People's Court Engineer being sued (5:43) PST

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Leopold
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People's Court Engineer being sued (5:43) PST

Post by Leopold » Mon Jun 09, 2008 5:44 pm

Some guy is being sued for mixing by someone who wasn't happy with the mixes.

Apparently someone took him the files and now isn't happy with the mix...update to come.


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Post by johnny7 » Mon Jun 09, 2008 6:22 pm

I hate to admit i saw that. Well, I was eating lunch and flipped on the tube...
Didn't much care for the ruling...

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Post by Rob Christensen » Tue Jun 10, 2008 9:49 am

Didn't catch the program. Can you or someone fill in more details about the case and the ruling?

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Post by ;ivlunsdystf » Tue Jun 10, 2008 10:12 am

If the party filing suit prevails in court, GREAT. There will be a precedent so we can finally sue Metallica for the terrible mixing on "Justice..."

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Post by Leopold » Tue Jun 10, 2008 6:04 pm

Here's what happened:
Some "manager" took one of his artist's tracks to this R&B style engineer/producer called "ASAP" (i'm not joking). ASAP mixed the tracks and charged the guy $115 for a 5 hour block but only agreed to use 3 of those hours for 3 songs and save the remaining 2 hours for future songs to be mixed. These 3 songs were critical because they were going to be sent to some lawyer who is apparently "connected" in the biz.

Well, needless to say they weren't happy with the mixes, ASAP explained that if he would have had more time to mix the tracks would have sounded better. His argument was he didn't have time for the manager and his artist to be in the studio because he was going to mix the songs on off hours so they had no real input on the mixes.
Now where he put himself in a hole was that he stated that if he had more time they would have sounded better, the judge said, that they had paid for more time and he could have used the two extra hours that they had paid for already. He said, he didn't want to use those hours because they were credited for future sessions...she didn't buy it.
They compared his mixes with someone else's mixes and the judge liked ASAP's mixes more but she said that ASAP even stated that his mixes weren't what they could have been and he therefore didn't do the job he was paid for.

There was a little bit of back and forth regarding the quality of the raw tracks and he said they weren't very good and he had to tweak things quite a bit but this wasn't a huge issue.

So the huge sum of $115 had to be refunded by ASAP.
"I raged against the machine and all this money came out!" Bart Simpson

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Post by Spark » Tue Jun 10, 2008 9:57 pm

Tatertot wrote:If the party filing suit prevails in court, GREAT. There will be a precedent so we can finally sue Metallica for the terrible mixing on "Justice..."

...and St. Anger.

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Post by tubetapexfmr » Tue Jun 10, 2008 10:09 pm

The Spark wrote:
Tatertot wrote:If the party filing suit prevails in court, GREAT. There will be a precedent so we can finally sue Metallica for the terrible mixing on "Justice..."

...and St. Anger.
It's not so much the mixing that sucks on St. Anger, its the material and that horrid snare sound. Those are the most boring, ass-dragging, pathetic-washed-up-DUDE songs ever written. I heard they made that album by recording a whole PETAbyte of endless jamming, having some lucky guy dig through that crap and pull out the nuggets, and finally looping together the 'best' parts to create the songs.

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Post by JGriffin » Tue Jun 10, 2008 10:16 pm

jessemesasavage wrote:
The Spark wrote:
Tatertot wrote:If the party filing suit prevails in court, GREAT. There will be a precedent so we can finally sue Metallica for the terrible mixing on "Justice..."

...and St. Anger.
It's not so much the mixing that sucks on St. Anger, its the material and that horrid snare sound. Those are the most boring, ass-dragging, pathetic-washed-up-DUDE songs ever written. I heard they made that album by recording a whole PETAbyte of endless jamming, having some lucky guy dig through that crap and pull out the nuggets, and finally looping together the 'best' parts to create the songs.
Well, plus, if you watch the "some Kind of Monster" movie, they also had the excruciating "safe place" writing circles where everyone including the therapist could throw in lyrics and no one could say they were shit 'cause that's negative...
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Post by A.David.MacKinnon » Tue Jun 10, 2008 10:40 pm

dwlb wrote:
jessemesasavage wrote:
The Spark wrote:
Tatertot wrote:If the party filing suit prevails in court, GREAT. There will be a precedent so we can finally sue Metallica for the terrible mixing on "Justice..."

...and St. Anger.
It's not so much the mixing that sucks on St. Anger, its the material and that horrid snare sound. Those are the most boring, ass-dragging, pathetic-washed-up-DUDE songs ever written. I heard they made that album by recording a whole PETAbyte of endless jamming, having some lucky guy dig through that crap and pull out the nuggets, and finally looping together the 'best' parts to create the songs.
Well, plus, if you watch the "some Kind of Monster" movie, they also had the excruciating "safe place" writing circles where everyone including the therapist could throw in lyrics and no one could say they were shit 'cause that's negative...
That's my favorite part of the movie. It's more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap.

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Post by JGriffin » Tue Jun 10, 2008 10:49 pm

junkshop wrote:
dwlb wrote:
jessemesasavage wrote:
The Spark wrote:
Tatertot wrote:If the party filing suit prevails in court, GREAT. There will be a precedent so we can finally sue Metallica for the terrible mixing on "Justice..."

...and St. Anger.
It's not so much the mixing that sucks on St. Anger, its the material and that horrid snare sound. Those are the most boring, ass-dragging, pathetic-washed-up-DUDE songs ever written. I heard they made that album by recording a whole PETAbyte of endless jamming, having some lucky guy dig through that crap and pull out the nuggets, and finally looping together the 'best' parts to create the songs.
Well, plus, if you watch the "some Kind of Monster" movie, they also had the excruciating "safe place" writing circles where everyone including the therapist could throw in lyrics and no one could say they were shit 'cause that's negative...
That's my favorite part of the movie. It's more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap.
It's true.
"Jeweller, you've failed. Jeweller."

