I'm mastering the record today!!!! YAY!

here's his CV

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:9kq4g4a9tvnz~1~T40B

http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/whatismastering.htm

It's working with the entire songs....basically, your basic final mixes tend to be a little bit all over the place in terms of EQing, so there is some high level EQing going on, trying to tame any wierd bass or low-mid frequencies, basically trying to get the songs to seem cohesive as an album.

The biggest thing is basically compression...making it louder...to which you can do to various degrees.

It's true, they're v. heavy.

Industry executives can tell a professional production from an amateur one. Professionals always have their projects mastered while unsigned artists usually make the mistake of skipping this important process.

So not true.

So while I thought he was a flake, the end result was fine and I decided to use him again for the second LP. Mistake. Then he ruined it, inexplicably so. Fans and music writers were mystified as to why the advance home copies of the tape sounded decent and the LP sounded poor.

I am betting the advent of the home PC as powerful enough to duplicate his studio in software put him out of business.

When we had an ep of ours mastered the engineer let us sit in on the session and we were able to discuss with him what he was doing and how he was doing it. He also bounced different ideas of how we wanted the mastered songs to sound. We were pretty happy with the results.

The second time we had another guy master our album. We dropped the files off to him and it was like "I'll have this back to you for review in a week." Needless to say the job was not nearly as good. I, for one, was not very happy at all with it. A note about this as well -- both the ep and the album were recorded in the same place on the same equipment. If anything, the guy who recorded us had gotten better between recording the ep and the album.

yeah...i dunno...that whole "my friend can master it on his laptop" can be a disaster...there's still something to having A) experience and B) those super fucking expensive compressors....

If you're a nobody, you always have to be careful you don't become prey. If you're a somebody, someone else's investment, then you don't really need them then, do you?

My philosophy, if you're going to throw your money away, throw it away on yourself.

I had restored some old vinyl to CD for Saunders and he had asked how I did it and what I had. He liked what was done and subsequently went to his friend at Triple X records with the plan. At the last minute he contacted me, giving me about a day to do the job so that CDR for radio and a show in Hollywood could be quickly duplicated.

I had to take the stuff from some old Samoans CDs, a new track that had not been released and miscellaneous old radio spots, normalize it all, make it sound sonically congruent, bleep the curse words
for duplicate tracks sent to radio, make vocals more present on stereo mixes and "fix" what was considered a bad mastering job on a track taken from the Back from Samoa CD. Bill Inglot, a very famous guy, had done the CD mastering years ago and Saunders was not happy with. Saunders' complaint was that it didn't match the impact of the vinyl and he was right, it didn't. So however it got that way, could I fix it? Maybe, maybe not.

So I did it and Peter of Triple X ran them off at one of those CDRs in a sleeve with art and 200 copies or so in 24 hours burning places and they were sent to radio and were put in boxes for shows. The obvious reason Triple X had an interest is that Saunders sells a considerable number of Samoans CDs for the label off the merch table -- and I do mean considerable -- at every gig.

I have no idea what Mike did with the rest of them. Probably sent them to friends and used them as promotional items.

Saunders liked the job. I had listened to my old vinyl copy of Back from Samoa and compared it to the track they gave me to work with, made a value judgment on what I thought was wrong -- it was definitely undermastered to the dynamic range -- thought about what might bring it closer to the vinyl, and did the deed. Saunders liked that. The record company guy liked the radio-bleeped versions, not that it did anyone any good. One guy who played lead guitar on one of the tracks whined slightly that the guitar sounded too dry. Yep, it sounded dry in the stereo mix and I could have fucked with it but the object on that track was to make the vocal less muddled sounding and smothering the track in reverb and delay wasn't going to be part of that recipe for the day.

Anyway, am I better than big name "pros" who worked on the original prints? Heck if I know but I do know I long taken a dim view on the omniscience and general guaranteed utility of certified "pros."

we watched over this guy's shoulder while he mastered our album on friday. never had anything professionally mastered before so we wanted to check it out. it was kind of fascinating and boring at the same time.

http://aebersold.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/em.jpg

Carl Saff seems like a nice fellow, I almost had him master my record but wouldn't have been able to watch him do it. I hope you're pleased with the results, Nick.