I’ll admit know that I’ve written some bad ones.  I’ve certainly read some bad ones, and some even worse ones.  I have also read some good ones, and what follows are some tips I’ve gleaned from those.  I don’t know if I’ve written a good one yet, but I’m trying.  I’ve written a lot of resumes, though and the same sort of tips apply.

1. Be direct. You’ve got a page, tops, to say who you are, what sort of music you make, maybe a few press clippings.  If you spend half of the page exclaiming that you’re the most awesome band ever before anybody has a clue why they should even care, you’ve lost.
2. Good grammar costs nothing. Seriously, people, do you want the primary representation of your musical endeavor to read like it was written by a 7th-grader?   You may be tempted to pepper it with l33tspeek or try and sound like PsychicTV by using “thee” and “ov.”  Don’t.  It’s not cute anymore.  It might be genre-appropriate to use some colloquialisms or slang – if you’re a dubstep act, using the word “wobble” is fine, for example, or if you’re Dizzee Rascal, you can occasionally use the word “wiv.”  Still, it’s dodgy.  Some promoters and the general public may catch on, others may just think you can’t use a spell-checker.
3. You are not a genre-defying, uncategorizable, one-of-a-kind band. Nobody, nobody believes that when they read it, so don’t bother to write it.  Even if, on the off chance you are a genre-bending totally unique act, it’s just not something you can come out and say.  You are not redefining anything, recontextualizing anything, or reinventing anything.  You can describe what you do.  If you can describe your sound well, that’s a stronger advertisement for your work than any “reinvention” BS.
4. Nobody cares who mastered or engineered your last album, or what gear it was recorded on – unless of course those people or gear are coming with you on tour or are always going to be working with you.  This is a reasonably new development, and I’m not sure where it came from.  I’m starting to see a number of acts who spend far too much time detailing exactly what sort of mixing board or synthesizer or producer or engineer was involved.  Trainspotters like me may think it’s cool, but unless it somehow contributes to the overall perception of your band, it’s not worth the space.  The rare exception to this is the producer, since they can have a direct impact on your sound, but even then they have to be established enough for it to make a difference.  For example, if your producer was, say, Brian Eno or someone of that stature – those guys don’t need your money, they have to like you first.

   Basically, you don’t sell your house by listing the plumber.

5. An aesthetic is a tricky thing to work with. If you’re a band with a specific visual identity, you have a tough line to walk.  What a band looks like won’t sell records, and while a stage act may bring bodies to a show, it’s really hard to sell that line to a promoter who’s only got a demo CD and a single photo to go on.   It’s even harder if your look doesn’t match the music – if by design you’re a techno band that dresses up in 14th-century Italianate costumes, well, that may be your thing but an unfamiliar reader is going to just see “schtick.”  Some descriptions are going to sound played-out or bandwagon-y no matter what you do, or no matter how true they are, too.  It’s best to leave that for later.
6. Who you’ve opened for needs to be relevant – and true. If you’re going to say you’ve played with U2, you’d better have opened for U2 and not just played the “Bob’s Grocery Local Talent Stage” at the same enormous music festival  as them.  It’s ridiculously easy to look this stuff up, and if someone can call bullshit on any small part of your presskit, the whole thing gets tossed.  Similarly, even if you did open for someone reasonably respected, it should likely be something that has some cache – opening for the “Pet Sounds” Beach Boys is a vastly different thing from opening for the “Kokomo” Beach Boys, for example.
7. If you’ve been a dick to someone, leave their name off your presskit. If you played a gig with another band, if you didn’t get along or they wouldn’t remember you, don’t namecheck them.  Unless we’re talking about the Rolling Stones, a promoter in your genre is probably going to have the ability to call up and check.  “Hey, yeah, Tom…these Null Device guys…oh, they’re asshats?  Thanks.”  Or worse “Hey, Tom, these Null Device guys…Null Device.   With an N.  No, Device.  So you don’t remember them?  They claimed to have played with you…huh. [click].”
8. Be consistent. A well-written onesheet can serve as a promotional tool in a lot of situations.  If you use the same, or at least very similar, language and content on your website, your myspace, your facebook, your demo, etc, you’re going to put forth a nicely professional and hopefully well-thought-out image.  Obviously certain media will require some tweaking, but the point is simply that tying it all together means you don’t ever have to worry about contradictory or confusing information anywhere a promoter, label honcho, distributor or even a fan might look.  It also saves you a lot of work.
9. A little informality is okay. While this is like a resume, this isn’t a resume.  You don’t have to write it like an insurance policy.  That said, you don’t want to go too far in the other direction.    You’re still trying to sell something, in this case your music, you’re not trying to get a pen pal.
10. Try to focus on the now. This is a tough one, since by definition your previous glories are what are making you attractive to a promoter or label.  There is, however, a limit.  It’s one thing to talk about your last album, or your last two albums.  To reference something you did 15 years ago?  Unless it was something massive that still has repercussions today (or this is a comeback tour for a band that was huge in the 80’s) it’s going to give the distinct impression that you’ve not done much noteworthy since.
11. Edit.  Edit, edit, edit, edit. Pretend this is your final term paper in high school.  It’s got to be spot-on.  Check it over a zillion times.  Have a friend read it.  Get opinions from people you trust.  Anything awkward-sounding, or poorly-written, is going to jump out and distract the reader.  There are still enough grammar fascists and orthography tyrants in the world that there’s a not-insignificant chance that one of them may be on the receiving end.  A misplaced comma or [gasp] quotes used for emphasis instead of facetiousness is going to jump out and be the Thing That They Remember.
12. Don’t expect everyone to know what the heck you’re talking about. While you can assume a certain level of commonality and familiarity on musical genres, if your references and definitions are so obscure or bleeding edge – or worse, you un-ironically coin a genre name for yourself – you’re going to get the promotion equivalent of a blank stare.  It’s the trickiest part of writing up self-referential press; you know what you do, but you have to write for the perspective of someone who has no idea who your references, influences, and baselines are.
13. Go easy on the comparisons. A few are alright, and in fact probably necessary if you’re just starting out.  It’s okay to say you’re influenced by Depeche Mode or Kraftwerk or the Beatles or whatever.  But don’t go nuts.  This is still about you, so a paragraph of your influences is probably overdoing it.  If your sound-description is clear enough,  you can reign back even further – everyone can pretty much take an influence to kraftwerk as read if you describe yourself as making minimal techno.  Too much and you’re wasting space that could be used for your own stuff, and additionally it could be setting the distinct impression on the reader that you’re just not that original.

