Attn: Mastering Clients & Mastering Hacks

[gainstages]

great article - a must read.

http://www.studioreviews.com/mastering-scams.htm

[Chris Lago]

Yeah it's not bad, but I just feel that having a lot of expensive gear does not justify how much you should pay to get the service or how good the mastering engineer really is. I personally only use plugins (Waves, URS, Crysonic and etc) and I get some really good mastering cuts that sound as good as any Cd out there. A lot of people ask me, wow this is great, what type of gear do you use for recording/mixing/mastering? And frankly, I don't use that much outboard gear other than the usual microphone preamp, guitars and such. I have no outboard mastering gear because it's so expensive, but it doesn't mean that because I don't own expensive gear that I won't give a great service.

I agree and disagree with the article.

[macc]

Plugins are quite expensive.

[Thomas W. Bethe]

John Scrip is a very fine mastering engineer and he has a GREAT site.

I wish more people would read about mastering scams BEFORE they send their hard earned money and materials to be mastered off to someone who is running a mastering operation out of their bedroom or basement and who's monitoring setup consists of computer speakers or worse and their "equipment" consists of cracked mastering software and cracked plug-ins.

This has been covered here a lot and you can do a search if you want to about bad mastering and or rip offs. One thing I know that upsets John is that people rip off his pictures and other information from his site and then uses them to lure potential clients to their "mastering" operations. These people know full well that they don't have the equipment or the monitoring setup so they steal his pictures and other information to make it look like they really have the equipment and they know what they are doing.

There are people on this website that are very good mastering engineers and if you go to their sites you can see what equipment they have, what their space looks like and see who they have mastered. There are other people here that have no pictures on their site and don't list their equipment who are also very good. The trick is to find someone who is honest, knowledgeable, talented and a WYSIWYG type of person so you know what you are getting BEFORE sending off your materials.

I don't know how to break this to you but people are basically cheap and they want to get the most bang for their buck. That is why the local mom and pop stores are closing and WALMART is doing so well. A lot of people today really don't care about service or the quality of the merchandise but only how much they can get it for as little money as possible and this drives them to look for a low ball price to get their stuff mastered.

One very deceptive tactic used by a lot of mastering engineer wannabees is to tell you that they are the greatest thing going that they can make stuff sound like the pros and that they don't need a lot of fancy equipment to do the work but when you try and pin them down or ask to see their client list or their studio or their credentials they put up a fog that would sink the TITANIC and these are the people that I would stay far far away from.

There are also lots of mastering sites on the WWW who list a lot of "A" list performers and artist that they have "worked" with but if you could dig a bit deeper you will find that they never mastered anything for them but were roadies or personal assistants or guitar techs for the "A" list performers which is a bit misleading. If I listed all the "A" list performers that I had worked with doing concert production or concert sound for it would take up three pages single spaced but since I never did mastering for any of them I don't have their names on my website.

Let the buyer beware is a good motto for buying anything. It is especially good advice today when their are so many more people offering "mastering services".

If you need a GREAT mastering engineer I can recommend John Scrip of Massive Mastering as he is one of the best and most honest people I know.

[24-96 Mastering]

Originally Posted by macc

Plugins are quite expensive.

Indeed, I would even go so far as saying that plugins can easily be more expensive than hardware, because while some are cheaper to buy initially, plugins tend to depreciate a lot faster whereas some hardware doesn't depreciate at all.

Also, the argument "I only use plugins, so my overhead is lower and I can offer my services cheaper" is completely beside the point because for most mastering studios, a couple of outboard boxes are not the main expense. That's just the icing on the cake. In my place, outboard processors make up around 20% of investment (at most), the large chunk of cash is in the room, the acoustics, the monitoring chain, the DAWs/authoring, etc.

Originally Posted by chrislago

Yeah it's not bad, but I just feel that having a lot of expensive gear does not justify how much you should pay to get the service or how good the mastering engineer really is.

You're paying only for the ME. Period. The room and gear comes with him/her. That environment he/she chooses to work in and the tools he/she chooses to work with is just what he/she needs to do to make everything work the way they want to. If Bob Ludwig says that my album will sound better when treated with a Behringer graphic EQ, I will believe him. That opinion is what I'm paying for.

The potential problem with the internets is that everyone is a seasoned pro. Everyone either has a full blown mastering suite in their bed room or - if they're honest enough to admit they don't - tells you that they've reinvented the wheel and that all that gear other places have (usually overlooking acoustics & monitoring) is just for showing off and that they're able to look through the BS and are generously sharing this truth with you.

Chris, I saw your post in the "where to" subforum and that's really being honest. Rest assured, your operation is not at all the kind that John is criticising in his article. And you may of course question the necessity of some nice looking hardware boxes, but there's so much more to a mastering studio than a couple of knobs on metal boxes. There's a good reason that so many mastering engineers gravitate towards the same kind of setups over time, no matter how they started out. And sure, you can male great masters with "only" plugins. But good acoustics and good monitoring really, really help. That's what it's about. And when you do this every day, when every album you're making has to be just right, when you can't guess but must know, the most professional working environment (with whatever tools _YOU_ PREFER to work with) is not an option, it's a necessity.

[Thomas W. Bethe]

Originally Posted by macc

Plugins are quite expensive.

Tell me about it. Just for the restoration we do we have a lot invested in the plug-ins.

[Sunbreak Music]

The article is a couple of years old, and I think Scrip was ahead of the curve on this one--or at least one of the first I saw drawing light to the issue.

Just check out the "bogus pictures" thread, and all the "Hey---this happened to me!!" posts.

[NorseHorse]

Thanks for that article. I've posted a link to it on my local Craigslist...

[MASSIVE Master]

Originally Posted by chrislago

Yeah it's not bad, but I just feel that having a lot of expensive gear does not justify how much you should pay to get the service or how good the mastering engineer really is. I personally only use plugins (Waves, URS, Crysonic and etc) and I get some really good mastering cuts that sound as good as any Cd out there. A lot of people ask me, wow this is great, what type of gear do you use for recording/mixing/mastering? And frankly, I don't use that much outboard gear other than the usual microphone preamp, guitars and such. I have no outboard mastering gear because it's so expensive, but it doesn't mean that because I don't own expensive gear that I won't give a great service.

I agree and disagree with the article.

I know it's been mentioned, but just driving it home: It's really not about what someone has or what someone uses - It's about deception. I did write that article in the middle of sending (well, my attorney sending) CADO's to several "mastering facilities" that were in the middle of using my (photos, gear list, entire site in a few cases, etc.) as their own. I haven't read it myself in a while - and I hope it didn't sound like I was "dissing" the digital crowd - That wasn't my intention.

[kjg]

Originally Posted by MASSIVE Master

It's really not about what someone has or what someone uses - It's about deception.

Exactly. Let's keep making a clear distinction between the smaller fish (whether all digital, with very limited outboard, working from home or whatever) and fraudsters.
There is nothing wrong with running a legitimate business aimed at the budget segment of the market.
IMO whoever pays taxes, buys software licenses and doesn't mislead potential clients is just as legitimate as a million dollar facility. After that the market will sort it out: Can your product/service compete or not? An expensive room and esoteric hardware should translate into a better product, and attract the bigger budget clients.
On the other hand, it is good that someone caters to the clients that the bigger ME's couldn't service anyway because of their limited budgets.

But yes, the picture stealing, preset mastering fraudsters should be put to shame.

my 2€¢,
kjg