. Mastering something that is already Square... Hmmmm? Why bother? I did actually master a live recording a month or two ago. That was fun!! I am gonna do a better job on it for free since it was not the best. But the source was not a square wave and the output was not brick limited. That is key to having the ability to use the volume knob. The volume "Knob" is something that does not exist on an iPod. So therefore it is outdated... Just like mastering your own bad mix. If you spend time mixing then send it to a mastering engineer. If you do it yourself expect no mastery of anything. Although it won't need a volume knob and it will sound rather decent on a phone or iPod.

Yup this thread has been building up into a frenzy now!! Just remember that your ears are the most important part of any project whether it is mixing or mastering. I always hear other peoples stuff and think WOW!! It sounds so different than my approach. Maybe my approach is wrong? Maybe I am the iconic symbol of a bad engineer. As you think those thoughts you start to break out of the funk that you are stuck. Never think your stuff don't stink.

I play a nylon string Ovation acoustic guitar country/folk style for the most part and contribute occasional tracks to a popular collaboration site. Lately most songs sound fine until some mastering whiz gets a hold of the final product and puts it through a "mastering" sausage machine plugin of some sort and square-waves the whole thing. When you can make a nylon string guitar sound like something that can clean earwax out of your head, something is wrong!

So yea, if you think "loud" is the goal, home studio mastering is problematic.

My mastering actually has real dynamics to it. No look ahead, brickwall blah blah. Precisely selected attack times and release times help to preserve a natural feel. While parallel processing also helps to retain some musical goodness and listenability.

Doing your own mastering is a bad idea if you just stick to your main pair of monitors. You need multiple pairs of monitors and in different acoustical environments. From your control room, to your bedroom, to your basement, to your living room and your car. And then on some of your friends and retail store systems. It needs to sound the same whether it's coming out of a single 4 inch speaker or whether it is coming out of a huge pair of Westlake's. And then there is that everyday average system that most people will be listening upon. All the while comparing your work to the work of other popular masters, of the trade. Then and only then does mastering at home, your own work, becomes viable.

Everybody needs to make a buck including Mastering Engineers.
Mx. Remy Ann David

"My mastering actually has real dynamics to it." - RemyRAD

'You mean it's musical and everything? Bless you!

Yup, it's in your face, musical and everything. LOL. And I frequently use parallel processing just to make it doubly fun. I wonder if they're always Dublin in Dublin?? I really don't like to repeat myself. I really don't like to repeat myself. There I go again... again.

I don't need heavy mastering for my mixes. Too many people think this is a magic pill. There's really only comes down to some of that handling of shipping and handling. It needs to be transferred pretty and packaged nicely.

I don't think Mastering at home is all that bad today. Provided you have more than one set of monitors with which to evaluate with. That is to say you have to play your mixes on small, medium and large monitors not only that but your car as well. You're not paying an hourly fee anymore so... it doesn't matter how long it takes you to get it right. Being an engineer is more like being an accountant. You've got to punch in the right numbers to make the books work. Audio isn't any different.

I know this is not good for Mastering Engineers overall. But then in today's economy, it's not good for recording engineers and studio owners either. So we all get to sit here and bitch. Realistically, I don't think people really think they're going to get rich? Most of us just want to make a living at what we do. And that's because we know how to make people sound their best. A lot of musicians do this for the fun and education of being an engineer only to find out... they really aren't engineers and really don't want to be engineers. And I gave up a life of making music to have a life making music. Or, rather, building music. What we do is beautiful and artful construction work. Kind of like Michelangelo. We chip away everything that has nothing to do with the final product. Which is quite a different mindset from building up a production. A lot of my balancing act is taking away what you don't need to hear. As opposed to just cramming everything together that you do need to hear. And this doesn't always mean that I am using subtractive equalization. It's tit for tat, pro and con, giving and taking, it's a balancing act of the most musical variety. It's really not about the equalizers or compressors, plug-ins or anything else. The balance comes first. Then ya can throw in the tricks and other audible accoutrements.

I know a real engineer when I come upon one. They always equalize everything before they listen and begin to mix. LMAO NOT! Few people today seem to want to actually balance their mixes before they start grabbing at equalizers and compressors, limiters and such. Well, that's all BS. This is where our software is nothing more than toys for video gamers. And it's not about that. I'm just really amazed by how many things I hear, here.

Nobody wants to try to mix a recording without using all sorts of gobbledygook equalization and compression on everything. It's not about equalization. It's not about the compression/limiting. It's about the balance. And that's where I really love the British term for us. It's so eloquent and concise, in Great Britain, we are Balance Engineers. Which I believe is far more an accurate description of what we do.

Remember there was only one Beatles. Now there's millions of them.
Mx. Remy Ann David

This OP makes me a bit wossy. I hear allot of Cannot's! Any mastering engineer started from nothing, no one is born an mastering engineer. You master allot of okay records before you start doing your best. Experiment, have fun and make it sound better then before. Sure there's allot of tech stuff to keep in mind, but it's not till you do it yourself that you appreciate what others can do.

Let me say this about that- What makes this forum so invaluable to me and a lot of people is the amount of knowledge that we as a group possess. From the most uninformed newbie to some of you true engineers out there, largely these discussions make us smarter, and more well rounded. Kudo's to the moderators who do their best in answering some of the same old questions repeatedly. I come in here as a pro musician but a practicle idiot in regards to what mic I need or how to record and master my mixes. I get good results, but you guys are slowly getting me to get better results. I want to focus on my art, but now I'm isolated and I need the recording technology as well. Pro studio or home studio, if I were to grab one of you guys that have been doing this for so long and hand you my headphones and ask "what do you think", you would start tweaking and do what you do. Your ears can hear things that I will probably never hear. That is why I stroll into this site with some humility and a lot of questions. I appreciate your years of experience and willingness to help others. Everytime I ask, a handfull of you jump in and save me a lot of time and money. Thanks to every one of you who take the time to make our stuff sound better.....we're listening....

