He also had the career enhancing luck to die while he was still at the top of his game and that's how you stay a legend instead of fading into some sad old fuck.BonsaiK said:
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That's true. However, being a legend is a pretty shitty deal when you're not alive to appreciate it.RhombusHatesYou said:He also had the career enhancing luck to die while he was still at the top of his game and that's how you stay a legend instead of fading into some sad old fuck.BonsaiK said:
True but dead legends are a godsend to publishers and merchandisers.BonsaiK said:That's true. However, being a legend is a pretty shitty deal when you're not alive to appreciate it.RhombusHatesYou said:He also had the career enhancing luck to die while he was still at the top of his game and that's how you stay a legend instead of fading into some sad old fuck.BonsaiK said:
Can you tell me about the supposed "Loudness war" going on in modern audio engineering? Is it just the product of improving sound quality and studio equipment? Or something else?
I was brought to my attention as I was listening to the latest Rush album when I finally though: "Holy shit, newer recordings are LOUD!" This is made even worst considering than I listen to music through headphones most of the time in loud buses and classrooms.
I was brought to my attention as I was listening to the latest Rush album when I finally though: "Holy shit, newer recordings are LOUD!" This is made even worst considering than I listen to music through headphones most of the time in loud buses and classrooms.
Yes. I'll try and make this explanation as simple as I can, but it's inevitably going to get a bit technical and long-winded.Ham_authority95 said:
In the old days, we had analog recordings - bands would go into a studio and record onto a multi-track analog tape machine with a bit fat magnetic tape that stored multiple tracks of music as arrangements of positively or negatively-charged magnetic particles. In the early days only mono (1-track) was possible. Then 2-track or "stereo" was invented where two separate audio signals could be carried on the one tape. It wasn't long before some bright spark, in this case a guy called Les Paul (yes, the same guy who invented the Gibson Les Paul guitar) invented multi-track recordings, where you could have 4, 8, and later 16 and even 32 tracks of music on one tape, all recorded side-by-side. This multi-track tape machine was then "mixed" (levels adjusted, effects added) and then re-recorded or "bounced" onto a big 2-track "master tape". This was then used to cut vinyl records using a process that I don't fully remember but you could look it up on Wikipedia or something.
All sonic analog recording or playback devices (tapes, microphones, amplifiers etc) have something called "headroom". They basically have a recommended volume (usually referred to as "zero", although it's not really no sound, what it represents is the ideal input signal for that device to preserve both maximum volume and a nice clear sound) , and once you start pushing the device past that volume, then eventually you start to get muddy - the loudness increases but the signal mutates or "distorts", it's not clear anymore. If you're thinking "is that distortion like on an amplifier?" then you're kind of right. If you ever see a distortion pedal marked as an "overdrive" then what it's doing is trying to imitate the kind of "over-driven" result you get from putting a little bit too much signal on a tape machine than what it's designed to hold, or that what an amplifier is designed to produce. Distortion may or may not be desirable depending on what style of music you're recording - Jimi Hendrix famously slashed his speakers so they could produce less volume before distortion kicked in, hence his well-known saturated, distorted sound. On the other hand classical artists didn't like the sound and tried to avoid it at all costs, because it was considered to sully the "purity" of the music with extra artifacts that are not designed to be there.
Then something happened to the music industry - digital sound. Now, instead of a collection of positively and negatively-charged magnetic particles, music is generally being stored as a collection of ones and zeroes. Analog recordings still exist but they are relatively expensive to make - the digital technology, although arguably it doesn't sound as good, is cheaper and easier to work with, so it's more popular. Digital sound works a little differently. "Digital zero" is different to "analog zero" - going a fraction above analog zero sounds great on rock recordings, the distortion you get is "sweet" and hardly noticeable except to the trained ear. However, exceed digital zero and whoa, Nelly... the sonic result, referred to as "clipping", is very harsh and instantly recognisable, it's generally considered unpleasant and something that studio engineers wish to avoid at all costs. (There are certainly many exceptions to this rule, but few deliberate ones in any kind of widely-popular mainstream music.) What actually happens when you go over digital zero is that you're exceeding the maximum digit-range that can store your sound. In lieu of being able to process correct information, the digital device either stays at the maximum level (what is known as a "square wave" - harsh to listen to and potentially damaging to speakers) or has a mathematical hissy-fit and just shits itself, doing whatever it wants until things get back to normal.
The "war on loudness" refers to the fact that as time has gone on, more and more engineers, including big names who theoretically should know better, are exceeding digital zero on their master recordings or somewhere else in their signal chains when recording some hotly anticipated artists' new work. This means that some well-known albums have digital clipping in various parts (Metallica's "Death Magnetic" is a notorious recent example).
