Critique and "Should I send to be mastered

There has been some discussion as of late about whether or not to send your CD to someone to master. I will also couple this with some points about the critique of mixes. If you have followed my ravings you will know that this is not the first time I have brought this up, but I will approach it from a different angle, and I will site a specific example-Dan and Amy Monaghan’s song “Beautiful”.

I always feel a little bad to give my honest critique of someone’s stuff for many reasons which I have mentioned before, and in this case is was even more difficult because it is a great song, great vocal and the production is very good. Some might wonder what is wrong with some of us that we can’t just give a simple, “that’s great, send more” and then keep our mouths shut. Well, I often leave it at that if a song has reached it’s potential or it is pretty obvious what the growth and future of the song is going to be. But in the case of Dan’s song, I liked it from the start, and my interest expanded into doing a supporting role of organ and piano pro bono. His wife is also very pretty. <g>. When Dan sent the song back to me for suggestions I sent him another day’s work to broaden it’s potential shall we say, to which he graciously agreed. Not only did he do some mixing fix it’s, but he added another guitar, and completely re-tracked the vocal. There is always the possibility of a challenge of egos when offering such “advice”, but Dan has grown to believe that I know what I am talking about-especially if he can see it-and if I am clear enough in my explanation which of course takes quite a bit of time through an email. Sometimes styles are different and there is one issue which we still don’t agree on totally, but I don’t think it matters in the songs immediate future. Anyway, if Dan doesn’t agree to something there is no reason to try to talk him into it. He with great respect will acknowledge the suggestion, and then disregard it. <G>. He is a great young producer, and as many have noticed is blessed with a very talented co-worker who doesn’t have to travel back and forth to work.

The point-there are friends who encourage you in everything you do, and come to your defense when others are criticizing your efforts. This can sometimes get in the way of progress though because if you want to do better the only way to learn is to realize that there is an area that needs attention. As wonderful as mothers are this is often the case. They get emotionally involved with their children’s works, they grow up to think they are just perfect, and they never reach their potential. I love my mother and I have some fans that think I am a great musician, and they definitely have their purpose. But if I want a song to reach its full potential I don’t go to them. I play it for them afterwards. They are truly appreciative. I have a team of critics however who don’t seem to get moved at all by emotion. They write back, “needs something in the 2nd verse, at 2.11, 2.44, and 3.09 the voice is flat, too much chorus on the guitar, etc.” Unless the song is stunning in which case they say you could do this and that if you want but maybe it’s just a matter of opinion. Sometimes I get a “that’s a beautiful song” or something, but anyway, that’s not their job. Their job is to make it reach it’s potential, and often the better the song is, the more picky things can get. I have critiqued some of their songs and actually asked them to start over and change directions, change beats etc. Once you leave your amateur status it is a great big world with a lot of competition, and the thing that separates you from others is your final product. I would suggest if that is your particular dream or goal that you solicit help from like minded professionals to make that product the very best it can be. Dan has done this-I just wanted to explain to the rest of you that if you think some of us are heartless, emotionless individuals that it is not the case. Like a doctor, it’s not going to do you any good to tell you to keep drinking beer and salami every night when you should keep it for your night off.

Reasons To Send to a Mastering House

This has been a question for some and here is my experience on the subject. Here are some of the differences between John, who does my mastering, and myself.

I’m 5’10”-he’s 5’6”, therefore he can have his speakers closer to the ground so that there is less room noise. <g>.

I bought the Bob Katz book on mastering. I took it to a coffee shop on my day off and read a lot of it and was surprised that I could relate to so much of it. But I wasn’t so inspired to pick it up again. I gave it to John as a present during one of our rehearsals. Rehearsal was over at 10:00 p.m. as we had a big gig the next day. He stayed up till 4:00 a.m. reading it. He also took it on a flight to the U.S. and read it the entire time instead of watching any of the onboard movies. (11 hours.) He contested a few of the things that were said, researched and tried them out and agreed that Katz was right. He tried out the different graphs etc. He thanked me at least 3 times for the “great” gift. Because he learned so much from Bob Katz? No. Because it confirmed all the things he is already doing. He did learn some things of course, but most of it he already knows.