Interesting film.  It’s quickly very clear why those particular three guitarists (Jimmy Page, The Edge, Jack White) were picked – they each represent a different era of guitar heroics, and they’re also the kind of guitarists who are known for their sound as much as any guitar heroics.  As much as there are many super-shredders out there who could outplay all three of them, probably only EVH would have the appropriate amount of crossover appeal.

It’s also clear what these guys did, in terms of their places in their respective bands – Page was a consummate Musician, joining bands after long stints as a studio musician and arranger; The Edge was a hardcore technician and sonic architect, showing up with a guitar and 4 giant racks of effects gear; Jack White was…well, Jack White’s a douchebag.

Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair.  He has a very distinctive sound and manner of playing, and he’s probably the one of the three who’s got the closest ties to old blues, so there’s that, and he’s  admittedly a reasonably iconic axeman.  But he was also the only one with a lot of conceits – he had his special outfits, he had a sidekick of “12-year-old Jack White” which was a mini-me version of him, and he was busy showing off his playing in some tumbledown old Tennessee house as though he were some backcountry bluesman, and not the $37M-valued rockstar he actually is.  While Page and Edge were pretty frank about what they did and how they did it, Jack White spent about as much time espousing his personal philosophy about vintage gear, recording a song on a battered old plywood guitar into an ancient reel-to-reel (I noted that he  *was* using a like-new $3000 Coles ribbon mic).  He was frankly pretty annoying.

The Edge was, to me, fascinating.  He was pretty spare with words, but he was also surprisingly humble.  He fully acknowledges he’s not an incredible player, but he also displayed almost boyish glee showing off his electronics gear and effects processors.   It was also interesting to see that a good portion of his “U2 sound” was in the way he voiced his chords.

I’ve never been a big Zeppelin fan, although I acknowledge their impact on the development of rock and roll.   And Page was a capital-M musician.  He certainly makes playing look effortless.  His callbacks to those heady, experimental days of the late 60’s when Zep recorded in manor house stairwells with cables running out to a mobile truck were fascinating.  It was also interesting to note his early career – as a kid in a skiffle band, then as a fill-in session musician, then a regularly gigging studio aguitarist doing everything from rock songs to muzak before he finally got fed up and joined the Yardbirds.  He also seems to be the godfather of Rock Face.  Most intriguingly he said he wept while watching Spinal Tap – not because he didn’t think it was funny, but because he said it was hardly parody, accurately portraying the ridiculous excesses of the 70’s rock band.

