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I was on the fence about this as well, I’ve got plenty of real world experience to draw from…
After some thought though I realized this really is kind of a cool opportunity that’s somewhat unique to the time we live in… It’s one thing to take a class, but being able to go back and re-visit it later, whether it’s for ideas or inspiration is kind of awesome. I figure even if I don’t learn any new tricks it would be really fun just to have a peek into his though process…
My only curiosity is if the price is only for pre-enrollment… It’d be a shame to find out if that’s just a registration price, with additional costs not yet mentioned…
Thanks LAwriter!
Totally understand, I realize your not an attorney… Thanks for the advice, and yes I’ve spoken to an attorney who represented me previously… After a day or two of mulling it over I realized it was well worth pursuing.
Yes, I own the copyright and master rights. They weren’t paying enough to take ownership of the music so I was managed to negotiate both of these into the agreement. It’s basically an exclusive license in perpetuity, ownership of the music and masters staying with me…
Sorry, I should have been more clear in the language. They haven’t begun ‘distribution’, (but that is their end game). Currently they’ve released a trailer, have released some of the score as promotional material, and are gearing up to do festival runs. They’re ultimately looking to either acquire distribution, option it to TV or larger film company, or attract money to develop it into a feature length film. (These were all discussed casually as possible scenarios when we began negotiating.)
Anyway, this is their first film. In term of why they would do this who knows for sure, but I think the answer is two fold.
A: It’s their first film. (Previously the producer had been a script writer and this was their first foray into producing a film themselves.)
B: I believe what ultimately happened was this; the producer ran out of money making the film. (This I know for a fact. Before the director and I had a blow out he was candid about this. He paid the deposit, and part of the agreed upon balance and explained what the situation was.)
Basically we came to blows over an edit I did. The edit was intended to be a draft but he chose not to hear that because he didn’t ‘get his way’… (The guy was a total control freak to put it politely.) Anyway, we exchanged nasty words after he threatened to pull me from the project over said draft. (And threatened not to pay me at that…) I tried to walk, she wouldn’t have it, hung the agreement over me, and I begrudgingly finished out the project, as at the time it wasn’t worth getting legal, and frankly I was emotionally fried from the back and forth…
Without getting too longwinded about the details, basically she (the producer) ran out of money and he (the director) was paying the tab. We exchanged nasty words and it was pretty clear he put me on his s#!t list. I suspect the producer asked him to pay the tab, he said he would, hasn’t done so, and she won’t return emails or calls after informing both of them that score had been copyrighted after it looked pretty clear that they had no intention of paying the balance…
There’s a lot more backstory, that’s the short version…
Anyway I’ll know more once I sit down with my attorney and we get in to the nitty gritty…
And thanks for the advice at the end there. Although I don’t see them having any major connections I’m concerned about I still plan on keeping it cool. I went through enough s#!t scoring this film where it isn’t worth sicking my attorney on them to the point of crippling them, and it turning into a drawn out negotiation. At this point I’m doing it mostly on principle with the added bonus of having leverage to renegotiate things favorably..
Cheers
My bad huge, I thought it was graphicriver but it’s themeforest… (one of the evato sites.) I’ll PM you with a link. Cheers
Of note – BMI and ASCAP have to do something about the Internet streaming or we are all dead in the water in 5+ years…..
Too true… I spend an awful lot of time wondering what will happen in the next 5 years… Every major blanket channel is moving to or offering streaming services and it concerns me greatly.
If you decide to go the traditional route check graphic River for wordpress templates. There are some pretty excellent ones, all the tools you need built in, and if you hire a developer that is cool with building off of the template you choose this should should reduce their costs substantially… I’m in the process of doing the same thing with my site…
Interesting… I’ve had mine for about 5 months. All’s well, but that’s short term in terms of what I expect form a good pair of cans, so will certainly use them with an open eye…
(or ear perhaps!) Thanks for the heads up Art…Not only has this been my best quarter to date, it almost doubled from last quarter…
Do I expect this to be ongoing? ABSOLUTELY NOT… As fantastic as royalties are they’re about as predictable as the weather… “give it 5 minutes an it will change” as they say…
Regardless I was blown away this quarter and have finally hit an income where I feel comfortable calling this a career… Hope everyone else did exceptionally well!Also I can;t stress how much of a life saver this app has been:
In the past two and a half years all 3 drives it warned me were failing failed within a short time after… (ALL of which were Seagate! Avoid them like the Plague in my experience… 6 or more have died on me in the past decade, often after only a year or two…)
Anyway drive DX is great, it has zero CPU footprint and will save you a lot of headaches…
Also, I often ask for references if doing anything exclusive… This has helped me build a nice library of more obscure references like dramedy, various common reality TV cue styles etc…
For any electronic or pop-esque genres I just use commercial tracks as references.
