I haven't fully grasped the reason for these types of people, considering that if you have a talented tracking/mixing engineer, this guy shouldnt be needed, but i was curious as to who have you either worked with or heard the work of that impressed you?

Chris

John Golden.

Trevor Sadler (Mastermind Productions, Milwaukee)

[quote]"I haven't fully grasped the reason for these types of people..."[/quote]

Trevor was a great help-We made an anthology with MANY different source materials, due to master tape loss or damage. I mean, 1/2" masters, 1/4" masters, cassettes, protools (live radio recordings), even 20 year old F1 digital safety copies on Betamax (!), lordy...

Trevor did a great job of making a cohesive sounding package.

Jay

Alan Douches mastered our records. Really made a difference and sounded great.

Redline wrote:John Golden.

Trevor Sadler (Mastermind Productions, Milwaukee)

We got ours back from Golden about 2 months ago. JJ mastered it. He did a hell of a job. I actually liked it a little bit more than the stuff John did (just a little). So, yeah, if you send it to JG and they say that JJ's going to do it, fear not.

john golden does a good job

abbey road is a great place, but expensive

every dime we've ever spent on mastering has been worth it

the playback system in a good mastering lab is actually kind of brutal, it's so accurate

i don't think i've enjoyed a single session that i've attended

but you hear everything, plenty of things you don't hear in the studio when you are more concerned with performances and general kicking-of-assness than the seeming minutiae of adding a smidge of high end, collapsing the very low end into mono a bit, or making sure your levels from song to song are right. also, the quality of eqs and converters is going to be very high at a good lab, as opposed to most studios or wherever you'd get it dumped to a 1630 or exabyte otherwise.

i think we've been around and around about this someplace before....

I've heard Federation X's "X-Patriot" record that was recorded by Albini pre-mastered as a cd-r of the final mix. It sounded very good. Great, even. Then I heard a CD-r of the same record once it got back from John Golden. Night and day difference. Everything just sounded...bigger.

My bands have always had similar expeiriences, despite not being able to afford Albini or Golden.

Mastering is always money well-spent.

tmidgett wrote:abbey road is a great place, but expensive

The project I took over there last year cost a grand total of about $650. It was a five song EP (about 20 minutes of audio) and I hardly think that had it been twice as long it would have cost twice as much. Chris Blair is a freaking badass. With one exception, we heard each song TWICE. Once as he was working on EQ and limiting and once as it was being imported for assembly. The last song we worked on, mixed at a different studio and under different circumstances, required a second pass while working on the audio.

I recommend him to pretty much all my clients now.

Shy of that, Hoyt Dooley III at Open Door Productions in Nashville does an excellent job for considerably less than many other pros. He's done the bulk of my work for the last seven or eight years and he's one of the most easy-to-work-with people I've ever met. I've never been dissatisfied with his work and I think the most involved project I ever sent him still cost less than $700.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

I had one record mastered at Abbey Road and was really happy with how it turned out.

I also have had lots of luck with Roger Seibel at SAE Mastering in Arizona. He is very reasonably priced as well.

John Dent at Loud Mastering in Taunton, England rescued my first record from sounding like it was made with two SM57s, no preamps and a Roland VS880 digital multitracker. Now it sounds like an album made with two SM57s, no preamps and a Roland VS880 digital multitracker that was then mastered by John Dent. Safe.