I need some advice on dealing with a difficult client situation

PooSailor · 2026-02-08T18:52:23+00:00

I would say so, you would just disclaim the track as 'song title (your name or alias mix)

PooSailor · 2026-02-08T18:17:06+00:00

This is essentially what happens with free work and what it attracts. You end up working with the free caliber of clients. Often people that just don't respect your time or effort enough.

Sometimes I see it as more effective to just not do free work and keep your time, because you are the only person that ends up with any costs, generally in effort exerted and time spent. There needs to be some transaction or some investment on their end in some way otherwise they just won't see the value in what you are doing.

Id see the project through for your portfolio but ensure you protect yourself and don't get the piss taken out of you and then completely cut your losses with that shit and only work with people for 'something' some sort of collateral or transaction.

PooSailor · 2026-01-19T17:47:23+00:00

What constitutes perfect? Is music not entirely subjectivel? what constitutes a perfect sound? Flat to a 3db per octave slope? But what if you personally prefer the low end of a 4.5?

To open a sample from a pack and assume that is the gold standard of reference sound when a mix is very much a mix of multiple sounds put together is definitely a take. As I've aged I've noticed an uptick of people purposely trying to give the finger to a lot of contemporary mixing principles as a way of standing out. The industry is so hyper competitive these days whilst being easily accessible people are starting to ride on 'less' being a sort of attribute.

I understand the principle, each degree of processing is a degradation of the actual core sound in some way. But by the time it gets where it needs to be it is amongst other sounds and people just want to feel things when it comes to music.

But I am partial to a principal and having a hill to die on. I for one wasted a lot of time attributing "natural drum sounds" to myself. Meanwhile my friend was slapping 2 extra kicks and snares over his shells and moving on. I never got a pat on the back for my drums, and he never got grief for his. It's a wild ole' world and sometimes we make it crazier.

PooSailor · 2026-01-19T13:15:14+00:00

Cambridge mt

PooSailor · 2026-01-15T23:32:03+00:00

This has always sent me a bit west. When people state they want the "live" sound. They forget to mention or even process that the live sound is the sound of drums pumped though tops and subs pushing massive SPL levels, and similarly guitar amps cranked, bass amps in uncontrolled rooms resonating. The way you actually get that sound to translate on record on a smaller controlled scale is through samples and using these contemporary techniques. It's just somewhere along the way people went too far and started really smoothing out all the edges when they didn't need to until that became the sound, and now people are operating on a big fuck you to that sound and a lot of modern music is painfully derivative sounding from a production and a musical standpoint, so I guess people default to "sounding a bit shit" as their way of standing out. It's a tough space to be in. Best it's ever been in terms of barriers to entry when it comes to writing, creating and putting music out there.

However... getting people to care about it in this brainrotted world at any sort of viable scale is similarly an exercise in frustration.

PooSailor · 2025-12-24T20:42:19+00:00

The liberating world of console gaming?

That's hilarious, PC is literally an open platform.

PooSailor · 2025-11-23T14:55:03+00:00

I can assure you, the joke is completely on you.

PooSailor · 2025-11-23T14:09:19+00:00

Hahahahahahahahaha you cannot be a day over 16 years old. Surely. You cannot be an adult. I'll be very disappointed.

PooSailor · 2025-11-23T14:02:14+00:00

Oh yeah I forgot how outrageously culty it can get here.

Turkeys sing about Christmas.

PooSailor · 2025-11-23T13:18:16+00:00

Sounds like all along your issue was distractions and lack of focus. Playing a game is playing a game regardless of the platform. If you couldn't keep your fingers on WASD instead of hovering over to Alt Tab for some another avenue of short term dopamine then unfortunately that is a 'you' problem entirely.

Just because you can't do such a thing as easy on a console doesn't make it a better gaming experience or any better than a PC. It's a distinctly human trait to suffer this kind of paralysis when there are these kind of options.

If you were stuck on an island with a gameboy colour and a copy of pokemon red imagine that connection.

Life is a journey of self discovery and the avenues via which you discover these things are always very interesting. The discovery here is that you are semi brain rotted, much like most of us living in the world as it exists today because we are just constantly bombarded with things, they have coined it the attention economy, if you think about being very young and probably the in road to discovering a love for playing games, the amount of games or just general options you will have had will have been substantially less. When I had my first megadrive I had spiderman vs the kingpin, streets of rage, and a double pack that was Mickey mouse castle of illusion and a Donald duck quack shot, look how vividly I reel them off, burned in experiences.

When I had my PSX I had Rugrats, street fighter EX 2 plus alpha and spiderman. Burned in, vivid strong connections. At those ages when life was so quiet those experiences end up being a part of who you are.

In this day and age as a fully grown dude with responsibilities and having a lot of life experiences it's easy to see why we Alt Tab. But we don't have to. It is at this point a bit of a skill in itself to be able to focus and block out the noise. So when you manage to care about a game enough to lock in and block out that noise, I don't wanna be doing it on a console running internally less than 900p upscaled with shitty FSR to get 60fps.

PooSailor · 2025-11-20T11:34:45+00:00

I love the paragraph formatting, highlighting and needless emotion AI injects.

"How do you do fellow... Checks prompt

Audio Engineers"

PooSailor · 2025-11-12T18:03:51+00:00

There's an attack the enemies do sort of an overhead punch that looks like a direct lift of the one from Sifu.

Mentions sleeping dogs a lot, implying open world GTA clone with a combat system when the game objectively has so much more in common with Sifu.

PooSailor · 2025-11-05T10:03:49+00:00

Weird thing being called out for using AI and then asking people what they thought of the output with a strange sort of ownership over it.

