| masterhse wrote on Sat, 29 March 2008 23:12 |
One of the things that saddens me is that some people judge the quality of mastering mainly through gear. Even if he has what the images represent would he be any good?
Personally I would hire an experienced ME with a Finalizer or stock plug-ins over a hack with the best gear.
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But we still get calls asking what kind of gear we have. They have decreased but we still get the occasional call which goes like this...
"hi I would like to get some mastering done, I have it ready but before I bring it over I was wondering what equipment you use to master with" I list the equipment we have...."Oh I guess that is OK but my recording engineer says that if you don't have Pro Tools you aren't a professional studio" to which I say well what does your engineer use for his recording and mastering..."he uses Pro Tools he has a Digi 001 setup running on his Mac" Well we use Samplitude or Wavelab for our DAW and find it works better for mastering than ProTools..."well I guess I will look around for someone more professional" OK talk to you later...how about letting us have a go at the mastering and see if we can do what you want done with what we have..."OK maybe but my engineer is pretty set on finding someone with ProTools to do the mastering"
[He never called me back and I have to assume he found someone with the PROTOOLS he wanted]
or this...
"hi I would like to get some mastering done what are your rates" so I tell him what my rates are..."well I was thinking like $10 a song like I see on the web" well if that what you want to pay then I suggest you contact the person on the web..."but I understand from <insert name of satisfied client> that you do really good work and helped him a lot" What would you like me to do. Our rates are our rates and if you want something mastered here those are the rates..."well couldn't we talk about the rates more? I don't have any money since we are having our CD release party at <insert name of local club> and they are charging me a lot for the use of the room and the beverages and food" Well I guess you have to decide which is more important a blow out CD release party or getting you stuff professionally mastered..."but I want to do them both, how about $15 a song I have 15 songs so that would be $225 and I think I could afford that if you will wait for a couple of weeks after the mastering is done to get paid" I would love to help you but we charge what we charge and we are not a bank so we don't extent credit maybe you should have budgeted this expense before you decided to release the CD...buy the way when do you need this by?..."well the CD release party is in two weeks and we need to get the mastering done today or tomorrow" I wish I could help but I really can't do anything for you maybe the next time...I wish I could help you. Next time as you are mixing give me a call and we can listen to the mixes and see if there are any problems with them, we don't charge for this service and I think it would save you a lot of time later on in the mastering process...
[He has not called back or been in touch since this go around but rumor has it he did not have product at his CD release party and had to give people cards to fill out and he later sent the CDs when they arrived]
The above two examples are almost word for word from two phone calls received within the last two months.
