| robbue wrote on Fri, 06 May 2005 15:20 |
When my album is done I will want a handful of you pros to do up a before and after demo for me and I hope that it will be a noticable difference and if it isnt then I wont spend the money for any flat transfers or no real noticable diferences as i am very capable of that on my own 
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Hah! Thought so.
My take on it is like this (and it's bolstered by Brad saying that it's very rare he actually does flat transfers)
ME is a weird job. It's much less like painting creatively with all sorts of audio colors- that's like mixing. It's more like working with the lenses and stuff to correctly 'photograph' said painting. ME as a job means you HAVE the lenses and stuff so the sound is not going to degrade unless YOU make it degrade. It also means you have, for instance, professional lighting- there are a large number of reasons why someone photographing an artwork in their home probably would not get a perfect virtual replica of the painting. Even if you had the lighting and all, you will probably have lens distortions like pincushioning- it looks easy enough but there's a lot going on that most people- most painters- wouldn't be familiar with.
My take on ME-ness is that you basically should be able to improve the mix- no matter how good it already sounds- by addressing these issues. I don't care what you're using- the whole sound picture is going to be locked in perfectly just as it comes out of mix? I would think that was very unlikely- never mind that it's reasonable to get a fresh pair of ears involved, expert ears.
Odds are overwhelming that there's gonna be SOMETHING that could still be done to make the outcome even better. It's probably not something you can do in mix, or you would have done it already. MEs specialize in advanced ability to reference what the sound really is (thus catching stuff that you don't hear on your monitoring and in your room) and in advanced ability to cleanly signal process (thus tuning the sound in ways more sophisticated than you have available in mix, without your taking much of a sonic hit by the extra processing- it should be a net gain, not a loss)
Put it this way- speaking for myself, I suspect it is overwhelmingly likely that when I listen to something of yours (and I'd be delighted to shoot-out alongside the big guns for you, if you'll let me) I will find SOMETHING that I'll want to be different, to satisfy my idea of 'better'. Will it be better? I'll think so. If you don't, I won't get your business. I can be pretty sure that it's not stuff on the order of just putting different EQ or dynamics on it, since you're so confident of your own work- I'm guessing that instead I'll be tuning a lot of different areas in subtle ways to make the music move better and be more clearly in focus (which can sometimes mean turning DOWN treble when it comes forward unpleasantly).
I'm not, at all, saying that I (or anyone) is guaranteed to be able to make your music sound better in mastering. Only that I see my job as an ME as, finding subtleties you might not know about and adjusting them towards an imagined ideal, to serve THE MUSIC.
I admit that I'm very likely to do things in the belief that they are needed to help the sound- but then Brad also admits that flat transfers are rare for him, and I think you will go a long way before you find an ME that's like "Oh yeah, usually I don't need to do anything". The real question is, what do we do to your music and why?
We all have our specialties. Some guys smash for level. Level (Bill Roberts) does the opposite and routinely puts out an astonishing degree of headroom in this day and age. You can expect an ME to have a 'style' because we are coaxing things towards what we think is 'right'. Just identify that style and choose one that does actually improve your sounds- and again, if truly nothing can improve your sounds and other people agree with that, you should be doing mastering yourself
