How do you deal with clients with naive expectations?

I have a feeling you’re being too hard on yourself

I’m by no means an expert on pop production but I’ve done some work in the genre and produced lots of songs that aren’t “pop” per se, but borrow heavily from the pop aesthetic. If you ever want a second set of ears, someone to bounce ideas off of, or some friendly advice let me know. I’d gladly listen to your tracks and give you some constructive feedback.

Damn this is a tough topic in general. And I believe it has become even worse as the one liners like “it can be fixed in the mix” or even worse “it will be fixed in mastering” have become the dogmatics of home recording and low budget tracking. I am in the very lucky and very unlucky position of not being a professional engineer. It would be great to make a living out of something that nice. But since I’m not I can approach it different. I live by the rule “shit in, shit out”. And I believe there is no way around it. Sooner or later we will all run into a client or project which just cannot be solved, no matter how well we perform. It can be anything from unrealistic expectations to mental health issues and what not. Learning to walk away from a project and learning to spot the characteristics of a setup for failure situation in time will serve you in the long run. I have taken part in projects that has killed me mentally, and I’ve learned to walk away from them and feel fine sayin no thanx, not my cup of tea. Telling a client the trackings are not up to par is a part of professionalism. It will serve the client in the long run, and they might come back later with better trackings and glad they learned something on the road.

From an income point of view. I am in a somewhat similar profession and position in many ways, as a self employed engineer would be, similar rules, similar expectations and outcome. I made a decision at an early stage to loose projects and clients that does not serve me nor my brand in the long run. In short term I have lost income and clients due to this, but in my area of field I am one of the few who have survived a career length. This is because I detach myself from low quality productions, and strive for everything I put out to have a possibility of coming out great. If I would have gotten into engineering professionally I would have taken the same steps.

Johnkenn, I believe there is no way to win, in the case of your client. Not in the eyes of the client and, without hearing the product, probably not as a mix either if the material is just bad. At the best you will put your name under a mediocre product trying to salvage a bad recording. If your income does not rely on this, I would think about just walking away. You also have to weigh the value of your reputation towards what the client pays plus it looks like the client might walk out very unhappy blaming you for it, despite you’ve done a great job with what was in front of you.

Just my pennies regarding my approach to this from a business perspective.

I would agree with you that this is a "managing expectations issue." While I am not a professional audio engineer with clients, I am a software engineer by trade who has done a lot of consulting in my time. When a client says "I want it to sound more professional" the first thing that struck me was the level of ambiguity in their statement - what does "more professional" mean? I chuckle at that one. In software parlance, they might be saying " I want that to be coded better."  At this point, I know they don't "understand" what I do, but think they do, perhaps. In this scenario, it may just come down to saying "I'm not the engineer you need" and politely walk away. If it were the beginning of the project still, and upon hearing the "more professional" comment, I'd seek a common point of reference you both understand - perhaps its another song the client wants his to be like that he provides. With that, you can easily say "this music can't get there for xyz reasons" or "we can get close, but there are limitations in the provided material," etc. In contracted software engineering, communication is a huge deal. So much so, there is a very well known comic that floats around about it. I leave you with this where there is also a good explanation about the comic. I hope it all works out well for you.

Communication

I've run into this a number of times. I have to explain to the client that an entire production that contains no real instruments played by people is going to limit what can be done. It can never compete against world class musicians. The feel will never be as good and it will feel cloudy and dense. At least that is my opinion, from going from all samples to zero samples in productions.

The other tough one is when someone sends a song to be mastered and they think it will somehow be remixed and sound completely different. Mastering can polish what is already there, but if the arrangement and mix suck, the master will such as well.
It's definitely hard working with inexperienced artists. They can get you going around in circles because they don't even know what they want.

My thinking is that the greatest expense in recording should be great musicians. They will make a world of difference.

If you are a software engineer to software, John is a software engineer for mixing and producing. What he got is some script kiddie shit made with VSTis in Cubase. Think something heavily dependent on libraries and barely modified code.

And more annoying.

I hear you, man…I just don’t have the patience to be that attentive anymore. Lol

Someone already said it, but it's a case-by-case basis.  Sometimes you just know it's not going to work out no matter what.  Sometimes you want the challenge, and sometimes the client just speaks to you somehow and you'll give it all you have.

I watched a video about producing a song like this, and it's not nearly as much mixing "work" as I had imagined.  Seems it was mostly about arrangement (why a lot of these songs have like 10 writers and producers) and the rest is about space.  It's BIG sounding but there's not a lot happening in the mix.  A lot of the melody is short lines between the bass hits in the form of higher-mid frequency synths.

Seems to me that it would be easier to mix than a whole band.

Anyway, one of the BIGGEST things I learned from those videos was sidechaining and ducking things.  Just about everything was sidechained to the vocals and ducked a little so the vocals would always be in front.  Even the reverb was ducked to keep that huge LUSH sound going without actually washing out the vocals.

I understand what John does and that he got #4 in the picture and was told "I need it to swing more professionally." My response was more about the client-engineer relationship. 

In the software world, I'd burn script kiddie code and start over - its often not recoverable, at least not for commercial use. If script kiddie is determined to keep the code, then charging by the hour is a necessity and to be clear this will be expensive - no way around it. I usually don't take [software] projects with so many flags. And there are those times where the flags don't appear until you are well into it and all there is left is the red handle and damage control.

I’m glad to hear there were no hurt feelings!

I think you and I discussed this at one point, one of the most freeing and empowering things about age maturity and making your bones in audio is the ability to say “ NO” to a project.
When you start out taking any work you can get is one of the smartest moves you can make, but at some point you find that being able to say no is just so empowering.

I guess you could ask him if you could post it as a contest..  If he gets a mix he likes then he's a winner too.