G,
As a member of the educational community and seeing students graduate every year I understand this completely. You need to pay your dues like everyone else. Getting into the mastering field was never easy in the past. I would say that it's actually easier now than years ago. Unfortunately this ease of entry due to lower cost alternatives creates an environment where mastering is commoditized and dilutes terms like "quality service" and experience.
Maybe this dude is good. I would like to hear what some of his clients have to say about his work and see some sort of client list. Personally I don't think that this is too much to ask if I'm going to have someone perform the final tweaks to a piece of work that I've sweated over up to this point and am planning on paying for this service. References mean far more than a website and some possibly tweaked source tracks.
Again, I agree completely with all of this. And, let's face it, as the one who compared this guy's marketing to a mail order bride, I'm not defending him
. I find his gear list and studio descriptions - or the lack thereof - to be quite troubling.
If the guy is using little more than a cracked Waves Diamond suite and the copy of Ozone that came with Sound Forge, you know there are going to be limits to what he can do as a mastering engineer, and if his room treatment is not up to snuff and he's depending on the active EQ in those JBLs to make up for that, that's going to straight jacket him a bit as well. Then there's the utter and complete lack of anything outboard/analog. Maybe those are non-issues, but 99 times out of 100, when such details are left out of the description of a mastering suite it's because there's not much there to brag about. And I bring up the quality of the website to make the point that you cannot easily just dismiss the lack of such detail as being sloppy web design and implementation.
But it just brought what I thought was an interesting question to my mind; in this new millennium playing filed in audio, what *is* the best way to get business and rep when the only way to get it is to already have it? Actually I am interested, Tom, in just how your grads actually do attack this problem? Of course they do have the advantage of being able to put your tutelage at the top of their resume, which I'm sure does not hurt
.
bigtoe said:
there's a guy here in town who is just starting up. he's doing a somewhat bizarre project i mixed off of cassette 8 track. he is doing changes until the band is happ and i don't think they are getting charged much if anything. i think that's a good way to do it. that's how i learned while on 8 track recording.
that said - i don't call call most guys who master in town here mastering guys. they aren't. they're guys who will take your money and put it to disc while either doing too little or way too much (usually the later) and if they're a recording studio they charging twice or three times as much as their normal rate to screw up your record.
i know a couple guys who do a passable job in that situation...but they are also the guys who do this and let the artist know there is somewhat of a difference between what they are set up to do and what a mastering studio does. they charge half as much (eg 250 instead of 500-600 at a real mastering place.) this is acceptible...even though they're making an elevated rate...at least they are acknowledging the difference.
they guys with the computers who don't? ack.
Mike
I think this is an excellent breakdown of the difference between the three different "classes" of "mastering service"; the pretenders with PCs, a copy of PTLE and a copy of Ozone and call themselves mastering services, the prosumer-grade services who do a servicable job at a servicable price and are honest about their place in the pecking order, and the real pros with both the experience and facilities to fit the top shelf, traditional definition of "professional mastering service". The first the world would be better off without, while the others have their respective legitimate places in the marketplace.
The tact of doing
pro bono work to build rep is a good one. It does have it's dangers in that it can be difficult sometimes to make the transition from pro-bono to billable work. But if one has a plan something along the lines of a crack dealer of giving them the first one or so free (and making sure thy have more than one to do), or some other way of charging for the respect while giving the the service free, it is indeed a good way to open doors
.
G.
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