In large band rehearsals with numerous groups on the roster, I am the leader. He is the teacher.

Put an analog synth in front of him and say, “make me a warm bell”-takes about 30 seconds. Ask for the ocean/wind, etc-takes about 15 seconds. He understands sound and where it comes from.

He corresponds with Craig Anderton, Garth Hjelte who invented “translator”, made algorithms for Bomes Midi Translater so that you can use the Hammond drawbars, leslie pedal, and volume swells. in real time from an old XM Hammond module with B4. I am amazed and he says, “yea, I shouldn’t have stayed up all night to do it but you know.”

He readily admits that he enjoys the mastering/technical side of music more than the production side. But he is an excellent producer. Check the url below for one of his productions he did for India.

He flosses his teeth, and keeps a daily log.

He still has an 8 track machine, PCM, AKA1 DR4, EPS 16, and various outdated pieces of equipment that I sold mine years ago when I could still get something for them. He recently did a project and dug out the 8 channel originals instead of the using the DAT master.

He has an acoustically perfect room and JBL 3 way speakers/NS 10M’s.

He uses Apogee equipment.

He built his own Dual CPU computer.

We did a project together which I listened to on the way to the duper,. I expressed some concerns that the tape was overly bright. He listened, agreed, re-did it immediately, and shipped to the duper at no extra cost.

He’s a nice guy.

If you have spent a few months listening to your mixes you become familiar with them. It’s not as easy to be objective anymore. Fresh areas are as important as fresh coffee. In Japan coffee is expensive, but even at Denny’s/McDonald’s they make it fresh every hour and toss the rest. Maybe some people won’t notice, but a lot of people do. I do.

You can play his mixes with loudness on and loudness off and they both sound good.

Often I can’t tell a great difference in the way it sounded when I sent it and the way it sounds when I get it back from him. He keeps a detailed record of everything he did to each song. He doesn’t change things just to change. He fixes things to make them better-sometimes just a little better-sometimes a lot better. Maybe you wouldn’t even notice but the main thing is you hear everything as good as it can be heard-of course he is limited by your mix. Is better really subjective when it comes to mastering? Or is better better? He did listen to a client once and asked what to do because the guy insisted on more lo-end. After the guy screamed at him he finally did it, but asked him to play it on his home stereo with loudness on before he sent it to the duper. It cracked up on his system so the client yielded.

One song was real nice but the snare was kind of annoying. He automated a sequence (I thing he uses Samplitude for mastering-he uses Sonar for tracking/mixing) with an eq. so that everytime the snare hit it would effect the snare without being able to notice it in the other instruments.

He doesn’t have, and doesn’t like crewcuts.

It’s clean. He hates rice krispies.

He checks it with equipment and programs I don’t even know how to use to make sure there are no subtle flaws in the master.

That’s all for now. If you feel you can do both, by all means do. But I wanted to share my personal experiences about why I don’t do my own mastering.

I dont think anyone would turn down letting someone else master if they could feasably afford it.....

hi Pilfa. I guess you missed the other posts. This was the discussion-whether or not to have someone else do it-it wasn't a money thing.

Michael - great post.

I'm very interested in mastering, too. Do I want to be a mastering engineer? I don't know.

The one thing I hear over and over again is that "It's important to have your music filtered through a fresh set of ears." I tend to agree with that statement but I'd amend it to say, "It's important to have your music filtered through a fresh set of GOLDEN ears." I'll follow this up with a long story of my own about a mastering experience that was an absolute disaster.