I like gearslutz, but you guys are more like a family (slightly disfunctional, but still a family)

I fell in here through a link from a friend when I came home to recover from brain surgery. I've made a lot of new friends here and rather enjoy helping those who want to make better recordings, make better recordings that they like.

I am going to say one thing here... while I have been an audio and broadcast engineer for over 40 years, as my only profession, with a heavy background in advertising and marketing, everything newer isn't always better. Companies and people seem to need to ruin things with improvements. We call that progress. They tell ya that progress is so good that it's better than before. Which unfortunately, today, is rarely true. There have been no outstanding breakthroughs in any technology we deal with. Everything we are using today, we used or new about 10-20 years or more ago. A lot of that we looked forward to. A lot of which we have been disappointed with. We have seen " standards ", quickly come and go like never before. A codec today is a code blue tomorrow. Like Detroit, 16 bits isn't any good so you need this year's new 24-bit model. Next year you'll need the new 32-bit model. Don't forget the year after that when you will need the 64-bit model. And has any of this actually make your music sound any better? Now that's a trick question, so be careful.

A singer-songwriter friend of mine is producing her third CD with another local producer/engineer. I do rely work for her and not her studio work as we have two completely different thoughts behind that process. So she sends me this song of hers. It's a beautiful sweet and personal, quiet song. So I get this new version. The pitch correction on her vocal wants to make me vomit. I know this engineer. Albeit not well but I've known of him since I started my own studio 20+ years ago. We've only gotten together a couple of times. He is utilizing his Steinberger Cue Base software and plug-ins to its fullest. He has absolutely murdered this song. Obnoxious drums that are in your face, jeez Almighty. My friend is a great singer-songwriter but as Ron White says " You can't fix Stupid ". Oh so true. She is at the top of the mediocre pile. And she's always wondered why my live recordings sound so good? Software... blah humbug. But then again, I'm a Libra and I also love it. It's sort of like those local rock and rollers that said they are still five tracks left on the multitrack machine so let's fill them up. Wrong. Not. But that's the " Mid-Atlantic Sound ". Which is why you don't hear much from the mid-Atlantic region. Anybody good gets out. I keep getting out but coming back like a bad dream. Maybe it's the family and friends?? I could just be as bored and out of work in South Florida again as I am here. And I'm thinking about that? Only one and 4/5 of an Auditronics 501 and one more Neve to go... enjoying my RV and skin diving off of the Florida Keys. That sounds real good compared to trying to bust my butt to make some more lousy recordings yet, still, more. I keep telling people they have to learn when good is good enough. I've had a damn good career albeit not quite as long or as fulfilling as I would like to have had it been. Thankfully I'm not dead yet. I'm not really done yet either. I'll never be done. You can't stop me. I've been considering trying to go back to doing just voiceover work again? That's the one part of my body that gets regular exercise. It's hard work trying to Chaw through those all you can eat Maryland blue crabs at the Chinese buffet every-other-day! You burn as many calories eating those as you take in. And audio stuff is a lot like that. But every now and then I just want to find that little Chinese restaurant and have some twice cooked pork.

I like Chinese food but not their equipment.
Mx. Remy Ann David

Remy,

I'm assuming we are on the same page and feel this is worth discussing for fun.

Do you think the autotune creates a sound that is more appealing to her targeted audience? Is this what this producer wanted, or tried for but is out of touch? I've always been busy, much busier than my peers because I kept up with the "sounds" and trends. This goes way back to the 70's as I was one of the first guitarist in Canada to Own the Arp Avatar. Even though it was a stupid investment sound wise, it just kept getting better for me. Current sounding makes anyone stand out. I mean, contrary to my DAD's tastes, the same D chord on a classical guitar just doesn't sound as good as it did on my Les Paul through a stomp box.
I look at autotune like any other effect now. Although I not saying I like it, it sounds like ass most of the time but there are some tracks thats sound okay when its used tastefully.

Arp Avatar goofed around by someone clueless, plus missing the actual guitar lol, No wonder Arp went broke after this idiotic attempt to making a guitar synth. . But here is all I could find on that..

I actually like autotune when I can't hear it. Now when you talk about it as an effect for a pop vocal, hell yeah. But this was a ballad of hers that had to do with suicide. That and hate crimes. Then she's singing legato notes. This is no place for autotune. It's an overzealous engineer playing with Cue Base and his plug-ins. I know he didn't intend for it to be obvious but it is. It is for me. Probably no one else? And minor pitch deviations in a song such as this is appropriate. Absolute pitch sounds rather cold and stupid. It sounds insensitive to the word. Where I'd like to hear some pitch correction is in all of that Middle Eastern music with all of that 1/4 pitch stuff LOL. Maybe the Cantor at the local Synagogue? Please yes him... It's OK I rarely go if ever. (I'm so reformed they sent me back to school) LMAO.

Hey I've used pitch correction on operatic soprano demos. Only because I knew they could do it anyhow themselves.
Mx. Remy Ann David

OK so I also actually used real-time pitch correction with the Harmonizer H-910 in 1979 on one of our solo jingle singers. Only because he couldn't do it himself. And millions of dollars were riding on this. And that "real-time pitch change" delay latency, put him on the backside of the beat which worked out really well, also. I just keep hearing so many of the same damned effects, it ain't cool anymore. And especially that nasal pitch change thingy I keep hearing. I mean it's a good thing that Opera doesn't sound like yodeling too often. LMAO

Pitch correct this suicide
Mx. Remy Ann David

ROTF.

Oh Ya!