As a professional songwriter, I've recorded a lot of songs over the past 25 years with a variety of…read morestudios, and working with Ken Goldfeder was easily the worst experience I've ever had. Nothing even comes close to coming close.
I had been learning to self-produce, and I was getting frustrated trying to mix this one song myself, when a friend told me should could get me a bargain price of $40 with a great engineer friend of hers. 40 bucks! Too good to be true, right? That's right, it was.
After spending several hours creating the files needed for the mix, I paid Ken in advance and sent him the files on Nov. 7. It was a little late to get the song released before Thanksgiving, but I hoped to have it in time for Christmas. Yeah, right.
To make a long story not quite as long, it was the end of March before I finally got the mix. During that time, Ken ignored my text message and my emails, and he failed to return my phone calls. I finally got him on the phone near the end of February, and he promised it would be done by the end of the weekend. It wasn't. I got him on the phone again and he said that it would definitely be done by the next weekend. It wasn't. After that, all I could do was leave voicemails for which I never got a callback.
Although I'd been trying to avoid getting our mutual friend involved, I finally told her what was going on. And I was shocked to learn that he has specifically told her not to talk to me about it. It appeared that he wanted to be free to continue stringing me along without her knowing or helping me. But she talked to him anyway after I brought it to her attention.
Even after that, it was another 2 weeks before I finally got the mix. And guess what? It was unusable.
At the beginning, I sent him a rough mix that was a template of what I had in mind. There were three details in particular I had put a lot of time and thought into. One was a signature lick that appeared in the verses. In Verse 1, it was featured on guitar. Verse 2 featured the keyboard. The second was a little arpeggio that I used as a fill in the both prechoruses as a secondary signature lick. The third was a background vocal on the chorus that I ran through a telephone effect and ping-ponged it between the left and right speaker - left to right in the first verse, right to left in the 2nd, and left to right in the 3rd.
As you might have guessed by now, Ken messed up all three. Actually, it wasn't even Ken. He didn't even bother to do the mix at all. He farmed it out to an intern.
The 2nd verse signature lick appears 4 times in each verse. In Verse 2, the keyboard was inaudible the first 2 times, and audible way in the background the 2nd two. Definitely not featured as I wanted and had on my template mix.
The arpeggio I had in the pre-choruses was there, kind of. But the notes had actually been CHANGED. I didn't ask for them to be changed, and I didn't like the result.
But the worst part was the background vocals. Not only weren't they telephoned or ping-ponged, it was like they came out of nowhere and jumped to the front of the mix in front of both the lead vocal and the instuments. It had a ghost-like feel and sounded like an awful mistake.
So, I emailed Ken asking if he could make a revision to fix these issues. He told me it would take two hours and that he'd charge me $80 that I had to pay in advance. As if I'd pay that guy another dime in advance after he kept me waiting 4 1/2 months.
I replied by mentioning that other mixers always include revisions, and asking that, since I had to wait 4 months, if he could do it at no extra charged. The reply I got was beyond the pale from a guy that made me wait all that time. He angrily declared that he is not a mixing service but rather a professional engineer, and that he does not include revisions. And then the kicker. "This is not a debate." Can you believe this asshole? I couldn't.
So, I told him never mind and just send me the wave files for the full mix, instrumental, and a capella vocal mixes. He replied that he'd send them the next day.
Would you be surprised if I told you that it was another 2 weeks before I got the files? And that was only after I once again spoke with the mutual friend, and the mutual friend went directly to the intern, who then sent me the files. Without the requested changes.
To sum up, for my $40, I got:
- wasted hours preparing the files
- a 4-month delay of my project
- zero service
- an unusable final product
- an asshole attitude when I asked for fixes
What a bargain, right?
