Wosrt thing that happened to your project after it left your hands..

[Sigma]

..,

For me..i mixed a project to mitsubishi x 86 ..it got sent to [won't name but major NYC mastering house as well as label] i get back a copy and the middle is going in and out drums pumping center stuff dissapearing etc etc..

I call up and go WTF did you do? .."we mastered directly from your format" ...huh?.."PCM" ..

someone took my tape and put it thru a Harmonia Mundi then sony PCM


I called Tom Steele at Frankford Wayne because he used to be in our philly building and I knew him for years..I said ..can i send you this recording..it reminds me of when i did 3 vocals instead of 4 and one was in the center and then sent to the early Emulator samplers [for bouncing BKG's] that had clock errors..

lo and behold he finds that the clocks were indeed off at the other facility..

the recordind was already pressed up..my name was on it.. what was even worse was I made a big stink about it with the ARTIST/PRODUCER but the record went gold..so from then on my client used to say..see bitch it doesn't matter what it sounds like...

and i had to sit and listen how my job was meaningless

[bobwarren]

The last two independent projects I produced, but did not mix, sounded absolutely gorgeous on the two track 24bit/48khz master. When I finally got a copy of the finished duplicated CD after being sent to either Nashville or New York for mastering, the music was almost unlistenable. Loud and bright, man, loud and bright! Come on! Are we ever going to get back to music actually breathing with dynamics? I heard Elton John's Yellow Brick Road the other night and felt like commiting hari-cari! I never got into classic rock, but I suppose I am a huge fan now.

[audiothings]

Video editors are the PITA. It happens all the time here... i finish the mix (ad jingles, mostly), check it on everything from a laptop speaker to cheap tv speakers, to my nearfields+sub (after i max out the levels, these are jingles, after all , and the editor instead of turning his speaker volume up adds another 10 dB to the file.... Client comes back and says that it sounds like ass... and when i import the track from the final video i see a fukkin railroad comprised of square waves...

[emkay]

Wosrt thing??---- Getting signed to a Laebl !!

Worst thing after that? Getting signed to a Label !!!

[rwhitney]

Didn't sell.

[RadioMoo]

Originally Posted by audiothings

Video editors are the PITA. It happens all the time here... i finish the mix (ad jingles, mostly), check it on everything from a laptop speaker to cheap tv speakers, to my nearfields+sub (after i max out the levels, these are jingles, after all , and the editor instead of turning his speaker volume up adds another 10 dB to the file.... Client comes back and says that it sounds like ass... and when i import the track from the final video i see a fukkin railroad comprised of square waves...

+1.

[frans]

The band burned their own CD-R for the pressing plant and had some mojo going in Nero (or whatever...) big surprise when it came from the plant. At least it wasn't loud....as magically, over all the "mojo" the level was 5dB down. Brickwalled at -5 with some psychoacustic gibberish tailormade for eeny computer speakers.

[Infernal Device]

Band I know got signed to a label. They asked me to do the drum/bass/guitar tracking. We did. We rocked it.

They go the label's "studio" to finish it and when I hear it, all the drums were quantized and sound replaced (badly), toms panned 100 to each side, bad guitar edits (to match quantized drums), bass went away. Vocals swimming in reverb presets.

I asked the band what happened. They said "It sounds great and they have this software that makes it super easy (PT LE)."

(I tracked everything on Neve/API, etc into Nuendo but do NOT quantize. I make the drummer play it right).

Now this horrible train wreck is out there.

[Mosby]

The guitarist wanted to mix it.

[PhilE]

High end hype mastering to the point of swirling crashes.

[blackcatdigi]

Friend of a friend wants to come in and do a full-length vanity project. Cool. I need the work as it's nice to keep the lights on and not get too far behind on the bills. He's a Singer/Songwriter/Guitarist. We agree that I'll play the drums and the bass player from my band will play bass. He comes in to track the guides for us to lay the tracks to. Turns out he's not much of a singer and even less of a songwriter. More like a very green guitar student (who's been playing for decades)...
He cannot play in time. He cannot play to a click. He's a "vibe" player. I work with him a long time to get usable song guides for each of his tracks. They are so far off from the click track, I basically have to chart the songs out, turn his tracks off, and lay drums to just the click. No problem. My bass player comes in and we work up bass lines and track. The 'artist' comes back in to lay down his keeper tracks. I'm thinking "even though he couldn't play to a static click, he'll do much better with a solid rhythm track behind him." Right. Each new track he lays down is worse than the one before. He keeps asking to put on more and more guitar tracks, and I keep thinking "Great. Finally, NOW he's going to put a solid rhythm gtr part down. Nope. Just lead noodles. Oodles and oodles of bad Carlos Santana wannabe licks with no feel and terrible timing. I mean so bad as to not even being in the same meter or tempo or even the right key. I finally snap and start suggesting that the songs need some sort of rhythm gtr parts and that we can't be soloing all over the vocals through every intro, verse and chorus. I assist him in coming up with rhythm parts. He can't play them. So, after every session, I replace all his parts myself. I also play all the keys and percussion on all the tracks.

