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NEWS ALERT!!

Kramer is happy to announce the arrival of a STUDER A810 reel-to-reel 1/4" Mastering machine. Fully restored and with brand new playback & record heads, this vintage gem has always been the industry standard for mastering and playback. This machine has been custom modified to run at all 4 tape speeds: 3.75, 7.5, 15 & 30 IPS, so we are now able to accept a variety of analog tape masters from labels, artists, or academic institutions for CD Mastering or digital archiving.

This latest addition to Kramer's professional Mastering facility is the final piece of the puzzle, fitting snugly into place at Noise Miami as of March, 2006.

In 2006 ALONE, Kramer Mixed / Mastered or Produced music for:

  • DOT ALLISON
  • SERENA MANEESH
  • SUKI EWERS
  • ROAD
  • SAETA
  • HARPER SIMON
  • CAUCUS
  • CHAMPION KICKBOXER
  • PEOPLE OF SANTIAGO
  • LACONIC ZERO
  • MINDY MISTY
  • FAMOUS PANTS
  • ELECTRIC GHOSTS
  • DANIELSON FAMILIE & BROTHER DANIELSON
  • HARPSWELL SOUND
  • HEADQUARTERS
  • HOWARD AMB
  • ROPE, INC.
  • MONSIEUR CLAUDE
  • SOMA ALLPASS
  • VANILLA SWINGERS
  • SUFJAN STEVENS & DANIEL SMITH
  • LEOPULDE
  • etc.

MASTERING WORK in 2006 included artists as diverse as:

  • FREEHEAT
  • MOTIKOS
  • AIR FORMATION
  • ANTIFOLK UK
  • ARBOR DAY
  • ELECTRIC ASSEMBLY
  • DOT ALLISON
  • BABELSHACK
  • BEN + VESPER
  • BLACK EYED DOG
  • BUD MELVCIN
  • CUPINE
  • DOLORES
  • DOPED THE HORSE
  • FAMOUS BREATHERS
  • KEVIN KANE
  • I AM STEREO
  • JESSIE & LAYLA
  • KIDS ON TV
  • THE KONKI DUET
  • LONG KNIVES
  • MARK O'CONNOR
  • MERCI MISS MONROE
  • MISTY ROSES
  • RONIN
  • PLAYING FIELDS
  • SPACE TOURIST
  • ST. MARY'S
  • STATIONARY ODYSSEY
  • THE ELEMENTALS
  • THE POLAROIDS
  • THE STAR DEPARTMENT
  • THE TOUGHCATS
  • THE YEAR ZERO
  • TIGER CRIED BEEF
  • TRANS LOVE AIRWAYS
  • UNION SUIT CHARACTERS
  • etc.

2007 Producing / Mixing/Mastering so far:

LITTLE AIDA (Australia), FLAVOR CRYSTALS (USA), JUNE PANIC (USA), MONOTONIX (Israel), CATNIP (Australia), DEADBUBBLES (USA), HARPER SIMON (USA), THE UNPRESENTABLES (Switzerland), CHAMPION KICKBOXER (UK), THE NIGHTJARS (UK), PERVERTED (Belgium), 22 PISTEPIRKKO (Finland), AMY RUDE (USA), UFO MEETS UFA (Belgium), YAKUZA MANSIONS (Japan), SERENA MANEESH (Norway), MS. LED (USA), and The Late Great TINY TIM (Heaven)...

Clients are raving:

From INDIGO (Spain):

Hi Kramer!

We are really impressed, deeply moved and excited with the job you did with Indigo. All the members of the band are agree with the mastering, and everybody says that the cd sounds twice as much as before. The songs have a brightness and an intensity, a new strength, that makes our hair stand on end. Thanks, thanks a lot for being so kind working with us. We believe that you are used to doing it and receive congratulations for your job, but for us is very important to tell you because for us it's been an honour and a pleasure to work with you, not only for your contribution, but also have met you. Thanks for your patience with the tracks problems, with our hurries and for everything. Many thanks... and if you visit Spain someday, we'll be pleased to meet you. Here you have some friends!!

Thanks a lot, sincerely

Iván

Mark Robinson of Ponk Media:

I received your package today with the re-mastered recordings of the Tiny Tim album Prisoner Of Love. Once again you have exceeded expectations and your work on these tracks is spectacular! Upon listening to these tracks for the first time after your touch was added, I almost felt like I was back on the soundstage the night(s) we recorded these live more than a decade ago. These recordings have never sounded so rich, crisp and full of life as they do now. I know how proud Tiny was about Prisoner Of Love and your brilliant mastering work elevates these recordings from good to great. Thanks again!

From Emil & SERENA MANEESH (on Kramer's recent remixes):

Resurfacing the swamp of earth, give this (mad)man a laptop or a nice, huge console. Smooth manoeuvres and my songs arrived at the beautiful harbour of kramer flavour. Musical and tasty, and not much of directing... hmm.. doesn´t seem like a typical thing of me to say.. must be a special complement.

Oliver Kersbergen of SLEEPYARD:

Kramer, you did an incredible remix of our song "Hot Radio" featuring Mike Garson on exotic piano. A fullblown psychedelic bonanza. Lovely use of sounds floating around the piano. Top work!

The remix of the track was also a great inspiration on how to explore sounds and approach mixes.

From SAPPHO (Mexico):

thank you so much, Kramer, we're very very very pleased with your job, we find that it really improved the overall sound of the record and it feels much more real and close, we keep noticing things that we forgot that were there because they were kinda buried in the mix...as far as I'm concerned, mastering doesn't get more beautiful than this.

keep in touch, dear K

love,
Pancho

From Secretly Canadian, re; the JUNE PANIC 3-cd box set:

hey kramer,
just wanted to let you know that the June Panic box is in production. we should have it back from the plant any day now...they sound AMAZING!!! thanks for all your hard work on that!

