Ghanaian sound engineer, Wei Ye Oteng, has described the fees musicians in the country are willing to pay for their songs to be mixed and mastered as absurd and sad.
According to him, this has resulted in the churning out of substandard and less fine-tuned sound in the country. He pointed out that, this situation is one of the reasons songs in Ghana are ‘largely’ underappreciated globally.
In an interview on Hitz FM’s Daybreak Hitz on Wednesday, April 6, the sound engineer said “sometimes the charges that our artistes in this country would want to pay for that quality, oh my God, it’s so absurd… it’s sad.”
“Most of the musicians in this country do not pay the engineers well,” he added.
He further indicated that, most artistes are more fixated on gaining popularity than investing in the right and quality sound. To him, even when they reap a lot of money from their music, they still don’t see the essence of investing in high-quality production.
From what he has observed, he believes most musicians begin to undervalue sound engineers they started their careers with when they become more established. According to him, some artistes even abandon their engineers for less outstanding ones, thereby reducing the quality of sound in their songs.
This happens because, to him, the artistes want to continue to pay their sound engineers rates they paid when they were starting out fresh.
“You can’t walk up to these people and expect to pay GHS500 or GHS1000 and expect him to mic things – and turn on some pre-amps, produce the entire thing to suit the standard,” Wei Ye Oteng said.
Comparing the quality of sound in Nigerian songs to Ghana’s, the CEO of DrumLyne Audio Facility said the Nigerians have better sound quality.
He thinks this is so because Nigerian artistes invest adequately in the production process.
“Nigeria has a bigger market – that doesn’t mean they do it better than us… When it comes to the best or quality, I think we all have the same – or at times, they have to learn from us,” he said.
Source: pulse.com.gh