A lot of the actual music in the film was surprisingly sub-standard.  You’d think that three iconic players in one room jamming would lead to some crazy sessions, but it was really just three dudes sitting on couches halfheartedly strumming their way through the Led Zeppelin backcatalogue, each with a wildly different guitar tone clashing with the other two.   The exception was when Page played something by himself, and it was obvious that neither the Edge nor White could really conceal their joy at watching Jimmy Freakin’ Page cruise through a legendary rock song.

Overall, from a music-nerd standpoint, it was a fascinating film.  Other than U2 I can’t say I’m a big fan of the artists involved, but they did represent three very distinct points of view and approaches to musicmaking.  Also, the “early years” footage of each of the bands in question was often hilarious.  A big-haired, macho-rocking embryonic U2 from the early early 80’s was hysterical, and a 14-year-old Jimmy Page playing “Momma Don’t Allow No Skiffle” on British TV was rather cute.  Footage of the White Stripes obviously doesn’t go back as far, although what was most interesting was how much Meg White’s drumming has improved in the intervening decade.

Sadly, during the film, it never really did get loud.   It did get interesting.

We did “Footfalls” as a giveaway, to see if it would boost album sales for “Sublimation.”  It did, kinda.  We did something similar for “London” and it too gave AMDM a little bump – helped probably by the fact that this time we got the label on board to help out.  We also printed a number of CD versions of it to sell at shows, and those, surprisingly sold out quickly.

When we conceptualized “Recursions”, we decided to take the idea to its logical conclusion – this wasn’t going to be just another “hey download some free tracks from the internet!”, we were going to treat this like a full release.  That is to say, full distribution channels, available downloads, tracking, etc.

In terms of both marketing and money, it’s been our most successful release to date.  It hasn’t sold as many copies as, say, Sublimation, but unlike our other releases it’s completely recouped production costs, making a small profit even, given us a mess of contacts for promotion and “fan relationship” building, and the bulk of promo has been entirely word of mouth.

Production costs were kept low, mainly due to the fact that we didn’t produce a large run of CDs.  We had 100 run up at a cost of roughly $130.    Okay, sure, costs would’ve been higher if I didn’t happen to have a small mastering business that I could just use for my own purposes, but still, the upshot is we DIY’ed the whole thing.  I cut costs here and there – bartering, begging, promising beer to people.  I probably could’ve spent another $100 if I had to shell out retail prices for things like UPC codes.

Next step was to throw this all on bandcamp.com.  I really, really like this service.  It’s incredibly flexible and consumer-oriented, and I really want them to thrive.  They’ve really hit upon something good for a distribution model – give the consumer the formats they want, while giving the artist the ability to control how things are distributed and what information is collected.  Using their system, we gave away Recursions with an optional “enter your own price” field.  Not only did people enter their own price, but they were awfully generous about it.  I expected maybe a few people to throw a buck at it here or there – instead, an awful lot of downloaders spent $5-$10 (usually, the people who downloaded the high-quality FLAC or AL versions gave more).    Better yet, we collected a lot of email addresses – people willingly signing up to our mailing list in exchange for downloading, meaning the next time we have a show or a release, we’ve got a significant number of new people to tell about it.

We spent another $35 to use TuneCore to put the album on Amazon, eMusic, iTunes, and elsewhere.  I know, why bother when it’s free?  Well, to see if people who don’t go to bandcamp.com find it and buy it anyway.  Or to see if people who love the iTunes interface – I’ve heard they exist – buy it.  The more places it is, the easier it’s to find.   This should hit those stores in a few weeks yet.

All told, so far, this release has managed to make a small profit.  Barely enough to, say, buy a hearty breakfast after a show, but still, this is an accomplishment that in over 10 years of writing and releasing music, hasn’t really happened before.  Certainly not within a month of release, anyway (I *think* Sublimation may have finally sold out its first run.  I haven’t seen sales figures on that in a few years).

The upshot is that DIY releases can work.  Maybe not well enough to make a living on, but certainly well enough that they can pay for themselves.  This isn’t news for some people, but for a band like ours, with a low profile and lower album sales, this is a Big Deal.

It occurred to me, with a bit of prodding from Matt Fanale, that I’ve never actually talked about what mastering really is.  I’ve blogged passionately about what to do and what not to do, and what gear is good, and what gear isn’t, but…I’ve never actually said what it is and why it’s important.

Part 1: Mastering – What It Is.