Unless someone specifically requests lots of dynamics I find that tracks actually do better if they’re competitive in level with commercial music. Sad as that may be, it’s a reality these days… The only genres I’m conservative on in terms of level are purely orchestral genres…
That being said, trailer music is mastered quite hot compared to a film score… So it really depends on your niche, or what the project calls for…if specifically for non-exclsuive tracks for general licensing, frustrating or not, you want to be as loud as the competition, ideally aiming for the same level of crispness and low end clarity as a major label or top tier exclusive library…
As for itunes…
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/dramedy-vol.-1/id1029317273
https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/two-steps-from-hell/id372716646
https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/immediate-music/id543395115Hey Dpwave. I have a pair and use them daily… I Couldn’t recommend a better headphone, especially when compared to higher priced offerings from Sennheiser etc…
Very comfortable, easy on the ears for sure, and the sound is absolutely lovely…
CheersI know this topic is way out of date but thought this might be useful for people who work in headphones a lot or write when traveling…
This fantastic tool has made mixing on headphones a much more enjoyable and “real world” experience for me:
http://www.newaudiotechnology.com/en/products/spatial-sound-card/
It’s the first virtual room monitoring plugin I’ve found that sounds real. They’ve taken impulses of some fantastic rooms and monitoring systems in them, and it makes working in headphones a very pleasant experience… It’s also quite handy for listening across various speakers in different rooms.
I’ve been cloning my system drives in OSX since 2008. I’ve never had any issues and always prefer this method for moving to a new machine.
I find (at least in OSX), the native operating system’s “migration wizards” to be much more of a headache than cloning a drive. You do take a lot of old baggage with you, so every few years I’ll clone, clean install a new OS, get everything off of the cloned drive I need and test for a couple weeks before wiping the old clone… I typically go through about 3 OS’s before wiping and starting fresh… so far it’s been a lot more headache free than migrating ever was…
Not a fan of the new annual operating system policy that’s become standard though… with the way things are moving toward more frequent operating system updates, getting comfortable with cloning your drive is essential IMO…
As for SSD’s. I personally can’t imagine not using them. I see significant performance gains now that I’ve moved everything to Solid State. I waited years to jump on the bandwagon and can’t imagine going back now…
The other plus of SSDs is that (‘theoretically’, as I haven’t had one die yet,) when they do die they just become read only. You can still cone and/or recover, just not write new data. That’s huge in my opinion… How true that is in the real world I don’t know but that’s what the claim is… Ether way I have most certainly seen performance gains switching to SSD and personally think it is well worth the investment… The downside is it aint cheap…
Hi TerlinguaMusic.
There’s a lot of fantastic feedback here. I do quite a bit of mastering aside from production music. (I recently took 3 months off from writing to build a mastering room in my place if that’s any indication of the perspective my reply is coming from…)
Regarding Loudness:
I personally wouldn’t suggest aiming for a particular decibel value in terms of gain reduction on your limiter as some have suggested, but instead would highly encourage you to buy a few albums or singles by the big exclusive production music libraries. Many of them have albums for sale on Itunes. (Extreme Music and Immediate Music both have many albums…)
I would pull a few tracks into a session or wave editor and use a level meter to see what RMS or LU value they aim for on release. RMS/LU value is critical in mastering…
And as Eduardo pointed out, your best souding tracks almost always get picked. There’s so much well produced music available that people have developed an equal, if not dominant bias on fidelity… (I can understand why as harsh or thin mixes are fatiguing…)Regarding the question on whether libraries master your music:
Non-Exclusive libraries do not. What you’re hearing are codec artifacts from low reoslution audio compression. (I’m sure there may be exceptions out there, but none I’m aware of…)
Some exclusive libraries do master your music however. It depends o their model… If they’re backend only than typically you’re your own mastering engineer. If they also sell albums or have any retail avenues then often they will. That being said it really varies from Exclusive library to library… Usually they’ll give you specifications if they’ll be mastering it but email them if unsure…
Regarding Bit Rate and Sample Rate:
44.1 is the most common. Some ask for 24 bit others 16, but 16 is the most common… There are a few libraries that request 48k, but typically they’ll specify…
Hope that helps…
CheersI use the highest quality AAC or mp3s I can find. They’re totally fine as reference tracks…
What I recommend is buying Magic AB by Sample Magic and keeping it on your master buss or including it in your template. It makes AB-ing easy and gets you in the habit of it… I buy reference tracks for almost every genre I write in…
As an update they’ve contacted me 3 times in the past week and a half… If anyone does consider trying it out I’d recommend talking to a lawyer… With the DOJ decisions in their current state I could see this being potentially disasterous…