full length album - needs mastering

[funkdrmr]

Hey everyone.

My band is finishing a 13 song (11 songs 3:30-5:00 each and 2 short 1:30 acoustic tracks) album. Mixing should be finished by end of this week. Total run time is right around 60 mins.

Genre is rock / modern rock with a hint of progressive. Think Coheed and Cambria, Taking Back Sunday, Bayside, Muse kind of influences.

With a lot of interest from our local ClearChannel station on this, we want to do the mastering right. Typical issue, though....we don't have a huge amount of funding. We all have good jobs, so we're not shopping around for a Craigslist $200 for the whole thing type of deal. We understand you get what you pay for here.

I've already spoken to a couple of mastering places, but I'm trying to get a "test run" so that I can give my guys a blind test to pick from. This blind test will run from all spectrums...from myself doing it ITB (not great), to a larger known "name" engineer who would cost us $3K to do the entire thing (a little out of reach $$$ for us).

I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in providing a test master so that we could make our decision for the rest of the album?

You don't even have to provide the entire song...just through the 1st or 2nd chorus would be great. We aren't looking to rip people off or anything and take our "test master" & put it right up on myspace or anything like that.

The reference track should be ready Monday. I'll upload the 44.1/24bit stereo wav file, so it can be downloaded by each engineer interested via a private link.

If anyone is interested, please PM me and we'll get everything worked out.

Thanks!
-Jay-

[Time Tech]

Hi Jay,

PM'd you

[miguelmarques]

PM'd you!

[RedTuxedo]

PM sent.

[tom durack]

PM sent.

[funkdrmr]

Thank you everyone for the PM's!

I'm gonna go ahead & say I have enough options for now.

To everyone that has PM'd thus far, I'll be in touch in the next day or 2 with the track.

Thanks again for the enthusiastic response!

[funkdrmr]

Just wanted to say that we've been seriously BLOWN AWAY by the response.

We have been going through a process of elimination that will continue for a couple of days still. There are still a few guys who haven't been able to get samples to me yet.

HUGE PROPS to everyone, though. The quality of work that many of you have provided in the samples so far has been FANTASTIC!

[Darwin James]

Why run around?

Hire Dave Collins and sleep well.

[lerone]

Thanks for undermining the abilities of all the other ME's on here Darwin. Nice one.

[funkdrmr]

Originally Posted by Darwin James

Why run around?

Hire Dave Collins and sleep well.

I'm sure Dave probably does excellent work. Looking at his credits and lack of rate advertisement on his page, I'd be taking a pretty educated guess that he's at the top of our budget at least. The only other engineer that I've consulted that has that type of credits to his name quoted me $3000 for the full album. Well worth it, I'm sure and we would be the first to pull the trigger if we had the cash.

Fact is we don't have that kind of money. Getting even half of that is gonna be a stretch if we decide on that price range. I would also never ask someone to lower their price just because we can't afford it. If we can't, we either need to be happy with who we work with, or save up for a few more months until we can go with someone more expensive.

The other reason for "running around"...this is my first experience with the entire process done somewhat correctly. I finally have some nice gear at my disposal, and we were fortunate enough to have a rate that supported our desire to take our time & do things as well as we could during tracking, editing, and mixing.

The experience that I'm getting by hearing what different ME's have done to my 1 imperfect mix has been invaluable, and I'm super appreciative of everyone taking the time to send me a sample.

I'm not exaggerating at all by saying that some of the results have truly been shocking up to this point....in a good way! It's proving to me, as is said many times on these forums....it doesn't really matter what an engineer uses or how much "cred" they have. It's ultimately how they use that gear, and how they envision getting to a final product.

hope that helps.

[Darwin James]

Originally Posted by lerone

Thanks for undermining the abilities of all the other ME's on here Darwin. Nice one.

Sorry. That wasnt the intention.

[tom durack]

Survey sez? How did this work out?

[Chris Lago]

I'd like to know as well. I tried to deal with the kick/bass relationship by removing a bit of bass because the mix seemed a bit bass guitar heavy. Other than that, it was pretty good.

[funkdrmr]

Greetings everyone.

Sorry I hadn't updated via this thread in a while. This entire process was so great (and downright time consuming!), and I can't thank EVERYONE enough for taking the time to give us a sample of what you could do.

I'll start by saying that we didn't receive 1 master that didn't sound at least "good", so kudos to everyone there. I know my mixing skills aren't exactly CLA either, and we weren't looking for miracles.

That being said, 5 of the masters that we received stood well above the rest in terms of clarity, loudness, punch, and just overall "awesomeness" right out of the gate.

As I stated before, I gave my guys a whole mess of randomly sequenced CDs, and they spent days going over them. Picking 1 or 2 out of the 4 or 5 on each disk, and moving on to the next. We slowly eliminated a few, then more...and I started noticing a pattern where they were picking the same engineer's tracks on different disks. Completely blind & honest...it was really neat to actually do it like that. It irritated the hell out of my boys, but in the end, we ended up 100% happy with the final product and we can't ask for anything other than that.

HUGE props to Alex at Red Tuxedo, Chris Lago, Tom Waltz, Kevin Nix, and last but DEFINITELY not least the engineer we went with....Randy Merrill at Masterdisk. Depending on what you're looking for, I don't think anyone could go wrong with any of those 5 guys. Seriously top notch work all around.

We're finished with the mastering process now, and I can't say enough good things about Randy. Completely professional, very VERY easy to work with, and he really brought our tracks to life more than we ever thought possible.

Thank you all again for taking your time. We're very happy with how it all has turned out, and very grateful that we received such an enthusiastic response for our humble rock band from Hawaii.

-J-

[Chris Lago]

Great stuff

[londonvega]

I don know if this is an appropriate question or not and I have not done much searching around the forum for the answer but this appears to be the perfect place to ask so ....

Funkdrmr mentioned that $3000 was the quote from an ME I´m assuming has lots of well known credits and therefor is probably on the higher end of the $$$ spectrum. $1500 was ¨almost a stretch¨ , so I am wondering.... how much does it generally cost to get an album mastered from someone in the price range Funkdrmr is looking for? How much to master just 1 song?

If you don´t want to post a quote on the thread I understand. A PM with more info would be great. And to be up front. I don´t have anything that is ready for mastering yet but I am trying to figure out a budget for my album and I want to include money for proper mastering.

Thanks GSlutz! I am learning so much from this community.thumbsup

[funkdrmr]

Hey londonvega,

From what I experienced, it mostly revolves around an hourly rate. Especially at the top end of the spectrum where the engineers have massive credits.

Some engineers will also quote by the project, depending if they're trying to get your business or not.

I ran into many options in our quest. Many engineers just charging by the hour, many charging by a rate per recorded minute of material, and many just saying "i'll do the whole thing for X amount".