It’s time for the truth. Today we’re going to talk about the unlimited revisions we offer. Now if you don’t know what revision means, it simply means a change, and for our cases it means the changes you’d like to your mix and master after you have received it.

When we started this business, almost 10 years ago (yikes!), we made the decision to offer unlimited revisions for the first 30 days after an artist receives their mix and master. This was radically different from most audio engineers who charge individually for each change the artist asks for or includes something like 2 or 3 free revisions.

Like most audio engineers, we were unsure if customers would take advantage of us by asking for a million changes. But it’s safe to say, that rarely happens. Why?

Unlimited Revisions Forces Us To Get it Right The First Time

By offering unlimited revisions, it forced us to get it right the first time or at least make sure all the major issues are addressed with the mix and master. I don’t want to pay myself on the back for initiating this policy because I was honestly unsure of how it would work out, but I think anything that is beneficial to the artist is usually the way to go.

This is probably why the majority of songs we work on are complete and the artist is satisfied after 2 or 3 changes. In fact, we rarely get into disputes or refund issues with artists because the overwhelming majority know we can only do so much, especially for song’s that are recorded in less than ideal situations.

Artist’s Perspective

By offering unlimited revisions, it allows us to be more collaborative with the artist and not treat every change request like something we have to invoice for.

Being an artist myself, I have always been super picky about how my music sounds and would absolutely hate working with an audio engineer that charged per change or only allowed a certain amount of changes. Even though I probably wouldn’t use up more than 2 or 3 changes, I still like to be able to change something small (Hey can you turn up the hi hat 1db?).

I get “time is money” but I wouldn’t feel right charging for revisions, especially if it’s the audio engineer who should be getting it right the first time (or at the least the first few times).

Why 30 Day Limit?

We do limit the free revisions to 30 days, so we’re not totally crazy. But the main reason is because of server space as music files take up a ton of space and it doesn’t make sense to offer free storage space for your music as well.

I know, I know! When we first started this business, we didn’t understand how much storage we’d consume so have to set our drives to automatically wipe clean after a certain amount of time (which I can’t remember at this time, I think it’s 30 days!).

But going forward, we’d love to figure out a solution where we could offer to store your music’s session files for eternity, because we do get emails from artists asking if we still have their song from 5 years ago!

But then again, things like Google Drive exist and it wouldn’t make financial sense for a small business to take on Google.

Limitation

One of the biggest insights I learned early on is: get your song to 90% of the way you envision it should sound and don’t stress yourself about that last magical and elusive 10%, because it’s just going to cause you to lose more hair (and I quite frankly can’t afford to lose anymore hair!).

I say that to see this, mixing and mastering is about making compromises. So when we say we’ll get your song perfect, we don’t mean we’ll get it to 100%, because again that’s unrealistic. We will get it sounding better than you can and that we can promise.