| TurtleTone wrote on Sun, 22 May 2005 06:22 |
The way I see it, credits do matter. If you don't have them, then you aren't doing much work, or at least not the kind of work that warrants a credit. People want to put your name on the record, if they don't, then they don't care much about you. It not only shows what you've done, but that the people you work with care enough about you to bother putting your name on the record. It doesn't mean that you aren't good at what you do.
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Or it shows that your taste and communication were a match with theirs.
Jerry, it's funny how one negative emotion has spiraled into all this ... and although I'm not sad that you posted it, I do tire of what this thread has become. It's ugly and unnecessary in many ways.
It's also funny how Brad said there is no snobbery ... and then has gone on to be a credits snob. So this board is for credit snobs who aren't doing the highest levels of releases that require huge limiting, so we can also make a 'mafia' list and be dynamics snobs there too. So we're accredited, but not really the top level guys in the world ... and so we want to be above SOMEONE. I get it.
Wow, when I have 30 years at this I will never discount the published credits of a younger engineer.
Experience is qualitative ... meaning that doing one thing well transfers to other things. Listening is not the province of MEs. Musicians in general find engineers to be gear lusting deaf geeks. I have tried not to go there but it is funny to read all the pomp form people who neither play an instrument nor compose, nor perform. It's a wonderful craft, but it's still just mastering a finished mix of a performed composition.
As for my credits, the clients on my webpage were not lying. Now some of my free samples do not result in jobs, hip hop is admittedly a weakness of mine ... yet on the jobs I get, the client priases are all the credit I need. And that's why I post them on my website. Word-of-mouth and actual quotes are far greater credit.
The fact of an AMG notation means that we did a job that was big enough to be released and was submitted to them by someone. It doesn't mean that we made the artist jump up and down for joy, or that we turned shite to Shinola and got them signed (as one of my UK artists tells everyone he knows.)
Again, I wonder why anyone would defend credits. It starts a slippery slope of expectations. For example, if I had 20-30 years in only this one field, I'd expect more than pages of AMG credits, I'd expect to be at the top of the field with Grammys and all the rest. So no one here has a platform to look down, really. We are all average in that light. And the credit measuring is a form of snobbery that's not productive at all. It only leads to scepticism and snobbery, and it further s the lie that a past credit assures the next guy happiness. There is no love and no truth in the past. Only facts, and facts can be manipulated in SO many ways.
| bblackwood wrote on Sun, 22 May 2005 06:08 |
All the expereince in the world in other fields, even other aspects of audio, don't matter when compared to real time in the trenches mastering records, imo.
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So an accountant is as good as a professional musician until he has AMG?
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Regardless of how good an engineer is, until he has some credits to point to, there is no easy way to quantiyfy his experience. And experince is what people pay us for, when you strip away everything else.
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Experience
cannot be quantified ... you can try, but its impossible. It can be seen and heard, but not read.
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How can anyone disagree with this? We talk about experience being the core of what we do all the time!
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Like I said, one of my recent clients was happier with my work than one of the main posters in this thread. So what does that mean? Not much necessarily.
Maybe that I got lucky? That communication was better? That tastes collided more easily? Who knows. Who cares. Was the music served? Yes. And
that's important to me. If another ME would do a better job for that record, I want the client to go there, honestly.
None of the details and qualitative interaction of a transaction between client and ME are revealed in the crediting process. It says that a specific form of release happened, and that the ME was noted on the record specifically as the ME.
And George ... although I agree with much of your post ... all qualities are not subjective. Some are objective ... like effortlessness for example.
A dancer or violinist's effortlessness can been seen and experienced by a large enough group to be as 'objective' as a math problem. Ever see Yo-Yo Ma live? Marcel Marceau? Greatness is not subjective either.
And even math is not true for everyone, there are other math's where 2+2=5. So even the great 'objectivity' is subjective at a certain point, and subjectivity is objective at another.
Stephen Hawking's Quantum Physics anyone?
