Jack Hammer
New member
I have recently, along with my two partners, started a record company. It is time to master our first project. Any tips, suggestions etc. from you that have experience in this would be much appreciated.
dr grip said:What Bruce said is right, Mastering is all about $$$. While Bruce can sometimes jar people a bit in the way he 'converses' about this topic, he could not be more correct.
Modern music is so commercialized and soulless that if you want to have any chance of success you need to make your music sound like everyone else's out there, which is typically "bought" through the services of a mastering engineer or tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and hundreds of hours of training and practice. (Assuming everything was tracked and mixed competently) It has to be as loud or louder than everything else, have a similar EQ curve, etc..
It is almost impossible for modern CONSUMERS to not think of music as anything but another PRODUCT. Therefore this product must be like all of the other PRODUCTS on the shelf at target, shiny and colorful enough to MOVE UNITS.
So if you are in it to SELL some PRODUCT, by all means have the project mastered by a PROFESSIONAL PRODUCT ENHANCER.
If you view music as ART and EXPRESSION, then it is OK for something to sound the way it does, regardless of how it compares to other PRODUCTS. This is a basic tenet of ART itself.
This is where I would tend to disagree with Bruce, if YOU as an ARTIST and the PRODUCER of this music are satisfied with the end result, then by all means master it at home.
Perhaps the civilization that discovers the ruins of human society will find your CD and be able to examine it out of context, as a cultural artifact containing the beautiful folk music of a people that destroyed themselves and their once beautiful planet in a race for resources, money and power.
You don't see people remastering Van Gogh because his 'colors were a little off'. Remember Ted Turner's attempts to colorize movies in the 80's??? ART is about expression, PERIOD. We don't look at a picasso and criticize it for not being realistic.
We live in a time where nothing exists outside the reach of the almighty dollar. Music used to be about beauty and uniqueness and emotion...now it's about single edits, radio edits, product placement, media hype, looks, and image.
It's much cheaper for a record company to produce 10 albums that sell 10 million copies a year than 100 albums that sell 1 million copies. Given the current trend in music I wouldn't expect this to get any better anytime soon.
Every day I dream about someone releasing an album that is so monumentally revisionistic that it changes everything, but I'm not holding my breath, because nobody would BUY IT.