So if it sounds like shit, why are people doing this? Well, they may simply not be paying attention. Compressors (a studio device that evens out volumes, used often for recording vocals to make them "smoother") are very easy devices to clip if you're not paying attention. More than likely though, the engineers are just trying to push up the master levels of their recordings as close to digital zero as far as they can get them to go... and sometimes they slip over. Why would they want to make the recording louder? Because it grabs more attention. In the world of pop/rock/rap/heavy metal, you sure as hell don't want your brand new CD to be quieter than the competition, you want it to stand up and be noticed.
I don't consider it a big problem - most people in the industry agree that the war on loudness is kind of dumb, and a skilled engineer who is paying attention to what they're doing can easily check to see that things aren't clipping like they shouldn't be, while still making a pop or metal record nice and loud. Digital clipping on a commercial recording tells me that the person doing the job kind of "phoned it in"...
I hope that answers your question... there's more that I haven't talked about but this is just a basic overview. Let me know if you have further questions about this.
Ok. Could you give me a specific example on Death Magnetic of the clipping? Because I only really noticed the dry as fuck guitars and the shitty drum sound.BonsaiK said:
This is unrelated: when I hear tracks like this:
I hear that that the guitars have more bass added to them than the actual bass guitar.
The bass is just clanking away, without taking up any considerable space. Is this just a product of modern metal production?
Just so you know, here's what digital clipping of a final master sounds like:
...the person who has made this video has obviously boosted the signal to all hell just to make his point, but that's what to listen for.
Now Death Magnetic is pretty sonically maximised (sometimes called "brickwalled" because of the "wall" effect when you look at the waveform in an audio program) but there isn't actually any digital clipping in the final master. When the album came out many people petitioned to get it remastered, but it was all for nothing because the problem wasn't the mastering - the clipping was somewhere in the initial recording and/or mixdown.
Now listen to this closely. You're listening for crackles and pops, there's plenty within the first minute of the track.
The other side of the "war on loudness" that I didn't discuss in detail before, is compression. Because I'm lazy and not feeling that well today I'm going to let this excellent video explain it for you:
If you want more information about what compression is and how it works let me know and I'll write you a more detailed response another time.
As for your Testament video, that's just modern metal production. Everyone in metal wants low chunky guitars so that creates the problem - where the hell does the bass go? Lower still is fine (and with a decent sub-system you can hear the bass on this recording pretty good) but if it's only low information it'll sound mushy and indistinct, plus on small speakers that can't reproduce those low frequencies you may not be able to hear it at all. Sometimes you have to give the bass a little bit of extra high-end so it has definition, otherwise you get a mix like the one on Metallica's And Justice For All where the bass is literally inaudible, even though it's there (this effect is called "audio masking"), and it just ends up sounding like part of the guitar.
...the person who has made this video has obviously boosted the signal to all hell just to make his point, but that's what to listen for.
Now Death Magnetic is pretty sonically maximised (sometimes called "brickwalled" because of the "wall" effect when you look at the waveform in an audio program) but there isn't actually any digital clipping in the final master. When the album came out many people petitioned to get it remastered, but it was all for nothing because the problem wasn't the mastering - the clipping was somewhere in the initial recording and/or mixdown.
Now listen to this closely. You're listening for crackles and pops, there's plenty within the first minute of the track.
The other side of the "war on loudness" that I didn't discuss in detail before, is compression. Because I'm lazy and not feeling that well today I'm going to let this excellent video explain it for you:
If you want more information about what compression is and how it works let me know and I'll write you a more detailed response another time.
As for your Testament video, that's just modern metal production. Everyone in metal wants low chunky guitars so that creates the problem - where the hell does the bass go? Lower still is fine (and with a decent sub-system you can hear the bass on this recording pretty good) but if it's only low information it'll sound mushy and indistinct, plus on small speakers that can't reproduce those low frequencies you may not be able to hear it at all. Sometimes you have to give the bass a little bit of extra high-end so it has definition, otherwise you get a mix like the one on Metallica's And Justice For All where the bass is literally inaudible, even though it's there (this effect is called "audio masking"), and it just ends up sounding like part of the guitar.
Bleh. While I sort of noticed the cracks and pops on the Death magnetic recording (but then again, my ear is pretty untrained), the track was still agonizing to listen to.BonsaiK said:
I know pretty much the jist of compression: Basically squeezing the track so that most of the sounds are at the same level, right? Which makes it seem "louder" when really, there is just more sound in less space.