Here goes:

The project was for a church. It was their first official CD, ever. My company promised to provide a recording that would be second to none for the price they were paying. For 260 hours we slaved day and night, tracking, mixing, fixing, etc...Through the whole process, our systems and software were put through the test. It all held up beautifully and the client was very pleased with the final mixes. In the end we had 14 songs (75 minutes in-all), carefully mixed and ready to go to master.

The church was working on a tight budget. After all was said and done, they had about 8k to put towards the entire project. With the recording eating up a good chunk of their budget, they were still faced with the expenses of getting artwork, photography, mastering, duplication and assembly. They decided that it was necessary to short cut the mastering. Initially, they didn't want mastering at all. I strongly advised against this and went into a long diatribe about the importance of good mastering. I explained that their recording, if well mastered would stand up to any other CD on the rack at your local Christian book store. I waxed eloquent about technical things like multi-band compressors, EQs, maximizers and the like. In the end they agreed that mastering should indeed NOT be side stepped. But there was still the issue of budget short falls.

After getting a few quotes for them ranging between $1500-$4000 and having the church refuse every one, I finally spoke to a friend (a very reliable source in the business of live and recorded sound) who knew someone that does mastering out of their house. He gave me the person's contact information and I got a hold of him. For the purposes of this writing, we'll call him "The Skull."

On the phone, The Skull was a very engaging and intelligent sort of guy. He had mastered a half-a-dozen projects or more and his customers had been very happy with his work. He had worked on a wide range of genres. He waxed philisophical about the virtues of mastering. He talked about mastering different kinds of music differently. He went through his equipment list and it was very impressive. He had all of the stuff you need to master a CD and he talked the talk and walked the walk. I have to admit, I was very impressed. Then came the quote, "Eh, it should take me about 10-12 hours to do the job and the price should come in right around $700.00.” he said. "WOW!!” I thought, I couldn't wait to tell my customer about this! They were very pleased by what I was telling them about The Skull. They agreed to have The Skull to master their project.

I arranged to drop off the final mixes at The Skull’s place (his rehearsal studio). We finally met. He stood about 5'5" weighing in at mere 118 pounds, with long, dark brown hair and a goatee beard that was about a foot-and-a-half long. He was clad in all black clothes and wore a happy-go-lucky grin on his face...all the time. His rehearsal studio was stocked with an impressive array of gear and instruments. We went over TRTs, fades, and pauses and took a lot of notes. After about an hour of discussion The Skull and I were comfortable that all of the aspects of the recording had been communicated and notated and he was ready to start. This was on a Tuesday.

That Saturday, my phone rings, it's The Skull. "Hey, it's me, guess what? Your master is being burned, even as we speak." "Great! I'll be over shortly.” I said. When I arrived at his mastering studio, I was surprised to see a small, seemingly inadequate array of equipment consisting of three Tanoy monitors, a small sub-woofer under the desk, Wavelab 3.0, Waves Gold Bundle and just about any other plugin you can imagine. He also ran a room analyzer called SAP. All of this was on a Pentium III machine running Windows 95. I didn't let it phase me. After all, The Skull came highly recommended from very reliable source and he talked the talk. We started listening to the masters. I really just wanted to hear the beginnings and endings to make sure the intros and fades were all correct. On one song, he neglected to remove a drumstick-clicking intro (which I asked him to do) and on another, he left in a click track at the beginning on the drum overheads that had bled through the drummers’ headphones. No big deal I thought, just make a couple of edits and burn another. But alas, his burner only burned @ 1x and while the edit would only take five seconds, the creation of the CD would take an hour-and-a-half. This was still forgivable. I have some Redbook editing software at home; I'll do the edit myself, and make a new master. I reluctantly agreed to this.

When I got home, I loaded the project up in CD Architect 5.0 and what I saw absolutely terrified me. The mixes had been super-duper-ultra compressed and limited so much so that some of them were all wave form...With NO variance in dB. They were pegged hard @ -0.03dB. There was severe clipping, perhaps the worst I have ever seen. My heart dropped. I started listening to the mixes on my system...Distortion! Lots of it! Everywhere! It's like he took the threshold control on the L2 Ultra-Maximizer and dropped to the floor and said, "Okay, that sounds good." I started to feel sick to my stomach. Thoughts started racing through my mind. Anger, depression, despair, disbelief, all of them swirling around in me at the same time. My mixes had been destroyed.

