When it comes to recording, some mistakes can't be undone.
Russ recounts his time with Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering and what mistakes he heard in his own recordings.
Well i don't know if there's a general rule of thumb. Anytime I work on something, I don't care whether I'm getting paid full rate or it's something I'm doing for a lower price. I mean, I try to put the same concern and passion and care into everything I do. Because if it's going to have my name on it, it could be potentially what gets me more work in the future or keeps me from ever working again.
So I try to be as careful as I can that things don't get out the door, I mean I think you don't want to make excuses if there's a... I mean you want to stand, you know, admit to your mistakes if you've made a mistake, but I mean some mistakes can't be can't be fixed, you know? I mean, I remember the first time I went to Gateway Mastering. Bob Ludwig was mastering a record I did, and it's mixed. I mean he's mastering, and this is something that was done on an analog console. That it's not like you could call your assistant and have him open up Pro Tools and make a couple of changes. And I remember sitting down there all excited about hearing this in possibly the best, sonically, the best room I’ve ever been in, and immediately hearing a gate on a guitar that had been gating out some noise or something. I could hear the guitar close. The guitar gate closed at one point and the noise just shut out, and I'm about to pass out. I'm like what in the world. I just heard a gate and then Bob goes, “yeah, you'll hear a lot of things here you won't hear anywhere else. If that's really subtle, you don't need to worry about it. You'll never hear it outside of this room” or something like that.
Well, right, but it was a pretty crazy thing, because I mean I heard there were multiple things on that that I realized that I heard that I didn't, and I didn't hear them again when I got the thing back. It was just in that room. There was some obvious stuff that made me pretty insecure about my work.