Ah. It's proabably my bass player-elitism speaking about the testament song, then.
I guess it's hard for me to really appriciate the bass tone on songs like that when you have bands like Obscura:
Tracking bass that has a nice punchy tone, PLUS guitars that crunch the hell out of your speakers.(But the bass is fretless, so that's why)
Expect them to be a bit miffed. As soon as you mention "midrange" to a metal guitar player, they'll ***** and whine and go "oh no, I'm going to sound all boxy". The reason why metal guitarists sometimes hate midrange is that they spent the formative years of their music development playing through little practice amps that can only do midrange, so to them the lack of midrange represents "time to get out of the bedroom and get serious". Of course to refute this you only have to play them any one of hundreds of metal records that are actually mixed properly with a good balance between guitar and bass signal, and they'll start to notice that it's actually the bass guitar that is driving a lot of the "chug chug chug" in many metal riffs, and the guitars typically have a midrangey, razor-like quality...Ham_authority95 said:
Very subjective. If you're not finding innovation, you're not looking...burntheartist said:
What are you talking about anyway, Nirvana ripped off the Pixies lock stock and barrel, and even admitted it freely whenever asked.
http://www.4ad.com/pixies/ephemera/kurt-cobain-on-p/
The whole really quiet clean verse, really distorted loud chorus - total Pixies thing. Nirvana milked that everywhere they could. The similarity is a lot closeer than Ozzy and The Beatles. Besides, everyone was inspired by The Beatles (even if they were only inspired to "not ever make music like that").burntheartist said:
I don't know about your last question, you'd have to be more specific. One person's innovation is another's.... something else, after all. It cwould be very easy for me to post something and then for you to say "well that's not innovative" no matter how way-out it is...
You're right. I can just show them a track like this one:BonsaiK said:
And show how much the growl and rumble the bass gives to the track.
(Alright, it might not be the best produced song ever, but still)
Just wondering: what are your views on private trackers like What CD? And what are the rest of the industries'?
I didn't know about this service but I understand from my admittedly minimal research that it's a site where you can find leaked copies of new music before it's released to the public. The problem with those services isn't the site itself or the content it holds, but the people who did the initial leaking to get material on those services. Leaks have always been a problem in the music industry and it's a problem that will probably never go away simply because of how the industry does promotion.NeutralMunchHotel said:
So what am I actually talking about here? Well, contrary to what you might think, it's generally not in the recording studio where things are leaked. Under that environment access to a master tape is usually tightly controlled. The only way an album could be leaked in that environment is if the engineer leaked it, and no engineer who likes their future employment prospects to remain good is going to do something stupid like that, because it's going to be very obvious who is at fault...
Most albums get leaked at the "promo" stage. For a commercial release there's a lag time of usually a week or two (but sometimes up to a few months) where the album is released in "promotional format", not to the public but to TV stations, radio stations, magazines, etc. The product sometimes has missing or non-final artwork, sometimes it even has a different track listing/order (these things can change at the last minute), but it's there so DJs, TV stations, print publications etc are ready to give airplay, write their reviews, include the album music in TV adverts for the album, etc and thus "hit the ground running" on release day. A big, highly anticipated release will have hundreds of promotional copies made and distributed to places around the globe. All that has to happen is for one staff member of one of those recipient organisations somewhere to go "hmmmm..." and make a copy.
The industry has ways of policing this. Some promo releases come "watermarked" - in other words there's a subtle, inaudible difference in the audio data on each promotional disc that goes out, so any copy of the data on there can be traced back to the exact organisation that made the copy. If the music biz finds something like this on What-CD they won't try to shut down the site (although they'd probably like to, and may, eventually) - instead they'll go after the organisation that did the piracy to get the song there. They won't generally sue unless they can firmly prove an exact amount of lost income somehow (a difficult thing to do in this case) - a more typical reaction is to just never send promos to that place again.
Other ways of stopping promo piracy include splitting a 10 track album into 99 tracks on a CD so it's harder to rip... some record companies even put a sampled sound over the top of the music at regular intervals. Both of these options are highly annoying for DJs and also limit the practical applications of the music so they're not as common as watermarking.
That bit about the watermark is quite interesting. Hanging around /mu/ yesterday it seems like Sufjan Steven's The Age of Adz has been leaked, which is a shame, and now I'm not sure what to do because I've been waiting to hear it since it was announced!BonsaiK said:
Also, what do you think about the other aspect of What CD - the idea that it is arguably the single largest database of music in every quality, and that this is only possible because copyright laws don't apply in thiss illegal environment.