I don't usually vent on the forum but this has really got my goat!
I've been recording for the past couple of weeks with my band, and it's mostly been a great experience...up until now...
The dry signals that we've recorded in for the drums sound great and I was happy with the purley un-mixed results and felt confident we had something great to work with but oh no! The engineer and our band leader have other ideas.
We come to mixing time and I noticed this popping sound, I asked the engineer what it was and he said "oh that's the close mics for the drums". Concerned I asked him to solo the tracks only to discover he's gated the absolute hell out of them! I voiced my concern and said that yes, it is important to gate out some bleed from the other mics but that the level of gating he put on the tracks was way overkill and that could we not find a compromise between keeping the body of the drums whilst getting rid of some of the bleed. Our recording engineers response was to tell me that unless he gated it to that level he could not mix the tracks properly, I rebuttled (politley I might add) saying I was only after a compormise and that of course SOME gating was needed but not so extreme. Well this didn't go down at all well, cue and absolute tyraid from the engineer! He acted as if I'd just taken a leak on his precious vintage desk...getting in a complete childish huff saying...in the most patronising of tones "okayyy then Kev we'll do it your way! and we'll have a p**s poor mix!" amongst many other unpleasantries which paraphrased boiled down to "I'm the engineer, you're not, you don't know anything so butt out!".
At the end of it all the engineer told me that "that's how you mix close mics" and that mix in the overheads to bring in tone...sorry Mr Big-Wig but if you're mixing something that sounds like somone taking out a jack lead from their guitar when the P.A. is still on it's gonna sound horrendous...but I apprarently I know nothing!
This has really annoyed me, I and the band are paying him to a GOOD job and to LISTEN to our input and do what we ask of him and I feel utterly cheated out of my money. The icing on the cake is that our band leader/songwriter & guitarist is acting like his pet monkey and agreeing with everything he says and putting pretty much everyone else in the band down when they try and raise any kind of concern.
It's not only annoying but genuinley hurtful and upsetting to be treated like this and as much as I know I'm right in what I'm saying it's taken a huge chunk out of my self-esteem.
Has anyone else out there experienced this? I'm not liking it one bit!
Hope you're all well,
Kev