(paraphrasing what I’ve got on submersiblestudios.com)

Mastering is that final stage before going to disc (or tape, or TV, or whatever).  It’s often spoken of in hushed tones, for fear that the Wizards of Mastering Engineering might overhear and smite thee with a curse. Everybody’s told they need it, few are told why, and even fewer really know what’s going on.

In reality, it’s less mystical and magical than one would think. It’s really just a form of audio processing done to add that final polish to an album. Of course, that’s just the basics.

It’s a finicky process, that requires good ears, good gear, and practice.

So why is it important for an indie artist?  The common answer is “it makes things sound better.”  This is part of the equation, but not all of it.   The end result may even sound “better” before it goes to mastering – but the mastering engineer makes it sound good on a whole range of systems.  A track may sound awesome on a set of studio montiors, but sound like complete pants when played through a car stereo or a TV speaker.  Mastering engineers polish things up so it sounds as good as possible everywhere, from a giant club PA to a tiny radio.  Sometimes that means a sacrifice on one system or a another.

Part of the process, of course, can be sweetening and shining the sound, cleaning up some rogue frequencies, making sure every track on the disc is reasonably consistent, etc.  Usually, the process of making it sound good everywhere makes it sound better overall.

Part 2: Mastering – Why You Need It

Simply put, it makes things sound professional.  Since you have very little control of the environment in which your work will be heard, having someone with some experience in optimizing your tunes can be tremendously helpful.

Mastering can make a well-mixed song sound great.  It can also make a poorly-mixed song sound slightly better.  It can’t fix everything – it’s not magic, despite what you may have heard – but it can glue things together sonically, make transitions between tracks on an album flow better, and clean up some things you might not have been able to hear.  It also puts an extra set of rather finicky ears on your tracks, which can help immensely.    Sonically, a mastering engineer can do a lot for a recording that you can’t necessarily do by yourself.

There’s also the element of the mastering process that’s not always discussed when people think of mastering – burning the master CD.  While yes, you can make a master recording with iTunes or RecordNOW or Nero, a real Redbook CD – standard master has PQ codes, ISRC embedding, CD-Text, crossfades, etc.   A good package can create DDP images and Edit Decision Lists for a replication house, too – not strictly necessary but often times they increase the reliability of the replication run and save everybody time and money.  It’s not a huge deal for a demoes, but before replication of an actual album, it’s a nice thing to have.  All those little extras can provide benefits on a variety of systems – and in some cases, for sales tracking.

In short – you need your stuff mastered because it makes everything sound polished, professional, and consistent.  It brings your recording out of the studio and into the real world.

Part 3: Mastering – What Goes Into It

Most of what mastering is, from a masterer’s standpoint, is listening.  And, in some cases, watching (those spectral analyzers can see those subharmonics and high frequencies that a human can’t).  But that’s also sort of a douchebag answer, because it doesn’t tell anyone what the process is like.

The problem is, the process is difference for every track.  Like writing a song, or recording a song, mastering audio is unique to the source material.  There are a number of tools, though, that are commonly used.

Harmonic Coloration and Excitation – I’ll start with the most contentious one.  Most pro mastering houses wouldn’t put this in as a step.  But then most pro mastering houses are already using top-of-the-line gear that will handle some of this for them.  Digital recording can be a little sterile or flat, so the addition of a subtle amount of coloration – whether by the use of real hardware or emulation software – can sometimes liven up a recording.  Some systems have this as in independent stage, others work this into the compressors and EQs by emulating high-end gear.  It is, of course, best done subtly, since over-application can turn a recording to mud (which is why it’s contentious).  Excitation adds some upper harmonics to give a bit of brightness to a dull recording, and can add a little extra “sparkle” to a darker track – but when overused can set a listener’s teeth on edge.  Exciters were used a lot during the mid-80′s – witness the teeth-shattering treble on most of the Stock/Aitken/Watermen records.   At any rate, coloration in any form is to be used only as necessary.

EQ – the unsung hero of the mastering process.  Smoothing out that one peak that makes track 5 sound so completely different from tracks 1-4, taming some out-of-control subharmonics, adding a little “air” to the top end, EQ helps bring everything together.  In the digital realm, linear-phase EQs are often preferred because, while they are processor intensive, don’t risk screwing up phase balance in a track.  However, some of the vintage EQ plugins do a nice job in some circumstances as well.  And certainly, various bits of hardware like the mastering EQs from Manley and others add a nice character.  EQ has the added bonus of reducing some of the overall levels (when you’re pulling down a frequency, anyway, which is the preferred way to do it) which gives the masterer more headroom to play with.

