If you fancy letting some of the UK's leading music and sound engineers from London's world famous Abbey Road Studios master your music then you just might be in luck.
Musicians and producers can now upload their music at abbeyroadonlinemastering.com to have it mastered for CDs (from a mere £90 per track) or vinyl (from £150 for a 7-inch single) "to put the Abbey Road finish to their music."
The new service gives musicians the "opportunity to have recordings mastered by Abbey Road Studios' award winning engineers in their famous mastering suites" with your CD or vinyl delivered to you within five working days beginning from point of purchase.
Total Guitar magazine's Stuart Williams reminded TechRadar that "mastering is the often expensive, rarely fully understood final stage in the recording process… it's the icing on the cake of your mixes."
And, Williams added: "While there are plenty of mastering processors and packages available on a relative budget, top end equipment, experienced ears and a transparent acoustic environment are usually premium commodities. Abbey Road's new online mastering service opens up a world class level of quality at a project level price-point."
Abbey Road online
So how do you get your tunes mastered by the best? Simply head over to www.abbeyroadonlinemastering.com upload up to 2GB of uncompressed stereo WAV or AIFF audio files to a secure server (with a bit depth of 16 or 24 bits and a sampling frequency of 44.1kHz).
The studio's press release adds: "Abbey Road Online Mastering work will be carried out in its mastering rooms which house a varied range of classic analogue equipment and the latest in digital hardware and software technologies; namely the original and exceptional EMI TG mastering consoles with the SADiE 5 PCM8 digital audio workstation.
"The Studios are all also equipped with Neumann cutting lathes for vinyl, Meyer and B&W main monitoring, Benchmark A/D/A's, outboard from the likes of Prism, Weiss, Junger, SPL and TC Electronics and an extensive range of the CEDAR software plug-ins."
Jonathan Smith, General Manager, Abbey Road Studios, added that they were "delighted to launch our online mastering service and offer the expertise of our engineers to producers and musicians anywhere in the world" and that the initiative was "a fantastic opportunity to make that Abbey Road sound available to emerging talent whilst continuing our tradition for innovation within music technology."
Death of tradition
All of which begs the question - is this latest move from Abbey Road the final nail in the coffin for the traditional studio?
"Yes, the traditonal studio is dead," agrees Joe Wilson, lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Gloucestershire.
"It is very diffcult for studios to make money from just recording acts, when technology has allowed artists do it themselves and in their own environment(though with a detriment of standard).
"With Abbey Road offering this service they are cashing in on their heritage status, but it is telling that a studio with this reputation has to offer this service."
Your comments (3) Click to add a new comment
sharkboy
July 9th
3. Actually there are allot of musicians now doing everything from home studios and using the internet to collaborate and share files.
Check out the website
http://myonlineband.com
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perfectchord
July 9th
2. I don't think that this signals the "end of an era". The era in question has been "ending" for several years now.
As a previous owner of a high-quality commercial studio, I witnessed the effects of generally available better-than-average recording equipment put into the hands of inexperienced users and the subsequent affect on both quality and the devaluation of professional services. After more than 2 years of trying to compete with "My friend has a studio in his basement and will do it for $20 an hour - can you beat that?" and the failed attempts to talk about art and experience, I gave up. Forget about the investments in 100's of thousands of dollars in top-notch equipment, the detail that most missed was the 15+ years of experience and the value of a trained brain/heart/ear connection.
A motorcycle riding friend once commented that "A Harley and 500 miles does not a rider make" and I extend that to the recording profession and say "A studio and 100 hours of recording does not an engineer make". The quality of equipment regardless of price does not ensure excellence in final product. The experience is the key.
I wish Abbey Road the best and laud them for trying (albeit a bit late) to go with the times and soften the decline in enlightened clientele. The need for their services will always exist, but the awareness of the value will continue to erode. The era has not yet ended - its memory is just slowly fading from the mainstream conciousness.
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ohdotoh
July 9th
1. The "traditional studio." Ow. My Head. Our idea of "tradition" has collapsed in on itself. Soon a tradition will be something two people have done twice in the last week. Beethoven recorded at Abbey Road, right?
What Abbey Road has to offer is not just the acoustics of the physical spaces they occupy or the equipment bolted into racks and consoles. Abbey Road is a collection of people that bring their unique and highly polished expertise to bear in the elaboration of musical ideas. From that point of view, this change in how a musician is able to employ their services is not simply something they (Abbey Road) "have to do." This is something that _only_ they can do. Yes, they have mechanical resources to help them in this task, but if they can't help musicians elaborate their ideas, the Internet will neither save nor kill them.
The only reason Abbey Road is such an icon in the popular culture is the happy accident of the collision of George Martin and the Beatles that burned the name into our consciousness. This doesn't mean Abbey Road is inferior to other studios, or that countless unknown studios are inferior to them simply by virtue of being unknown.
"Traditional Studios" provide several unique features.
1.) Acoustically controlled environments.
2.) Recording Equipment.
3.) Really smart, talented dedicated people who can throw down when the ship hits the sand.
In our modern world the nearly every musician has access to #2. Some of them have access to #1 and #2, but it is numero tres that is the deal maker.
I see this as Abbey Road leading with their strengths, not as the collapse of a "tradition" that was a fabrication at best in the the nostalgic era the author harkens back to. The era when I had no access at all to the talent at Abbey Road simply because I lived in a backwater hamlet in rural Oregon, USA.
Kudos to Abbey Road for showing us that they really do bring the thunder when it's raining.
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