Customer Satisfaction VS Engineering

Happy Clients

A lot of engineers facing the harsh truth that they need to make adjustments on the already well mixed and mastered track to satisfy their clients needs and make them happy so that they would come back next time. Among engineers it is okay if you don’t nail it first, that’s what revisions are for, they work as a finetune and it’s a good thing. Where the problem lies is the huge gap between the engineers reference monitoring system and the clients monitoring and checking methods.

DJ clients

The classic Dj story is when the mastered track gets played for the first time in a club and the loud playback volume highlights all the small details and weak points in the music. That is why We master our club bangers at 100 dB level, so We hear the exact same volume the dancing crowd will. The twist could be if the club has too much or too weak subs, and then the clients ask for revision based on the experiences of what happened in the club. Then the track gets the adjustments and it will play just perfect in that club, but what happens on a regular car test or in the pods? Well this speaker compensating behavior could happen in a lot of the cases, if client has a very colored headphone or studio monitor or simply that acoustics create standing waves that may lead to amplify some freqs or cancel them out.

Another common problem is the stereo image: the wider the better. We know that in the club the opposite is true, the narrower the stereo image the better the translation will be. The kick and bass ratio to lead synths and pads on a generally more wider stereoimaged and spreadout trance track could quickly fall to unbalance if the club plays it back in mono, which happens quite sometime. That is what mono compatibility for, but some genres like trance for example, they simply don’t sound good if you apply that rule strictly with the technical details in focus. You have to be able to think in musical dimensions too and find a balance of what would you gain from strict rules vs smart moves that lets the composition breathe but controls it so it won’t damage too much if played back in not optimal conditions. There is also a philosophical question of whether the client should ask for totally questionable moves on the mastering process.

The big question

The big question is to make a good sounding master or making the client happy. The struggle is real. If an engineer choose to refuse the clients requests it will be bad for the business and get’s the grumpy burned out badge from the society although the masters in technical terms are perfect and may time will be proove the faith of real engineering. On the other hand engineers could choose to not argue and do whatever the clients ask to make them happy and grow in business. Well it may result in fast results from business side but not with a lasting joy for sure, as the results will satisfy the artists but not the audience. The main role of mastering explained in a visual metaphor is to make a good looking frame for the picture so it doesn’t expand endlessly, gets limited so it cuts to the point, could be hanged on your wall or in a galery or can be printed out for a book or to a billboard as it has it’s exact resolution, ratios and dimensions determined. By limiting the dynamics and balancing the frequency spectrum We engineers put all the musical energy into a controlled and easy to playback form for every speaker system, but this means We need to cut the overly extending information both in freq and stereo image terms, so one could think mastering as a destructive process from an artistic point of view.

Needless to say that artists will not like cutting out parts or removing energy just so that the track could be played back in cheaper more limited systems too as well without errors or by breaking them. This is a neverending fight in the industry such as the loudness war or the analog vs digital topics.

Our Standpoint

Our standpoint on this question is that as engineers We must educate our clients and artists, because as they will understand the barriers they can stay within safe limits and learn how to create such depth and energy with new tricks so their compositions can stay mastering ready from the first note to the last effect chain. Another solution is to give multiple versions, one with the suggested mastering and one with the clients desire, this way the test crowd or labels will have the option to choose and both of us will be more experienced how to approach the audience.

As a final thought We must mention that these fights over mild adjustments are not worth too much trouble because todays playback systems are so good they could easily handle most unmastered materia too, the important thing is to have a good sounding track that translates the artists vision in the best possible way, if an artist chooses to have some parts overcompressed or boosted it is still a part of their own art and may be serve as a stylistic element in the long run.

We all should remember to respect the art and the artist and to respect the engineers opinion and suggestions because that is why We cooperate on making the music sound good as possible.