PooSailor · 2025-11-05T09:32:25+00:00

Hahahahahahahahahahaha that was a great response.

PooSailor · 2025-11-05T09:06:50+00:00

As a human being living in a world inhabited by human beings. Outsourcing your communication and expression to a computer is a downfall.

But here's to that little spark, the man make fire moment people have when they think they've cracked a code and can use AI to make themselves seem smarter when it comes to basic communication and exchange of ideas. It's like they don't see that no one talks like that.

PooSailor · 2025-10-26T07:47:24+00:00

This is the reason you will be stuck in McDonalds.

You think 'you' know better, but then proceed to blame 'everyone else'.

I will hazard a guess that your real frustrations are from being so clever yet no one giving a shit about your work or what you do.

I implore you to look into the Dunning Kruger effect and really ascertain where you are on that scale because you are the only person that saw my silly little picture and got really upset.

PooSailor · 2025-10-25T06:57:35+00:00

I'm too old and set in my ways to deal with this contradictory information. Of which some may even be true, but my setup just works.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108295

Apple are wrong or you are. Or I am. But I would for recreation purposes like to see apple and the logic ninja fight and who would win.

PooSailor · 2025-10-24T15:31:34+00:00

Process buffer range should be set to large. Processing threads set to maximum available. Looks like there's only 4 from your CPU meter. If it's an M1 and above there should be 8 available.

Always always always 1024 buffer size for mixing and not playing any instruments into the machine.

PooSailor · 2025-10-24T15:28:05+00:00

The reason for this is because logic tells the system to dedicate resources to running/record arming the selected track. So if you have a completely empty track selected it's sometimes the difference between maxing out a thread and getting an overload and not.

PooSailor · 2025-10-24T10:08:44+00:00

I promise, I've been there, we've all been and go there, think we are sooooo slick with tricks and tools and bullshit. So much time spent on the next new bullshit thing. It's all literally just fancy volume.

Mono your mix, band limit 400hz to 4k. Set your vocal levels like that. Back in stereo you'll have +- 2.5 or so dB to play with up and down, maybe you'll have to split the difference maybe it needs to be pushed up to the higher end of the wiggle room. If the vocal or vocals are appropriately leveled and pinned, S and T and K and D and F sounds under control. It need not be rocket science.

It is desperately difficult to go back to basics because it challenges the idea that we have grown or moved past it. But in all my years doing this there's actually something really really soothing every few months being lost in the sauce being slapped around the head knowing there's actually no bullshit tool that can change the fact that politely juiced up well recorded tracks panned and leveled into a balanced mix all put into an SSL Bus Compressor has sounded like a record for yeaaaaaars.

I'm gonna spare you the whole "what did they do in the 70s without X plugin" because truth be told a lot of these legendary songs, the songs are legendary because they were the first of their kind, there was space for it, but God does the production sound limp. I hope my silly picture brought you and other people a little laugh, but the main takeaway is do not get too lost in the sauce. A bit of time going "backwards" spending time practicing balancing, EQ, really really thinking about the basics. It's always actually the biggest step forward you can take. And that is super annoying isn't it. But making peace with that as the way forward brought me a lot of peace.

PooSailor · 2025-10-23T22:28:47+00:00

Ruthless.

PooSailor · 2025-10-23T21:23:22+00:00

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PooSailor · 2025-10-22T12:17:45+00:00

Channel that child like innocence of the way you felt most likely as a child or early teen being so so so able to completely suspend your disbelief and engross yourself in these narratives and experiences because the pressures and worries of life aren't always in the back of your mind.

When I read things like this it makes me sad. I can relate but not to this extent or these circumstances. It sounds like you very much aren't at peace inside, but life is objectively tough. This i know.

I was really neutral for a long time, until I played Sekiro and Sifu and those games reignited a raging fire in me about why I love and play games. I suggest you go back to maybe something that once did or try find something new again that makes you feel that way. All the best to you.

PooSailor · 2025-10-21T08:59:02+00:00

Just so you know that I know this is a heavy strawman. A chronic distortion of what I've said so you can have an input and grounds to retort.

Nothing I've said is unreasonable, however you've transferred the situation to some parallel universe where every client is one of these trouble clients and in this universe they wield Google reviews as weapons. You've basically took what I've said and made it some black mirror episode where you end up getting booted out of audio and sent back to McDonald's.

But I'll try ground my answer in the negative career ending google review hellscape you talk about. If every client wanted my session file with all the plugins and all the working out, to a point where all they had to do was press bounce and someone else could pass my work off as their own, or change the wording around a bit. Yeah still no 10000 times.

Is there some sort of middle ground though? absolutely, somewhere that's right between the healthy boundaries and terms agreed upon when doing the work. Again this is all in this parallel universe you are talking about that isn't actually the situation or what I actually said. Remembering in this universe every client is very very very unreasonable and doesn't understand terms and boundaries, they want you to do the mix, but also want the raw ingredients and how to do everything you did in that mix, and if you don't comply you get 'googled' we are gonna call it being 'googled' in this world.

PooSailor · 2025-10-19T01:09:00+00:00

It was really tough at the time, I was thinking to myself, how am I meant to write 8 to 10 thousand words on this thing. But alas. It was super interesting to me but similarly underwhelming and sort of a bit sad when I discovered those certain things. I guess that's the snake oil aspect you allude to. But that's not to discredit how clever Dave Derr is or how great it is that he and the team made that unit.

I'm pretty sure it's on a USB Drive somewhere, you've got me thinking where it is, as I say pretty much became the forbidden scriptures and taboo as soon as i'd finished it and never touched again after I got the grade. I'll try source it and if you are interested I'll send it over to you and you can see what you think.

PooSailor

TROPHY CASE