After all was said and done, I could keep only 5 out 14 songs that The Skull mastered. The other nine, totally eviscerated.

I ended up mastering the ruined mixes myself, which I really did not want to do. But I learned a lesson - a really hard lesson. That is if you need your mixes mastered; make sure your choice of mastering studios is proven, over and over and over again. Honestly, I could have done a better job of mastering my own project.

That is a situation I never want to encounter again.


Thanks,

Michael - one component of the forum critique that hasn't really been touched upon is what I like to call the "pile on" effect. It's a side effect of public critiques that tends to be one of the more disconcerting aspects of critiquing in a forum like this one. It's where one person mentions something they're not fond of in a mix and then other people come along side them and start agreeing with it. I think that's why I feel uncomfortable about giving a true honest critique in a forum like this - and what happened between Mark Colquitt and me is a prime example of that. Fortunately with that, the pile on effect was minimized so Mark and I were able to resolve our disagreement quickly.

What are your thoughts on this, Papa?

Thanks,

ORIGINAL: danhazer

Michael - one component of the forum critique that hasn't really been touched upon is what I like to call the "pile on" effect. It's a side effect of public critiques that tends to be one of the more disconcerting aspects of critiquing in a forum like this one. It's where one person mentions something they're not fond of in a mix and then other people come along side them and start agreeing with it. I think that's why I feel uncomfortable about giving a true honest critique in a forum like this - and what happened between Mark Colquitt and me is a prime example of that. Fortunately with that, the pile on effect was minimized so Mark and I were able to resolve our disagreement quickly.

What are your thoughts on this, Papa?

Thanks,

Dan my son, I must totally agree-to a point. <g> Seriously, I moderate a lot of meetings and go to a lot of meetings, and since I don't like meetings (though I know they are very necessary for unity) one of the main rules is to not expound or repeat too much, unless specifically asked for a second or confirmation. Though on the other hand, something that I didn't mention in the first post is that I have a secretary that collects all the auditioning points, and we agree as a team that if something isn't mentioned twice you can take it with a grain of salt. Of course with a good idea it doesn't matter if it is only mentioned once, I will implement it unless it is too time consuming for what I get in return. I definitely agree with you that it is a little more difficult on a public forum with a 1000 eyes staring at you. The exposure, for lack of a better word, can hurt and make one feel that he has to defend himself or let it be known that, "hey I already know that." That's why my "big suggestions" are usually offline. Hey, your posts are almost up to the year I was born. When you get there let's celebrate.

be brutal and don't hold back!"

I am brutal and don't hold back!

When I critique a song I'm absolutely honest. It's my opinion that “that’s great, send more” doesn't help. I want to help, and yes, sometimes I think to myself 'hey man, should I really write this?', but then I usually do.
Of course I never critique the lack of ability to play an instrument.
My posts usually seem to be apreciated. Or do you think they just want to be polite?

And yes, I also tend to write more when the mix is better...

Greets
Melf

ORIGINAL: danhazer

I am brutal and don't hold back!

This is a typical German attribute.

Thanks

When I critique a song I'm absolutely honest. It's my opinion that “that’s great, send more” doesn't help. I want to help, and yes, sometimes I think to myself 'hey man, should I really write this?', but then I usually do.

Oh, I totally agree. I would never say, "Hey this is great," if I don't think it is. I don't think it's helpful to mislead people.

On the other hand, I have gotten some negative reaction when I went just a little too "deep" in public. I've come to think that it's easier to say some of the more difficult things via email. I think you can be honest and still be respectful. It's just sometimes difficult to do that in public (unless they give you permission).