Compression – the bus compressor is the most misunderstood and abused link in the mastering chain.  Judicious use of compression can “glue” a track together by selectively squashing out some dynamics and levelling things out.  It can give a bit of a pulse to a dance track.   It can also completely destroy a track by sucking all the life out of it.  Multiband Compressors are even more dangerous in this regard – yes, they can tighten up some sloppy bass or bring out the midrange a bit better, but a 4-band compressor just gives a person 3 additional ways to destroy the dynamic of a piece of audio.  Worst is when a track comes into the mastering studio with a lot of bus compression already on it.

Expansion – compression’s antimatter.  It does just the opposite – expanding dynamic range instead of compressing it.  It’s not used much, but occasionally it’s needed to emphasize some dynamics.  It can be an antidote to overcompression, but only to a point – it can’t replace dynamic range that’s no longer there.

Stereo processing – sometimes a recording is very narrow and everything is clustered in the center of the stereo field.  Sometimes it’s really wide and everything sounds washed-out.  In cases like these, stereo imaging tricks can be used to fix things.  It can be very, very tricky – since screwing with stereo imaging often affects phase, and not in a good way.  The last thing someone wants with their music is for the vocals to drop out when the club speakers are too far apart, or for the song to consist of just a bassline when played in mono.  What will happen often to fix stereo imaging is that, instead of actually adjusting the stereo image, the mastering engineer will split the track into a band representing the middle of the sound field, and a band containing the sides of the sound field.  They can be adjusted independently, then, and mixed back together.  A tigthter middle can make an overly-wide recording have more punch, and a louder side channel can make a track sound wider and deeper without actually expanding the stereo field.

Limiting/maximizing – two sides of the same coin.  The final stage is usually some brickwall limiting to keep he signal from getting peaky, with the added bonus of increasing the perceived loudness of the track overall.  Again, though, as a type of compression, limiting removes a lot of dynamic range from a track, so in addition to making the thing seem louder, it removes the quiet parts necessary to keep “loud” sounding loud.  The human ear adjusts to constant loud noises, so without the contrast of a dynamic range, “loud” starts sounding “flat” after a while.  That said, limiting and maximization are necessary parts of the mastering process, as they help even out albums-worth of material, add some consistancy, and give everything that room-filling sound.  They’re often abused, even by big names, at the behest of artists or producers who want their track to be the loudest thing on the radio.  That, however, is a separate discussion.

Dithering – much of what goes on in the mastering process occurs in the digital realm, at bitrates higher than the standard 16-bits of a CD.  A straight conversion from a 24-bit recording to a 16-bit recording will likely sound fine, but adding a little bit of dithering – a process of algorithmically selectively adding certain kinds of noise to smooth the edges of a harsh downsampling -  can make things sound pretty nice on a CD.

Metering – keeping tabs on levels, headroom, phase, clipping, RMS, peak, and spectrum is very important.  A track may sound good right now but if it’s clipping or has some subtle phase problems that even the good mastering ears don’t catch, it may sound terrible on some system.  The eyes see what the ear can’t.  When I’m mastering, I like to keep various metering tools enabled between every stage of the process, so I can keep tabs on where anything’s going wrong in case my aging ears don’t detect a problem.  Certain metering systems exist so that perceived loudness is baselined and can be kept consistent easily.

Testing, testing, testing – The real hard work.  The mechanics of mastering are not just the technical tweaking of compressors and EQs.  There’s an awful lot of critical listening.  If you were to look at a photo of a real, high-end mastering studio, the first thing you’d see would be multiple sets of speakers – from tiny nearfields to giant, wall-mounted mains, and usually a set of midfields, and possibly even some battered old Yamaha NS-10′s.  Since the goal of mastering is to make sure the track sounds good outside the studio, a wide array of listening systems are used to verify that, in fact, this club track doesn’t lose all the bass in a car, or distort like crazy through a set of crappy computer speakers.  Those of us who do mastering on the cheap are usually limited to nearfields (since a good set of mains requires more money and installation time than any of us really have) so we’re forced to test by playing tracks in the car, or through the iPod, or whatever various systems we have handy.  After a while, a masterer can develop decent instincts and know what’s going to pass the “car test” before actually trying it.  Also, a good suite of the aforementioned metering tools helps, since they can see that, yeah, there’s a spike at 22hz that none of your speakers pick up, but a cheap subwoofer would make sound flabby.