From Tom Rose of Reveal Records (UK) re; POPPY & THE JEZEBELS:

Hey K,
the masters arrived today - thanks very much, they sound brilliant! cant wait to hear your work with Madam!

On the forthcoming GG ALLIN "country" LP, CARNIVAL OF EXCESS:

Hi Kramer,
Hope your weekend was well. Just wanted to send a note to let you know about the response from the "new" mastered version of COE. People are blown fucking away!! Many are telling me it is like hearing a new cd, which it is. You did a great job on it and it is appreciated and very much noticed. - Mark Robinson, Ponk Media

From 21 LOVE HOTEL:

Dear K,
We're so ashamed we didn't write you before to thank you for your excellent mastering work... Great work, hope that soon we can do more together!
All our love, C&F

On the forthcoming GG ALLIN "country" LP, CARNIVAL OF EXCESS:

Hi Kramer,
Hope your weekend was well. Just wanted to send a note to let you know about the response from the "new" mastered version of COE. People are blown fucking away!! Many are telling me it is like hearing a new cd, which it is. You did a great job on it and it is appreciated and very much noticed. - Mark Robinson, Ponk Media

MASTERING is a fine art, but sadly, most mastering labs don't approach it as such.

Sure, they'll claim to, but they just don't.

Most mastering engineers aren't musicians, but they damn well oughtta be. Knowing the difference between one frequency and another isn't all one needs to be a great mastering engineer. One also needs EARS that come from a solid musical background. It's silly to assume that knowing acoustics and audio engineering is all that one needs to address the problems inherent in recorded music.

How can one solve a problem, if one cannot even hear the problem to begin with?

The most expensive mastering lab I ever worked at (at the insistence of a naive record executive who firmly believed that the best mastering lab HAD to be the most expensive one) was little more than a joke. The engineer began the session by loading all of his "standard" settings. He proudly explained that he works "by the book", expecting me to respect that.

Less than 5 minutes later, after a bit of nonsensical "tweaking" of a few knobs and dials, he said, "Sounds good to me."

And I believed him. I have no doubt that it DID sound good, to him.

But it sounded like dogshit to me.

It sounded flat, mundane, and lifeless. Although the CD I was mastering had both acoustic tracks and electric tracks, the acoustic tracks suddenly seemed "processed", and the electric tracks sounded as though no electricity had ever run through the instruments. It wasn't a great painting anymore - it was a forgery.

My heart sank, and the music sank with it.

This experienced, "world-class" mastering engineer had sucked the life out of my mixes, taken the edge off, and reduced pivotal musical events to tiny speedbumps barely noticable in the listening experience. Amazingly, he accomplished this astounding feat in a matter of minutes.

What I had spent 6 months working on to achieve something unique, he had molested and ground into hamburger meat in little more than the blink of an eye. And for this kind of work, he had attained the highest level of respect in his field, luxury homes in London, NYC and Belize, and a shelf full of awards. And so it goes.

Here is the most infuriating part of this ordeal; when I instructed him to reduce the level of compression and let the peaks rise up as they were intended to, what I got in response was indignation and resentment. I then had to remind him whose CD he was mastering, and who was the client. It was not a pleasant experience, and I thought that for all the money the label was spending on mastering this CD, we should perhaps get a little more attention to detail than what I was being offered in this ornately decorated, world renowned mastering suite, surrounded by gold and platinum record awards and fresh-faced teenage interns upon whose faces the future of this lofty industry lay etched.

That was the day I decided that someday, somehow, when professional digital mastering tools became affordable to everyone, I would enter the mastering field myself, and offer artists and independent record labels the opportunity to get what they really want out of the hard work and attention they put into their final mixes.

My small, private mastering lab, comprised of vintage analog tube compressors & EQ's, in conjunction with an ocean of digital programs designed by PEAK, WAVES and other state-of-the-art applications, is now open to select artists and labels via request only.

The lab is located in South Florida, which means that unless the artist (or label executive) is willing to travel to me, I work alone. I have no employees, and no trainees. You will be working directly with me on your masters, and the work is finished when we mutually agree that it is finished. In other words, it's done when the client is happy.

There is no charge for re-mastering a song you think could be done better. The goal is to make you happy enough to come back again, and to forge a relationship in which you feel confident that you have found the best mastering lab, at the best price, bar none.

Whether you are a record label executive, a "working" independent artist, or an amateur looking to finalize your debut release...I don't care who you are. I only care about your music. Each master gets the same attention to detail, whether your name is Neil Young or Neil Finkelstein. Music is music. I don't discriminate.

I determine my fees on a sliding scale, based upon your budget. I do NOT charge by the hour. I charge one fee to complete a master, regardless of how long it takes. Some masters can be finished in a day. Others may take a week. The time it takes to complete your master does NOT affect your fee. The only time my fee may be affected is if a "RUSH JOB" is required, in which case it may be necessary for me to put aside other work on your behalf. Only then might it become necessary to add an additional fee, though this is based entirely upon my workload at the time of such a request.

I also offer Analog-to-Digital archiving and Re-MASTERING, so if you have old cassettes or analog reels you think will never sound good enough to release, or old cd's you wish had sounded better, send me an MP3 of one selection, and I'll prove you wrong within 24 hours by returning a Re-Mastered MP3 to you. This is a courtesy offered to new clients only, at no fee.

Onward & Upward.

Kramer, 03-05-2006 (South Florida)