Not entirely off-topic, but I have a proposal that I’ve already made elsewhere and am now bringing to the Renoise community (couldn’t find an appropriate SPAM forum so posted it here).
I’ve been producing for 7 years now, while during the last 3 of those I became more and more critical of the quality of my sound rather than the content, and eventually spent half, or sometimes even more than half of my production time on mastering. So I finally decided to drop composing altogether and have since moved on to mastering only, and am now on my way to becoming a professional mastering engineer.
While I initially set out to master all music styles, I’ve since learnt it’s best to focus on a small selection of genres only, which is why I’ve decided to stick to progressive house, tech-house, and progressive trance music only (my favourite and thus the ones I’m most familiar with). So if you’re a composer of any music that matches those genres that you’d like professionally mastered, drop me a line.
For the moment I’d like to get a collection of sample work out there in order to build up a repertiore as an engineer, so essentially I will only except serious works that you intend to use in the hope of getting a record deal or similar. And that’s basically the deal - I master your track for free so that I can build up a portfolio to show mastering studios in the near future when I intend to apply for work there, while at the same time I should be able to bring the level of your track up to a professional level so that you can send it off in the hope of getting a record deal.
I use only high quality digital processors and currently have over three years experience in mastering, so I can assure you the quality will be good, if not exceptional. So if you have any progressive house music made in Renoise, either leave a reply here or contact me on ICQ or MSN Messenger so that we can arrange something.
Just a few rules and guidelines though:
Obviously your track should essentially be made in Renoise, although I can practically render from within any software application too.
After recently spending more than a week and hours upon hours of time and using 3 times more RAM than I have mastering a 30-track project, your song will have to contain a maximum of 20 separate tracks as my computer setup just doesn’t allow for anything more. That includes the breaking down of drum tracks, so that I master the kick separately from the snare, for example.
Your track shouldn’t already have any compressors and EQs enabled on the tracks, and you should set each track volume to maximum and the global volume to as high as possible without causing distortion before sending me the file so that I can simply render without having to worry about getting the best signal to noise ratio.
You can use delay and reverb processors if you really want to, as I can always copy the settings across to the plugins I use to obtain a similar sound, but it’s really compressors and EQ plugins that should be bypassed for best results.
I think that’s it for now. I’ve currently almost finished my first master since starting up this service a few weeks ago as well as being in progress of an album and a couple of other tracks as well (will be posting links here as they become available). But it’s progressive house music that I’m really looking to master so I’m willing to give priority to you if that’s what you have.