Long story short(ish), we finish tracking the session and he's blown away with how the tunes have come out. My bass player and I have agreed to back him up on his CD Release show which is booked last minute, way too soon to properly mix his tracks and get the project mastered. I promise I'll get it done, whatever it takes. I mix 10 songs in 3 days (working around 20 hrs at a time). He loves the mixs. I have my graphics guy do his CD layout and it looks fantastic. The mastering house I've suggested has a cancellation, so I take the project to mastering, he does a bang up job and finally: It's done. And it sounds much better than it really has a right to.

Now at this point, he's very much under the gun to get the project manufactured to meet his release show deadline, so he has to upload the files to Discmakers rather then send the master. So, he takes the ref copy from mastering, rips it onto his PC, and uploads the project files as 128kbp mp3s...



And happily plays these discs for anyone who'll listen...

Oh well; The check didn't bounce.

[Jules]

I walked back into the studio on a day off to find a band I had been doing, mixing with another producer..

Wow, that really hurt my feelings... My heart fell to the floor

They didnt tell me they were doing it..

I had only been engineering for a year or so and was really just a tape op at the time.. but still..

Anyhow, that toughened me up, so notheing like that ever 'got to me' again..

(band never got anywhere the SNAKES IN THE GRASS!!!! )

[Jules]

After me (producer) band and A&R all had approved mastering session...

.. I was the last to leave...

My taxi took a while to come..

I then caught the Mastering Engineer plugging in a Junger limiter (like a fancy Finalizer) to put acros EVERYTHING!

I said WHAT THE F**K??

He said it was 'only to get a few extra DB"

TOTALLY BOGUS BEHAVIOR IMHO

Especially as we had all signed off on the mastering job..

(but the whole ablum project was like WWIII - so I just let it slide...)

[Matteran]

Originally Posted by blackcatdigi

Now at this point, he's very much under the gun to get the project manufactured to meet his release show deadline, so he has to upload the files to Discmakers rather then send the master. So, he takes the ref copy from mastering, rips it onto his PC, and uploads the project files as 128kbp mp3s...

oh man... that's horrible. You went through so much to help this guy out, and then unknowingly completely negates like half your work... oh well, like you said, you got paid.

[uncle duncan]

Sent a project to be mixed out of state on a SSL board. Sent reference mixes. Got a call "We've got 4 in the can. Which vocal do we use on this tune?" I say "It's in the mix notes." He says "What mix notes?" They've mixed 4 songs already and never even looked at the mix notes I sent. The assistant engineer says she has the mix notes and they continue.
The mixes come back, and on one song they got one of the e gt mics about 2 seconds out of time through the whole song. It's obviously wrong. It sounds nothing like the reference mix. (How do you screw up the mix on a power trio with only one guitar?) On two other songs they added a vocal harmony that is almost a half step out of tune in places. (This was the producers idea.)
They want to charge $$$ to fix their screwups. We have to wait 6 weeks for another opening in their schedule. The artist is a hardass, so we get the fixes for free, but he has to reschedule his CD release, etc.
Gotta admit though, the bass and drums sounded great.

[Led]

Just the usual, produced and recorded a single here, label got it mixed by a name in Sweden, mix sucks. Label says, "Yeah we kinda like your mix better" but guess who's mix is coming out in May? (I'll give you a hint, it's not mine)

[In Tune Audio]

Recorded this musical group, about 10 singers, a guitar and some light percussion. We record in a guys living room because this is where they're used to singing. They want a nice intimate sound, and very natural. Hard to do in a living room with 10 singers, but I bring a portable setup and did what I thought was a great job creating a natural intimate tone.

