By Chris Castle

One day shortly after the sale to PolyGram, I got a call from Cheryl Engels with a problem she needed help with.  Cheryl at the time was A&M’s post-production director in mastering.  Among other things Cheryl supervised our audio assets storage room (which was mostly tape assets at the time) and also supervised mastering of new releases for other labels and artists such as U2.

Cheryl had received a call from some putz in PolyGram Special Markets demanding our best quality masters  be shipped to some place in New Jersey to be made into yet another stupid compilation record to be sold as God knows what kind of tchotchke.  In other words, our recordings were going to be used for the sole purpose of commoditizing music and being yet another place outside of A&M where our artist’s recordings could be purchased.

Cheryl had told this putz that he didn’t need our precious masters and that she’d be happy to run him off a DAT for his one track.  So why was she calling me?  Because of what he said next: “We’re the parent and you’re the child and the child doesn’t tell the parent what to do.”

I said just leave this with me.  I called the guy and said, “Hi, my name is Chris Castle.  You don’t know me but I’m calling to explain to you why you’re not getting what you want, Mr. SVP of Bullshit.  So first thing, I’ve been to your tape storage facility—are you going to store our masters by the broken water pipe or the space heaters?  Near the open window or in the car park?  And when would we get our tape back?”

After some back and forth, he accepted that this time it was different at least with A&M.  He apparently thought that Cheryl had been difficult with him.  I explained to him that he just needed to learn how things were done.  I explained to him that in Cheryl’s area the way things were done was the way Cheryl wanted them to be done—because she was correct.  I suggested to him that it worked for Herb Alpert, Bono, Sting and many other top artists and mastering engineers so maybe it could work for him, too.  And more importantly for him at that moment, it worked for me and I was backing Cheryl 100% with no daylight.

In signing off, I said, “and by the way, if we have a “parent” at A&M, his name is Jerry Moss and I’d be happy to transfer you to him right now if you have any questions.”

And as they say, that was that.  Another thing about Cheryl was that she kept track of the tape library which means that she knew where all of the original rolls and rolls and rolls of audio tape were that included outtakes, rough mixes, etc., etc., that are created as part of making a record, especially a high profile record.

Even with Cheryl Engels TLC, the media eventually wear out, whether it’s sticky shed syndrome for magnetic tape, or other degrading phenomenon for hard drives.

Steve Harvey writing in Mix Magazine has a very serious wakeup call coming our way:

[F]or the past 25 or more years, the music industry has been focused on its magnetic tape archives, and on the remediation, digitization and migration of assets to more accessible, reliable storage. Hard drives also became a focus of the industry during that period, ever since the emergence of the first DAWs in the late 1980s. But unlike tape, surely, all you need to do, decades later, is connect a drive and open the files. Well, not necessarily. And Iron Mountain would like to alert the music industry at large to the fact that, even though you may have followed recommended best practices at the time, those archived drives may now be no more easily playable than a 40-year-old reel of Ampex 456 tape.

This is why post production directors like Cheryl Engels were so insistent about quality control for the last 30 years.  The problem came up when we were working on a lot of 5.1 mixes in the 2002 era and it’s coming up again with immersive as Steve Harvey points out.  It will keep coming up as new mixing techniques required going back to the original multitracks. And 5.1 emulation is not the same as true 5.1.

Read Steve Harvey’s article—it’s very important to prepare for hard drive hell. Thankfully, Iron Mountain has some techniques up the sleeve to help, but trust me we are way past baking tapes in a hard drive reality.  For unlike a magnetic recording that at least might allow one pass over the tape heads to transfer it to a new storage medium, hard drives may end up just being bricks.  Assuming that tape wasn’t stored under a dripping water pipe in a basement, parents and children being what they are.

Read the post on Mix Magazine

[This post first appeared on Artist Rights Watch]