You might notice that there is a common thread in all these tools – it’s all about careful application and critical listening.  A lot of the more severe applications of effects that come so normally in mixing are usually inappropriate in mastering.  EQ boosts and cuts are rarely more than a decibel or two, compression tends to stay on the mild side, and so forth.   Mastering engineers also worry about signal phase a lot, since phase problems lead to cancellations, comb filtering effects, and muddiness.  The whole process  is just very fussy.

Of course, you may be thinking, “gosh, Eric, I’m already a super-fussy guy in front of my 64-channel Neve board, and everything is balanced and EQ’ed just so.  Why do I need you to master this?”  Well, you might not.  A good mastering engineer also knows when to step back and say “yeah, this already works just fine.”  Chances are, though, if you submit 12 tracks to the mastering engineer and one of them is great, the other 11 are going to need to be adjusted to match.

Part 4: Mastering – Can You DIY?

The conventional wisdom is currently that it’s de riguer to pay someone else master your tracks.  This is primarily for two reasons – 1) you already think your tracks sound good, so someone else’s ears and opinions can correct things that you don’t notice and 2) people who do this professionally likely have better gear and acoustics than you do, specifically for this purpose, so they’ll be able to reproduce and test in a way you can’t.   However, this being the era of both music-technology democratization and vastly reduced production budgets, it is entirely possible to DIY.

Most standard DAW packages come with everything you need for basic mastering in plug-in form.  A compressor, a limiter, an EQ and a variety of metering tools.  These are usually of varying quality, though, so you may wish to invest in better  hardware or software.  Regardless, these tools are not going to get you the same level of quality Bernie Grundmann studios is, since they have multi-kajillion dollar hardware and software for doing this.  However, if you’re trying to keep costs down and this is really an indie release you’re selling at gigs or giving to indie labels, your own software is probably fine.  There are economies of scale involved.  Without the right tools and environment, you’ll never get that track mastered to sound as good as Coldplay’s does on the radio – but you also don’t have to pay the prices they paid to have that done.  You can likely get close enough that it won’t sound like crap by comparison.

Where it falls apart for most people is in the arena of hardware.  Many people kit out their home studios with fantastic software, plugins that sound like the best vintage analog gear, high-powered computers,  super-featured DAWs – but then completely neglect to  think about the listening environment or the output gear.  If your monitors are crap (or even if they’re just “decent”), your I/O isn’t clean, or your room acoustics aren’t any good, then forget trying to DIY mastering.  The tools for mastering are surgical, and having a insufficiently detailed listening environment is like trying to do surgery with a burlap sack over your head – you’re likely to do more damage than you fix.

This part of the equation can be costly, too.  Good nearfield monitors are not cheap, nor are precision audio I/O systems.  Acoustic treatment of a room requires time and effort (although it’s less expensive than one might thing – I have other posts on that).   To really do things right, if you want to be all pro about it, your mastering room and your own mixing studio should be separate, and you should have midfield and mains monitors too, but that’s starting to get into the Grundmann teritory again.  This is why it’s often more cost-effective to pay some guy a few hundred to master your stuff – it’s cheaper than buying new gear for it.   There are a lot of low-end mastering houses, too – people with said gear who, while maybe not providing the fanciest of results, are still better at this than most and have invested in at least some of the gear.

If you’re fixated on doing it yourself, at a minimum you need good monitors and some acoustic treatment of a room.

You should also own Bob Katz’s book “Mastering Audio, the Art and the Science.”  While Katz often gets off onto technical, beard-y discussions of jitter and compressor knees, his knowledge is still pretty indispensable.  Also, he’s a vocal critic of the loudness war, and his K-system metering standard is an excellent reference system, since it is predicated on a calibrated listening environment.

What you SHOULDN’T do, EVER, is grab a cracked copy of Waves L2 or fire up Logic’s Adaptive Limiter and crank the gain knobs.  It may sound awesome and space-filling for about 2 minutes but your ears will get tired and you’ll get really bored with it – and so will anyone who’s going to listen.  This, unfortunately, has been the M.O. of too many people, leading to loud, squashed indie recordings that only perpetuate the loudness race, and piss off professional mastering engineers.

Mastering is really all about the ear and how it relates to the totality of the source material, so most of what you’ll be doing in the mastering process will be listening to a track, comparing it to another track, changing settings, and then doing it over and over again.  A common myth is that mastering is mostly about making a track sound good – this is partially true, but it has to sound good in context.  A great, pumping club-loud track is going to really stick out on an album of dynamic ballads, so even if the mastering job is good in isolation, it’s could  sound bad in context.