Take it back to the studio do some work on it. Show it to the lead guy in the group. He flips, really happy with how it turned out. (He was a smart guy and worried about the fact that it was recorded where it was)

So I give him a disc of it. One of the other guys in the group takes the disc and decides to run it through some extra plugins. Squashes the crap out of it, and plasters it with reverb!

Instead of the intimate sound I worked so hard on, it now sounds like a distorted guitar amp in carnegie hall. Talk to the lead guy about fixing this (and he knows it's a problem) but doesn't want to hurt the other guys feelings.

[gsqd]

Spent over 300k to make a splendid album for a very famous label. 4 world class producers over 11 tracks. Had great players all over it, mixed by one of the best, mastered by one of the best!
Exellent packaging, design and photography.

Sounds good so far eh?

Then, when it was all done, dusted and canned ready for a full blown release, the famous label sold out to a BIGGER more famous label and our artist got dropped because of estimated future development and support costs!!!

To this day it sits on a shelf!

Nice,

GM

[AmplitudeAudio]

Recorded and mixed some buddies of mine in a Celtic Jazz/world beat group. Great sound, great mix, great dynamics, send it off to a local mastering house, sounds superb.....one of my buddies sends a copy to an independent radio station to be included on a multi-disc "local artist" compilation disc. I get my copy of the compilatoin CD, only track with their name and my studio name on it......sounds like complete crap, squashed, brittle, almost like they ran it in and out of a Sound Blaster card 20 times!!!! Other track on the discs sound fine!

[Veej007]

i write a score for a short film from a small team of filmmakers. dynamic, breathes to the video, responds to the script, tempo synchronized with camera cuts, the whole nine yards.

one of the filmmakers comes over and reviews it with me and gives it the big thumbs up, so i bounce it down for him.

one of the other guys on the team hates it, so they chop out the one part they like and loop it for the entire film. naturally, they cut a seven-bar segment, and it skips every time it repeats. i asked for my name to be pulled from the credits but it was too late.

[Jonkan]

My first recording to be commercially released that i did last year was a big letdown for me.

I was recording a fairly well known female singer songwriter and struggled to get a warm intimate sound. I succeeded pretty well, and everyone was very happy with the way the tracks turned out. Basically its mostly Piano and Vocals, and a string quartet.

I was only hired to do the tracking, and some guy who had mixed a pretty sucessful record was hired to mix it. After we finish tracking everyone agrees that my rough mixes that i did in two hours are very good, and the producer and artist even considers hiring me to do the mix instead. But the mix engineer had already been payed (i heard he got alot more than i got for the tracking might i add), so he gets to do it. Basically all he would have had to do to get a great result was to pull the faders up and balance it a bit, add some compression to the vocals and a hint of reverb and voila!= good mix. I had worked very hard to get everything right at the tracking stage without using any eq or compression.

When i later get to hear the record (after its released) it sounds awful. Everything has way too much reverb on it, and not the good kind of reverb. More like a big tin can that makes your ears scream for help. Everything is eq:ed badly and not very well balanced levelwise (where i went for warm intimate vocals the other guy just added alot of treble). The room mics on the piano are overused. The string quartet which sounded great with just a stereo pair has now all the spot mics pulled up way too high (which were there only for safety while tracking). And Im not the only one who has noticed this with the recordings. Alot of people have commented spontaneously about the wierd mixes.

Its not the end of the world though, i can listen to it and some of the tracks sound ok:ish. But i feel that much of my work has gone down the drain, and that i would have done a better work mixing it. It just hurts extra much because it is my first real record.

Despite all of this, the record has gotten great reviews, so im happy anyway for the artist who is a friend of mine. And i had a blast recording with them.

/J

[zaczac]

My first very humble release on a label (as engineer) was for a very traditional jazz group. They were very specific about wanting a natural raw sound. So other than some emergency compression on the trombone, all other dynamic changes were done by hand.

Got it back from mastering and it was totally flattened. These guys played with a huge dynamic range, so the really soft songs became really really loud all of the time :(

Not half as bad as some of the stories here, but I get really annoyed by how many professionals don't understand the importance of dynamic range in a situation like this.

[Chris Parsons]

I did a demo for a band, good guys, good music. The singer does some messing around with sound engineering. We did 10 songs in about 20 hours mixed/mastered and everything and it actually came out sounding pretty good for the time (budget) alloted.

