Family
Steven J Goldman
Thank you Steven and all of the Slate family for all the amazing personal support and the incredible products. You're the best, period.
Over the past 10 years, I've found myself in several bands, and learned to play guitar, drums, bass and to sing through good old trial and error. My pride and joy, a band called Armageddon Monks, was a regional radio-hard-rock band in Upstate NY, before its dissolution in 2008.
I broke into sound engineering just as a hobby at first. I worked on my guitarist's DAW because I'd never used plugin effects before, and they were fun and easy to tweak. Luckily, nobody told me how bad my mixes sounded, and I kept developing an ear for it.
I got some good advice from Bobby Barth of the band Blackfoot, on some gear and techniques, and continued on my way. With every mix, I was able to more closely match whatever professional mixes I liked, and the DAW effects became more subtle and effective. I started using Drumagog a few years back to replace the close-mics on my projects. I even took my own drum multisamples with every new project.
I've only recently gotten into Slate products. I was really into the Breaking Benjamin giant-snare sound, and through some research, I eventually found myself at the Slate website, listening to snare samples. I was immediately floored by how crisp everything was, and I purchased Trigger Platinum.
Trigger is a god-send. The samples are amazingly receptive to cutting, boosting, adding reverb, and everything else I can throw at them. The triggering is very accurate, and the noise suppression feature is a huge time-saver. I never have to set the triggering differently for different parts of songs, the way I always had to with Drumagog.
I am also a proud owner of the FG-X mastering plugin. I downloaded the demo on a whim, and was simultaneously amazed and depressed that all of my time spent finessing my Waves mastering setup could never have made my music sound as big and clear as this single plugin. Sad, yet amazing. I can just concentrate on making my mixes the best they can be, without worrying that I'll lose the drum transients or the background parts of the songs to extreme mastering compression.
Today, I own a small, mainly ITB studio called Four Legs Records. I consider my specialty to be Rock and Metal, but I've also done live Hip-Hop and A Cappella. I have won several Best Of Collegiate A Cappella awards and accolades for a recent EP that I engineered.
If you visit www.fourlegsrecords.com, every single thing you hear from this day forward will have been done using Trigger and FG-X.
I'll leave you with this; an old song of mine that's seen revision after revision with several different performers over my whole career. Now that I've found my Slate tools, this is the first time in my life I have the confidence to put my own name and voice on it.
– Steven J Goldman
Run Jacob Run - "Where We Lie" (Written, Recorded, Mixed, Mastered by Steven J Goldman) by Slate Family