There are also, of course, many all-in-one, master-your-tracks software packages.  T-Racks and Ozone come to mind immediately.  They’re all reasonably nice programs, but they do afford one the laziness of hitting “dance music preset #1″ and expecting everything to sound good.  This rarely works  (Ozone, for some reason, also includes a “mastering reverb” which seems like a Bad Idea) and often causes the end result to be a distorted, overcompressed mess.  Certainly, this can sour a person on the whole concept of mastering, and the number of poorly self-mastered songs out on the internet is a testament to this. These tools are not to be dismissed out of hand, though – they often do have some very nice options hidden within.  Ozone’s M/S processing is  brilliant, for example.  However, you can build a really flexible mastering chain out of a bunch of different pieces of software and hardware, to suit your own needs and workflow.   PSPaudioware, Voxengo, Waves, Roger Nichols Digital, Wavearts, and many others make high-quality, mastering-chain software plugins.  As for hardware, there’s all sorts of stuff out there, from Manley to UAD to DangerousMusic.

The biggest part of the DIY mastering chain (or even the pro one)  is the one sitting in the chair by the mixing console or computer.  The fundamental center of the mastering world is good, trained ears.  It takes practice to hear a lot of things.  It takes practice to compensate for your own high-frequency hearing loss from all those years as a club DJ.  It takes relaxation – a tired listener means tired ears, and tired ears cannot perceive detail or loudness well.  Dehydration, alcohol, caffeine – all these things affect listening, and should be taken into account during the process.  Taking a break to rest the ears, to approach things fresh again after a while, can make a huge difference.  Hell, it makes a huge difference when mixing, too, but it is really critical when doing the fine-tooth-comb work of mastering.

Yesterday, I was talking to the good Dr. Goedken regarding all the recent blasts of marketing ideas, sales concepts, promotions, etc etc that I’ve been itching to try.

Eric asked me “so, well…what’s the goal?  What are you trying to accomplish?”

I was nonplussed for a moment.  It’s not merely a fair question, it’s a very, very important question.

There are thousands of blogs, services, marketeers and consultants at the ready to help you “succeed” in the music business.  But how do you define success?  What’s a realistic goal?  Hell, what’s an unrealistic goal?   Do you want to be the biggest band in the world?  The biggest band in your town?  Sell a lot of records?  Play a lot of shows?  Make a lot of money?  Be respected as an artist long after your death?

This is the kind of question everyone needs to ask.  I personally often forget to keep this in mind, but it’s dreadfully important.  If you want to be a great touring band, then all the bandcamp.com’s and TuneCores in the world aren’t going to help, so focusing effort there might be a waste of resources.   If you want to sell a kajillion records, then going the indie twitter-famous route isn’t a good one.  If you want worldwide respect, signing on with a major label isn’t necessarily your best option.  And so forth.

Sure, everyone has the ambition to be the greatest band on earth.  That’s a goal one could set, too, but I think it’s probably just a little unrealistic, at least from a planning perspective.  It’s also ridiculously hard to quantify, which is an important facet of planning.  A goal like “I want to sell 3000 records” is a lot more quantifiable, or even “I want to sell more records than that douchebag from Null Device” (not only is that quantifiable, it’s not all that hard).  A goal that makes sense and isn’t so nebulous that you don’t know if you’ve met it or not is a good thing to have.

Of course, you don’t need to treat it all like a business.  This isn’t the IT industry where you need a small army of project managers, gantt charts, and some guy coming in periodically to teach your band members “Agile” this or “Total Quality” that.  Failing to meet a goal doesn’t mean you’re going to get fired (unless it’s a sales goal set by your label).  Success as a musician is by its nature a moving target.  So you didn’t sell 3000 records, you only sold 2000.  That’s still pretty good, and if you hadn’t been doing all the stuff you did  to try to sell those 3000, you probably wouldn’t have been able to sell those 2000 either.  That’s a success in and of itself, driven by a goal-based plan.

For a lot of musicians, “success” may simply be “I wrote a song that I’m really happy with.”   That might be enough. Everything beyond that is just a bonus.

In the past week alone I’ve seen three heavily buzzed digital music marketing handbooks come along.  These handbooks are spreading more virally than anybody’s music, that’s for sure.

They all say pretty much the same thing.  Leverage online tools, start a blog/twitter feed/facebook, generate tons of content, something something long tail, no economies of scarcity, etc.  That’s all very well and good, and there’s an element of truth to everything they say.  The problem is, if these things all worked so flawlessly, everyone would be a megastar by now.

