Falling Off a Log
Hi, All!
This edition of From the Devil’s Coach House has me pondering, among other things, filthy lucre and how to get it.
While we are on the subject of The Beatles, this weekend gave me the opportunity to finish Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back, and I loved every second of its nine-hour running time.
For me, The Beatles feel like members of my own family. I knew most of their catalogue initially from my mum singing their songs around the house, and the US animated TV version of the band, despite the wildly inaccurate accents, was always great fun.
The first album I ever owned was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was a Christmas present from my grandparents when I was 6 or 7. The first album I ever bought with my own money was A Collection of Beatles Oldies, which, considering it was a compilation, was a fine album in itself. The latter album has quite an odd history and is no longer available.
Unfortunately, that album is no longer available to me, either, as my sister lent it to one of her friends and I never saw it again. (Darn you, Danielle!)
Having a Beatles obsession is clearly a family trait, the all-out winner being my lovely cousin Jackie Spencer, who was one of the first three Beatles guides in Liverpool and still gives tours today. I can’t recommend her tours highly enough, so you may as well just go straight to her site and book one.
If you are curious as to what other music was imprinted on me as a nipper, I have a few posts on the subject over on my blog, like this one on Adam & the Ants’ debut Dirk Wears White Sox and this one on the music of Doctor Who.
It sounds like I’m being very British and putting off talking about filthy lucre, doesn’t it?…
Oh, well, here goes.
L’histoire
Building a studio is very, very expensive. And I mean very, very, very expensive.
When I started this project, I worked out how much it would cost, doubled that and it’s still costing more. How have I dealt with that? Well, like I always deal with things, I rolled up my sleeves and got my hands dirty. In this particular case, this has meant working two jobs.
During the day, I work for a great family business out here in Brittany that provides the backline for concerts and festivals. My job entails selecting drums, amps, guitars, basses, keyboards, organs, etc. from the company’s huge warehouse, loading it all into a van and then delivering it to music venues across France. I’m also responsible for the repair and maintenance of the gear. It’s pretty physically demanding work loading huge amplifiers in flight cases and then driving hundreds of kilometres to unload it again. However, it’s good honest work, and my co-workers are lovely. I get to practice my French daily, and I’ve got to know Brittany like the back of my hand.
I suppose my language skills must be improving. Recently, I’ve been mistaken for a Belgian, as well as for a Gallo speaker! Gallo is the third language of Brittany, after French and Breton. However, it’s much more similar to French than Breton is.
In the evenings and on days off, I do my audio work in the studio. At the minute, that mostly consists of mastering rock and metal records. Quite a bit of this work comes my way through recommendations from a Salford/Manchester studio called Noiseboy.
I can’t recommend Noiseboy enough if you are based in the North West of England and play rock or metal. Chris, the owner, is a fantastic chap who also does some mixing as part of Soundfackery Productions. He even has his own profile on our page.
In fact, it was Chris who recorded and mixed this silly ditty based on John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Falling Off a Log
I’m getting there, honest.
My partner in crime, Anikó Tóth, once told me that I had to find my “falling off a log” thing. I had no idea what she meant by that, but she explained it as a concept she had learnt from a book called Successful Singing Auditions (link below) by Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher. To put very simply, your “falling off a log” thing is the thing you discover you can do very well - and people want to pay you well for it - but that you find very easy.
I have to admit, nothing about my career in music has come easy to me. I’ve often felt that I’ve had to work much harder than my peers, but I’ve always managed to get there by sheer determination. That is, until I started mastering.
Like many people in music, I thought of mastering as the “dark art” of audio. If I asked a mastering engineer what they did, they would just reply that they just added a bit of equalisation and compression. Surely, it couldn’t be just that? They must be being vague to try and keep me from discovering their secret recipes.
Back when I was based in the UK, I used to do a lot more mixing, and, just to give the client a better idea of how the final version would sound, I started doing temporary “masters”. The turning point came when, after one particularly rewarding mix, the mastering engineer called me to say that my “temporary masters” were good enough to release and that he didn’t feel he could add anything more. I was quite flattered by this and even more flattered that this started to happen more and more. Increasingly, musicians started contacting me directly to master their records, and it has become a large part of what I do now at Soundfackery Productions.
I’ve found my “falling off the log” thing!
Here’s one I mastered.
When I master, I use a hybrid approach, which is a mixture of analogue and digital processing. If you want to get into mastering yourself, the cheapest route is to start “in the box” with digital plugins. I wrote a blog post with some plugins I recommend for mastering. With a good set of ears and a bit of practice, there’s no reason why you won’t be able to do it as well as me in no time.
Filthy Lucre
Should you be interested in having me master your music, or you want to book The Devil’s Coach House for your next recording project, you can do that through my Mastering page or The Studio page.
If you’d like to buy in any of the albums or books I’ve mentioned in this issue, you can find them through these links below. These are affiliate links, which means that I receive a small percentage of anything you buy through these links. However, this does not cost you any extra.
If you want to get the book on mastering, get this one
The Beatles - With the Beatles
The Beatles - Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band
Gillyanne Kayes & Jeremy Fisher - Successful Singing Auditions
The Flying Lizards
…And in the End, the Love You Take is Equal to the Love You Make
As always, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to read From the Devil’s Coach House. If you’ve enjoyed it, please share it with your friends, post it on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Stay noisy!
Steve