The Finished Product Is A Summed Reflection of the Source Materials
Posted on | October 10, 2009 | No Comments
We live in a society of hitting budgets and cutting corners. I was reminded of this recently when I had a problem with my guitar’s tuning machine. The machine seemed to be slipping and I couldn’t get it to raise the pitch past a certain point. It was actually the second time this happened in two years…but this time I was in Italy and needed to use my guitar for a musical performance.
I contacted the manufacturer and they said the tuning machines were actually a cheaper, third-party look-alike of a reputable brand, with the guitar maker’s name and logo on them. They also said that when the current run of those tuners was gone they’d be switching over to a reputable German manufacturer. They offered to send me a new set of machines, but I ended up just ordering the German manufactured tuners myself; but not before a lot of wasted time on my part…troubleshooting what was in essence the result of budget constraints and cut corners.
This sort of thing happens a lot in the world. In music production — where there are less concrete benchmarks for success and error — musicians or producers might use cheap gear or consolidate steps to save time and money. It’s something that’s irked me for a long time, because professional recordings (made by the big boys and girls…that end up on Soundscan and Billboard) always have a talented production team consisting of an arranger, tracking engineer, mix engineer, and mastering engineer: specialists that bring their expertise to the table yet still work together as a team. It’s the way things should be done.
But this is the real world, not Disneyland. And the way things should be done doesn’t always happen; what’s affordable is what happens. The problem with accepting this is that you get inferior results.
Basically, what you get in the end is a direct result of the quality of what’s put in on the front-end…whether it’s an instrument or a record. Quality counts.
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From Ohm to Om reflects the opinions of mastering engineer Paul Abbott, owner of San Diego's ZenMastering.
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