There is no silver bullet.  As a musician, there is no golden solution to breaking the band.  It’s easy enough to say the old models don’t work anymore – the big label system is crumbling under the weight of downloading and a million indie artists – but what nobody seems to want to admit is that the “new” models don’t really work that great either.   Oh, sure, having a facebook page and a twitter feed is not likely to hurt, and a few artists have managed to use these sorts of things to keep buzz going about themselves.  But something like Facebook or Twitter or MySpace will not, in and of itself, guarantee success.  Sending mp3′s to every music blog on the planet will not either.  Having 5000 accounts on every music network service from last.fm to OurStage to Reverbnation won’t either.   All these things in concert may help with your promotional effort, but they will not replace a promotional effort.

And of course, there’s the key thing that none of these how-to’s ever want to mention: you need a product people want. You may not suck, you may be the most skilled musician in the world on your instrument or in your genre, but if you release an album of 1930′s-style ukelele music, you’re pretty much guaranteeing that you won’t ever become much beyond a very, very niche sensation, much less a household name.  Given that most of the bands I know, myself included, labor in sub-sub-sub genres with at most a few thousand adherents worldwide, there are economies of scale to take into account.  Unfortunately, a good number of musicians I’ve come across over the years are still waiting for the old-school major-label discovery, hoping that their genre will come into vogue (in some cases, again) and a whole new bucket of fans will appear.

Those days are long gone.  That is one thing the how-to’s do tell you, although, it’s often couched in don’t-give-up kinds of language.  The market has changed, and we’re never going to see another “Thriller” or “Joshua Tree” or “Frampton Comes Alive” again, simply because there’s just not the scarcity of releases there once was.

This is not to say that  no indie band out there will ever achieve that coveted quit-your-day-job success.  It could happen.  But “success” really also needs to be redefined.  The days of Rick Astley moving from studio tea boy to worldwide megastar are behind us, and I think we’re going to see a lot more “really good weekend artists.

It’s by turns funny and kind of painfully close to home.

The argument for a full-length album is usually artistic – you can tell a longer, more detailed musical story and establish a more concrete musical identity with a full-length than you can with a shorter album.  But, given the huge upswing in single-track digital sales (and the subsequent decline in full-album sales) it could be argued that it’s almost moot – if fewer people hear the full-length album in favor of a select few tracks, then the message of the full-length is lost.  Additionally, with streaming services like Pandora leaping in popularity,  single-tracks are all a listener is going to hear.

Conversely though, if a listener likes a single track, a band should have additional content for them to purchase – whether it’s an iTunes “complete my album” or just additional downloads, selling single tracks alone isn’t a solution.

There’s the issue of keeping up buzz, too.   Certainly for me it takes a while to put together a full-length album.  Sublimation took a year, AMDM a year and half, Excursions took two, this one is taking even longer.  It’s hard to generate enough content to keep the name “fresh” so to speak if it takes 2 years to put out an album.  Given how quickly the musical landscape can change in two years, and how quickly word-of-mouth rises and falls on the faceblogotweetsphere,  taking that long can mean the differencde between a response of “oh great, a new album!” and “Who?  Oh, they’re still around?”  If you’re Depeche Mode or Morrissey or Radiohead you can fill the gap with innumerable repackagings, limited editions, best-ofs, etc, or sping the hiatus as “preapring a comeback.”  If you’re a guy with a partially converted basement studio and a day job, these aren’t available options, so putting out shorter releases more frequently seems like a good solution.

Of course, that brings us back to the question of artistry.  Nobody wants to sacrifice their message for some marketing.   Plus, there’s still the appearance of professionalism that releasing a full-length gets you, that no number of EPs, singles, and short-players will ever get you.

In short, I don’t know what the solution is.  But I’m thinking about this probably a lot more that I should.

Ten years.  Wow.  I remember me, Fanale, Chuck S, and Dan assembling for the 5 year anniversary.

It’s a great show – Ryan plays everything from techno and dnb to industrial and powernoise, and pretty much everything in between.   He’s been a vocal supporter of (and player of music for) the local electronic music scene.   

(Plus, Ryan’s just a really great guy.  He’s probably the only guy for whom Null Device would agree to be a wedding band – we played at his reception!)

Anyway, tune in tonight from 8pm to 11pm CDT, at 89.9FM in the Madison area, or wort-fm.org on the internets.  It’s his tenth year, and a bunch of us should be showing up to harrass him in the studio tonight.   Plus, Matt and I have worked up something that we think is hilarious (and likely nobody born after 1975 will get).