I don't think Glen's suggesting either that an ME's first instinct is to crush the mix, or that you should not get your stuff mastered because it will make your music "sound like shite".
All along Glen has extolled the value of mastering as (a) a means of applying consistency across a suite of tracks, and (b) bringing out the inherent sparkle in an already good mix.
I also think that Glen agrees that a lot of material arriving at an ME's door suffers from mixing flaws that mastering is not going to do much for.
I agree with the general thrust of your comments, but not with your interpretation of Glen's stance.
Thank you, Mike (or is it Mic?
), you are absolutely correct.
Waltz, if you had a playbook (you can't tell the players without a playbook!
) for this BBS, or if you had watched the game here for a while before making quick judgements, you'd know that some of my favorite people here are folks like Massive Master and Mastering House and BBlackwood (though I think that Brad left this place a couple of years ago, I haven't seen him in a long time) some of the finest pro MEs in the business and a few of the best contributors to this BBS (amongst others), that I fully support and defend professional mastering on the appropriate projects, and that the majority of MEs that I come across loathe the Loudness Wars - as do I.
For the record, the Loudness Wars have been going on and off in different incarnations since the advent of commercial AM radio back in the early 20th century, when broadcasters found that if they pushed the average modulation of their signal as close to the legal limit of 100% as they could, their broadcasts would carry a farther range and they could potentially charge more for advertising that way. The station station engineers competed for coming up with ways of pushing the mod levels (the 1920s equivalent of today's pushing the digital RMS) without sacrificing a whole lot in the signal quality (because the quality pretty much sucked to begin with anyway).
But today that rationale just doesn't exist anymore, unless one is making a limited-fidelity recording to be broadcast only on an AM radio station. And even then, the radio station is doing all the work, you don't need to encode it in the program material.
Sure a great ME can push stuff harder than a mediocre one, but it's still going to sound worse than the un-pushed version, and with no tangible benefit to the artist or listener whatsoever. It's a losing proposition.
Can you make better money being an ME who caters to the mo' louda' mo bett'a crowd than one who occasionally can actually talk a client out of it? Yeah, howdy, that's a given. But if one's
main motivation is to make money, the music business is probably the last business they should be getting into
.
G.
