one that is inappropriate for the song....the wrong "curve" maybe, too quick, too slow...
As judged by who?
I asked John that question because, frankly, I have always dome my own fades and have never had a problem; the problems he describes frankly floor me that they even occur, let alone with the frequency he experiences as ME. I mean...wow.
I'm with you, Terra, in that individual fades are not only often a good idea creatively, but sometime they are absolutely necessary. I've gotten a lot of mixes - especially from solo artists making their own multi-instrument tracks, but it can be from full bands also - where there is no purposeful end to all the tracks at one time because they know in tracking that the song is just going to fade anyway, so they just stretch the song and extra few bars and just let themselves die out. The ends of each player's/instrument's part can differ by as much as a few seconds, but they know it's just going to be trimmed in post anyway.
But when it comes to judging "apporpriateness" in length or speed or shape of the fade, somebody's got to wear the producer hat there and make the decision. Yeah, you can leave it up to the ME - especially those who are unable to even make make their own fade properly (yeesh). But I often like to make my own fades, or define the fade specs to the ME, because sometimes it can make all the difference just which beat of which measure is the last thing the listener hears. Sometimes one wants to end on a wimpy beat, sometimes just squeezing in that last vocal scream or guitar mini-riff before silence puts a nice punctuation at the end.
That said, and I'd like to hear John's (and Tom V's., if he's listening in) take on this: I usually will do my own fades only if I am doing my own mastering. If I'm handing off to a ME, I'll leave the ends sloppy, but specify (to at least some degree) where I want the fade to happen and so forth so he can do it.
The reason is, IMHO FWTW (and these guys are welcome to edumacate me otherwise if I'm missing something), the fade out should be the very last thing done to the song. EQ, compression, limiting, etc. that may be done to the 2mix can change the character of the sound of the fade. What sounds like the perfect fade now can sound chunky and mismanaged after the fade has been run through the rack a few times. It's like throwing a compressor on a reverb tail, it just no longer sounds the way it should (Terra, I know you like to break that "rule" purposely to get that nasty sound, and that's cool. But that's not what we're talking about here, we're talking about keeping the natural fade curve intact.) EDIT: Shit, Farview beat me to that point (again). He is sneaky that way
G.