Can anyone perhaps point me in the right direction of commercial online music labels working in conjunction with artists producing electronica, and in particular progressive house and progressive trance music?
For a while now I’ve had the thought of attempting to contact these sort of companies, in the hope of perhaps being able to do some mastering of releases for a small price compared to what professional engineers charge.
Just looking for something part-time I may be able to pick up while I go back to uni in a few months, both in order to buy a pair of studio monitors at some stage and to broaden my career horizons. Would be a perfect world if such a thing existed, I know, but worth a try at least.
Can anyone point me in a direction, perhaps a label they’re familiar with and/or release for?
what exactly do you need ? mastering only or mixing aswell ?
if its really only the mastering (the art to make a track as loud as possible), then I have to say that I dont find it that hard to do at all. the mixing is a entirely different thing though, but there are alot discussion archived on this board about that topic.
and what exactly is a professional online label ? name a few please ! and btw, I think they mostly do it themselves (meaning the artists).
Well, a lot of artists actually prefer to do their own mixing anyway, so even though I might actually prefer to do mixing more than mastering, it’s really only mastering where the opportunities would lie in.
And, well, conventionally I guess you could say that mastering is mainly about the art of making a track as loud as possible, but with artists doing their own mixing these days, I always find I have to engineer the whole track before I master it anyway. This would involve using tons of parametric EQ nodes (15-20) to properly shape the mix, as no doubt the artist has made some huge flaws while mixing the track down. I do this on the final mixdown rather than the individual tracks though, so technically I’m actually just engineering the track rather than mixing it. After that I can safely master it with multiband compression, multiband stereo imaging, and multiband limiting.
Well, of course mastering is a subjective process, and people would go about it differently, but I really don’t believe that anyone could master a track well without years of experience. Unless you’re an exception with golden ears and high-end monitoring equipment of course.
and moving a little further up the ladder, things like:
Astral Records
Border Community Recordings
Nukleuz Records
Silver Planet Recordings
Sunkissed Records
I do believe these sort of labels hire engineers to master the single and album releases their sites offer.
But this stage I’m of course not exactly looking to master the next track of the world’s biggest DJs, so would just like to start out working with smaller, more independent labels.
Maybe I’m dreaming, but as I said before, worth a try at least.
Where do you live Atlantis? If you live in a big city the chances of you getting your foot in the door of the mastering/engineering industry are stacked against you.
I live in a small country city (Australian small, not EU small), and I do take my mastering skills quite seriously. I’m sure if I bothered to start a business I could make quite a few quid mastering recordings of locals artists, especially because most of their recordings are still in analogue. But by day job is that, so I can’t be bothered at the moment. You could do something similiar.
If not, then maybe offer to clean the toilets for your favourite city studio, maybe they’ll figure out you’ve got tallent.
My day job is an “Audio Engineer” at University of New England. I work doing a lot of remastering from analogue teaching materials to digital. Obviously this isn’t as glamorous as mixing cutting edge electronica, but I’m putting a full range of studio skills to work. It pays well. How did I get this job? Well I did a lot of voluteer work at a community radio station untill they wanted me as their production engineer. So I did a year of that in between jobs, put it on my CV, and eventually got the job at the uni.
If you’re determined enough to work in the industry you’ll find a way in. Usually to begin with you have to do the average jobs, but if your tallent shines you’ll quickly move to a place where you’ll have fun
I’m in Hamilton, New Zealand, about 120 km south of Auckland. The only real recording studios are in the bigger cities such as Auckland and Wellington, and even then you only end up with rock, punk and pop bands.
I really don’t want to get into the industry that way (certainly not mastering those styles of music), so instead I’m sticking to the Internet medium, and if I can’t get in through net labels, I will start up my own business similar to Audibleoddities, but I would do it part time while I finish my university degree. If I don’t have a lot of luck initially, I’m sure I would after have done that for a few years.
Also I’m really attached to my own studio and would hate to work in a strange environment. Digital is really the way I work (i.e. in a DAW environment), and I’m planning on buying a pair of Dynaudio BM5A studio monitors soon, which I’d cetainly like to put to good use.
Thanks for the tips/help though. I’ll keep looking.
In short: electronica. But for me that covers anything from downtempo to IDM to EDM to ambient to experimental (provided it isn’t too experimental, in which case I might not know how to approach the material).
And yes, I also prefer to work with EDM styles such as progressive house, tech-house, progressive trance, trance, house, tribal-tech, insert whatever other styles you can think of here.
I don’t actually listen to hip-hop, but I understand the basics of how it’s mastered for maximum punch and volume.
You can contact me via my profile if you’re still interested.
Also find some more info here for the time being since I’m currently still in the planning stage so don’t have a web site up yet.
