The Importance of Sound Quality

Some of you may be aware that we self-produced our last record, Life. For those of you who are not fully familiar with the term, ‘Self-produce’ in this context means that we recorded all the individual tracks (vocals, guitars, etc…), we mixed all the songs, and mastered the album ourselves. To some, this is heresy, but to most of the us, it’s the normal way you make music and release it nowadays.

For our first record, some of it was recorded at home, some of it was recorded in a professional studio, and the whole album was mixed and mastered professionally. So the sound was a little all over the place. It also cost a fortune to produce! 

This time round, we were offered the opportunity to record for free in a sound engineering school in Paris. It sounded like a pretty good deal. We got to record for free for 3 days, and the two students got try out all the stuff they had learned during the year. The risk with the this kind of thing is that if the students aren not very bright, it can be a waste of time. We were rather lucky though. The two lads were great and we managed to record 11 songs in 3 days. Thank you Dylan, thank you Damien. I cannot mention the school for legal reasons, but if you’re interested finding out more, feel free to drop us an email.

So, I have been editing the recordings for the past few weeks and it’s all starting to sound pretty good, well, I think it is at least! I don’t particularly enjoy mixing, but it is rather expensive to pay someone else to do it for you. We’re talking anything between 1,000 and 2,000 EUR for an album of 10 songs. And then there’s the mastering, which costs another 500-1,000 EUR.

For those of you for whom mastering is an obscure technical term, here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_mastering

If you add the cost of recording in a studio, the full cost of producing an album can be between 3,000 and 5,000 EUR. Since we have already released two records, we now know for sure that we cannot afford to pay that kind of money! 

Which is why we decided to self-produce the third record.

Last week, I met a friend who happens to be a sound engineer and he asked me who was mixing the new album. I said I was. Then he said, “but you’re going to get it mastered professionally, right?” I said no. Then he looked at me as if I had blasphemed in 10 different languages at the same time, and on a Sunday too!

So I said, “do you know how many records we have to sell to cover the cost of professional mastering?! We don’t sell enough to warrant paying for mastering, so I’ll do it myself. And that’s when he said, “well, maybe there’s a correlation between not getting a record professionally mastered and not selling many records!”

And maybe he has a point. 

Now to the purpose of this post. 

How important is sound quality? Have you ever stopped listening to an album because it didn’t sound as professional as Justin Bieber’s latest single? Have you ever decided not to purchase a record because the bass made your teeth fall out and the high frequencies drilled a hole in your skull? 

Have you ever lost patience with a record because you had to turn up the volume for track 2 and then turn it back down again for track 3?

For those of you who bought our last record, or who have streamed it via bandcamp, or Spotify, did you notice a big difference between our music and other music you listen to?  

Thanks for your support!

Andy

andy@uniformmotion.net