"Lots of people are nostalgic for analog. I suspect they're people who never had to work with it." ? Brian Eno

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Post by Seamonster » Wed Jun 11, 2008 3:55 pm

Leopold wrote:They compared his mixes with someone else's mixes and the judge liked ASAP's mixes more but she said that ASAP even stated that his mixes weren't what they could have been and he therefore didn't do the job he was paid for. ... So the huge sum of $115 had to be refunded by ASAP.
The image of everyone in the courtroom evaluating the mixes is humorous (and even funnier if you imagine it as a Monty Python-style courtroom). But there's some serious implications here.

ASAP and the judge were unwittingly comparing apples and oranges when he said his mixes "weren't what they could have been" and the judge concluded that "he therefore didn't do the job he was paid for." How often does one do a mix that isn't less than it could have been (theoretically)? It's an art, and always involves some element of "imperfection;" it's subjective. Yet here the court treated it like a job as cut and dried as installing linoleum. (Not to diss anyone in the linoleum layers union.) The notion that a mix could be held up to some absolute commercial standard gives me chills. I didn't see the show, but the judge did like ASAP's mixes better than the comparison mixes, so apparently they didn't totally suck.

Also problematic was the judge's remedy. Shouldn't the work ASAP did do have been accounted for, and he have been given a chance (or required) to take another shot at "correcting" the mixes at his own expense? I'd be curious to know how bigger cases of substandard mixes have been treated in "real" court cases.

I realize that this is just a tiny case and it's just The People's Court, but if it's at all indicative of the way that society perceives the mixer's art, then were all closer to Idiocracy than one might have thought. (And maybe ASAP's next client will be Upgraydd.) Like, I object!.... that this decision was all lame and shit, scro'.

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Post by Leopold » Wed Jun 11, 2008 7:17 pm

hoagie wrote:
Leopold wrote:They compared his mixes with someone else's mixes and the judge liked ASAP's mixes more but she said that ASAP even stated that his mixes weren't what they could have been and he therefore didn't do the job he was paid for. ... So the huge sum of $115 had to be refunded by ASAP.
The image of everyone in the courtroom evaluating the mixes is humorous (and even funnier if you imagine it as a Monty Python-style courtroom). But there's some serious implications here.


Also problematic was the judge's remedy. Shouldn't the work ASAP did do have been accounted for, and he have been given a chance (or required) to take another shot at "correcting" the mixes at his own expense? I'd be curious to know how bigger cases of substandard mixes have been treated in "real" court cases.


Hoagie Hill
The judge asked why didn't ASAP go back and remix after they called him and said there weren't happy with mixes and ASAP said that he would again have to go back and do it on off hours and the clients couldn't be there and of course at that point the clients just felt like he was jerking them around.


Seems like his biggest mistake was not having them there in the studio to help execute whatever ideas they had about what the song should have sounded like. They were paying him after all. Their main complaint was actually the vocals not being as upfront and present as they would have liked as well as some harmonies that were a bit too far back.

This could be an issue if you think about how many people are recording tracks at home and then sending them to other people to mix. At what point can the mixing engineer say that the basic tracks sucked and he did the best he could do?

A friend of mine that does this has actually gone back and rerecorded people's original tracks but not charged for that time, just to get the job done quicker and easier....no thanks.

Eddie
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Post by signorMars » Wed Jun 11, 2008 8:38 pm

junkshop wrote: That's my favorite part of the movie. It's more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap.
i think my favorite moment is when lars is tracking drums and plays about 7 1/2 measures before stopping and declaring that that should be enough material to edit into a full song.

on the court case... i can sort of understand where the ruling is coming from. think of a tile contractor maybe... something that has a skill and a talent angle. if some guy retiled my bathroom and tiles were falling off the wall or the design and materials were not at all what i wanted or asked for, i'd damn sure want all my money back, since he did not complete the work he was contracted to do. of course, i would first try to get him to fix it at no charge, but if the thing goes to court... all my money back.
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Post by Nick Sevilla » Thu Jun 12, 2008 11:50 am

Leopold wrote:Here's what happened:
Some "manager" took one of his artist's tracks to this R&B style engineer/producer called "ASAP" (i'm not joking). ASAP mixed the tracks and charged the guy $115 for a 5 hour block but only agreed to use 3 of those hours for 3 songs and save the remaining 2 hours for future songs to be mixed. These 3 songs were critical because they were going to be sent to some lawyer who is apparently "connected" in the biz.

Well, needless to say they weren't happy with the mixes, ASAP explained that if he would have had more time to mix the tracks would have sounded better. His argument was he didn't have time for the manager and his artist to be in the studio because he was going to mix the songs on off hours so they had no real input on the mixes.
Now where he put himself in a hole was that he stated that if he had more time they would have sounded better, the judge said, that they had paid for more time and he could have used the two extra hours that they had paid for already. He said, he didn't want to use those hours because they were credited for future sessions...she didn't buy it.
They compared his mixes with someone else's mixes and the judge liked ASAP's mixes more but she said that ASAP even stated that his mixes weren't what they could have been and he therefore didn't do the job he was paid for.

There was a little bit of back and forth regarding the quality of the raw tracks and he said they weren't very good and he had to tweak things quite a bit but this wasn't a huge issue.

So the huge sum of $115 had to be refunded by ASAP.
ASAP needs to look long and hard at his customer acceptance policies.

One hour for one song mix? The guy is out of his mind. And not using the other two hours to finish better mixes?

I smell not only a bad engineer but also a dumb "manager" who both don't really know their jobs.
Howling at the neighbors. Hoping they have more mic cables.

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