dcollins wrote on Sun, 12 March 2006 22:58 |
I find it all a bit naive, as my local restaurant will make a Masala that actually makes your eyes bug out cartoon-style -- but only if I ask for it.....
DC
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I wish that mastering were as simple as going to a restaurant, ordering food and tasting it. In reality, it is more like having everyone eat their food through a set of filters that change the taste and who evaluate the taste on a whole set of different noses. There's the "car nose", there's the "radio nose" and there's the guy who always pinches his nose almost closed so even if he burns his tongue on the spice he hardly notices how hot it is. And then there's the guy who's entirely immune to the spice and thinks that if you don't spice it up then no one will like it at all by the time it gets out to the street vendor.
How many of those guys ("customers", A&R) are totally educated as to what they want and to the real reasons why they are doing it? Some are. Many of them aren't. Many of them have ideas which when examined would be a disservice to their product. They all have a right to their choices as they are the customer, however:
"If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem".
There is a furniture store in New York whose motto is "An educated consumer is our best customer." How many of your customers walk in the door totally educated as to what they want?
The standard "lecture" over here is 5 to 10 minutes, during which we find out what the client wants and if what they want does not seem to suit the material in my opinion, then we spend a little time listening to various options, and sometimes they even change their mind because they had not considered those options.
The number of people who truly understand the relationship between the amoutn of program compression, "normalizing to the peak", and the position of the monitor level control are very few. Does this mean we should plea to the ignorant and just go their way without explaining this?
I have a client with a 1500-title legacy classic catalog of, shall we say, "very important music". When the pressure came from A&R to make the entire reissue set 6 dB "louder" than what it should be for optimum sound, and potentially destroy that legacy for all future generations---do you think I kept my mouth shut and just said, "yes sir" without discussing the issue?
No, instead I invited the A&R person here to listen to what he was asking for under objective conditions.... it was an ear-opener for him and he changed his mind entirely. He thought that what you're supposed to do is ask the mastering engineer to make it as hot as you can.... And he's been in A&R/production for 20 years.... Perhaps he's never heard a mastering-grade monitor system.
When he did hear his previous work objectively, he was totally embarrassed to find out how squashed and unclear and overcompressed were the products that he had been ordering his previous mastering engineer for his previous record companies to make.
We need a common language, and we need more mastering engineers to stand up and explain, otherwise sound will continue to get objectively worse and worse.
Either that, or do your really enjoy making stuffed sausages all day long?
Examining Doug Sax's work or any of our work of 10-15 years ago, do you think it was just the case of Doug doing other clients' bidding? Or didn't they just trust him to do a good job? Clients do go to certain mastering engineers not just because they'll do it like they tell them to, but also because they trust the M.E. to tell them what he thinks as well. This is a creative field, and claiming that the M.E. is just a hired hack is far from the truth. Here, you turn my knobs...
BK