I checked out their website today and I guess he took my masteres and smashed the hell out of it on his own system. HE SET IT TO STUN. Funny thing is that at first it sounds pretty cool, like an effect, but after a while I find myself missing the dynamics that I left on the album :-(

check it out! The Sally Growlers it should start right up.

-Chris

[Led]

Originally Posted by Veej007

i write a score for a short film from a small team of filmmakers. dynamic, breathes to the video, responds to the script, tempo synchronized with camera cuts, the whole nine yards.

one of the filmmakers comes over and reviews it with me and gives it the big thumbs up, so i bounce it down for him.

one of the other guys on the team hates it, so they chop out the one part they like and loop it for the entire film. naturally, they cut a seven-bar segment, and it skips every time it repeats. i asked for my name to be pulled from the credits but it was too late.

Ha, very similar to the first feature score I wrote with a full symphony orchestra. For a large independant film company in Oz, they take it to the Toronto festival and secure finance and distribution from US film company (Next Wave), who decide the music "leads the audience too much emotionally" (boy wouldn't want a filmscore to do that) and all they have are stems so they mix it back to just the Double bass and cello drones and fade them in and out wherever they want. Four months orchestrating and it sounded like a monkey with a brick on a keyboard. I too asked about my name being removed from the credits, but I was young and got over it eventually. Mind you I still pass on most film projects I'm asked about doing.

[Rufuss Sewell]

Long story short...

My budget studio finally landed one of the more popular local bands. They're a great band and I spent a ton of my free time producing an album that really sounded great. We had mixed it and everything and it was ready to be mastered. Lots of people heard the final mixes and were raving...

Out of blue someone who happened to be interning at a world class studio mentioned that he could sneak the band in for some free mixing sessions... so they asked for the tracks. I figured, no big deal, they'll probably hate the outcome and just use the original mixes.

Keep in mind this is a good band with good singers who sing more or less on pitch, and all of the rhythm were groovin'

I'm sure you can guess what's coming...

A few months later they release the album and all of the sweet harmonies have been turned into uber-autotuned Mr.Roboto style vocals. All of the groove completely locked to the grid with Beat Detective... and to top it off the mixes were absolutely atrocious. It was all vocals and reverb. Literally all of the punch was removed from the drums and there was nothing but painfully loud and bright cymbals.

Somehow he got the bass to sound a bit better though haha. Probably some cool tube compressor. But the bottom line was that the band was fooled into thinking the "perfect" performances were better sounding than their own human talent.

Ug...

Of course now I just melodyne and quantize the hell out of everything to ensure job security.... :(

[zaczac]

I've had too many bad experiences with certain large studios similiar to your story Rufuss. It's why I feel smaller operations like myself can be very relevant.

[Jules]

Let me guess,

Emo-core band - that liked the cookie cutter Beat Detectived drums and robot vocals cause all their CD's sound like that?

And the leader of the band was the bass player?

Originally Posted by Rufuss Sewell

they release the album and all of the sweet harmonies have been turned into uber-autotuned Mr.Roboto style vocals.

All of the groove completely locked to the grid with Beat Detective...

Somehow he got the bass to sound a bit better though .... :(

[marty lester]

Originally Posted by audiothings

Video editors are the PITA. It happens all the time here... i finish the mix (ad jingles, mostly), check it on everything from a laptop speaker to cheap tv speakers, to my nearfields+sub (after i max out the levels, these are jingles, after all , and the editor instead of turning his speaker volume up adds another 10 dB to the file.... Client comes back and says that it sounds like ass... and when i import the track from the final video i see a fukkin railroad comprised of square waves...

i hear ya brother...how 'bout doing a lovely mix for a tv commercial and then upon hearing it on TV, noticing it's dual-left channel. they tossed the right channel
away and mono'd it. i could hear the 'verb from right channel elements
that no longer existed. ******s.

marty.

[pbell]

When I was in school I brought a band in (super great musicians) to do the bed tracks for their upcoming demo. They were doing overdubs and such at their producer's place. Had some killer drum tones as far as I was concerned (producer loved them to) and rather excited to have my name on this project. Almost a year later and no mention of it ever being finished :(

Oh well.

[jbuntz]

How many times have you heard "Dude, I've got a friend who said he can master it for free!" I've usually talked bands out of doing this but occasionally it happens.

"Dude but he's got this Phase EQ linear thing and some new L3 something"

To be fair, pricey mastering jobs can be really bad too though. There's been quite a few times when I've thought "hmmm...Didn't those mixes used to sound good?"