Hi starfugger, Baldo & Abys,
Your points are well taken. Economics certainly plays a big role in Philippine music situation, Quiapo and greenhills taken into account. There's still a lot of revenue being generated by the label in spite of the piracy. Piracy is a global problem, it's just more rampant in the Philippines.
But record companies are still in business. Maybe Edu Manzano is actually doing his job. Record companies will make their money no matter what. In this business, we see the label as the evil empire hoarding all earnings from an artist's album. But that's a myth, it's the songwriter and publisher that gets most of the pie. The label merely gets a sizeable piece that's why they have to sign a lot of artists to make up for one artist that didn't sell. They're in this business not to lose money. And yes it's the label's responsibility to filter out the demo sounding recordings and re-record that or have it re-mixed. That's the bulk of my work now and I get a lot of work from labels wanting to improve the quality. Once in a while I'll get Sonar and Cubase/Nuendo files and see what they did to the mix, how they implemented plug ins (compression, EQ). The first thing that comes to mind: "How the hell do they survive out there in this recording business having a mix like this"? I see the problem is with the use or misuse of EQ & compression and gain-staging. My 4 year old can do better. And my point of knowing your craft in earlier posts rings louder now. Sure, flat frequency speakers help the mix, but knowledge plus a good set of ears will help more. And get this, one mix even put a reverb on each and every track thru inserts. Haven't they heard of Aux sends thru one reverb plugin and sharing it with, say, all drums drum tracks?
This is simple sound engineering knowledge that this new crop of these so-called mixing engineers simply do not share. He probably has 2 gigs of memory to support all the reverb plugins he inserted on each track. And the settings are all the same. Go figure. Does this only happen to DAW users? A perfect example of too much gear in the hands of amateurs and sounding bad as opposed to less gear for the pro engineer but who could make it sound like a commercial release.
I learned from an analog board and one or 2 outboard gear. I learned how to allocate compression to tracks that need it in the mix and sharing one reverb box to all tracks with varying wet/dry settings. Doesn't anybody teach that stuff here? There's a wealth of information out there, in the net, Recording Magazine, Electronic Musician, Mix Magazine to actually digest and learn from.
So let's improve our audio professionals' sound quality thru practice and research and listening. And maybe tomorrow, we'll wake up to a robust music industry here in the Phils.
Till next time, gentlepeople,
Joe Tweakhead