Getting your tracks to reach a commercial level with out having the sound suck so much takes a lot of practice and many sleepless nights.
So much practice in fact that nobody yet has been able to do it. I hope somebody hits the required amount of practice and sleepless nights soon, because it would be awesome to hear something with sound that didn't suck at least one more time before I die.
My copy n' paste rant on the matter:
The easiest way to put value back into our music is to knock off the damn loudness. I have heard the argument that nobody cares about sound quality. I agree, nobody cares about sound quality. So why wring every last drop of life out of a recording in pursuit of a sound that will “grab” people if we all agree that nobody gives a flyin’ fuck about the sound? They don’t care. They turned it down anyway so it’s not even loud while they listen.
But here is what did happen:
*The few people who do care not only didn’t buy the album, they stopped buying altogether out of the very real fear that any random album off the shelf is now unlistenable.
*Everybody else in the world now has music that hums along at a constant din, never falling behind the foreground noise. Therefore they no longer have to throw any brain cells towards the song to keep focus on the melody. Therefore they never have to shut down Facebook or put down the cell phone and dedicate time for just the music. Therefore they don’t bond with the music. It is now background. They don’t pay for background. They don’t care if background lives or dies. They feel no guilt in harming the people who create background. Background does not move them.
And I know the artists themselves are the ones pushing for loudness. I know they are the ones handing over the money. I know the customer is the boss. I also know the customer can’t produce an album, or else he wouldn’t be paying others to produce an album. Maybe the customer isn’t always right…
Here is the thing: It is the artist’s vision. And nobody has any business “correcting” that vision. But “loud” is not something that can be forced onto the listener in the world of recorded music. Not when the customer has a volume knob. A writer says his vision is for a loud song. Absolutely nothing done in the studio at any part of the production process will guarantee loud playback. Some things could “encourage” loud playback… Drums that push some air when allowed to, guitars that don’t duck for cover behind larger sounds when the limiter comes knocking, upper mids that aren’t shrill…pretty much the opposite of what we are doing right now. Music that the listener wants to blast… that is what will create loud playback.
So we have tried educating the artists. And the entire campaign has been mis-managed in the worst way possible. We go on about dynamics, fatigue, sonic clarity, lack of distortion, preserving transients… and worst of all we keep chanting “too loud!”. We sound old. We sound out of touch. We sound like we just don’t want to rock. Enough. Let us never again scold a 22 year-old musician for adding clipping and distortion to his music. Let us never EVER again tell a young kid that something he did is too loud.
Try this on for size:
Limiters, compressors and clipping do one thing: They turn shit DOWN! That drum hit was supposed to be louder. It is not. The clipper made it quiet. That bass drum was supposed to kick me in my chest and push me through the wall. It didn’t because we used a high-pass to squeeze out a higher RMS and then the limiter stomped all over whatever balls were left. Those cymbals are supposed to bring the energy. They don’t when they literally duck the bass and snare drums.
Worried the disc will be quieter if left uncrushed? It won’t be. Crushing has not made music louder in the first place. Travel back to 1994 with me and step into my Pontiac. Hear that mix tape I'm playing? Are you holding your ears? Yeah? It can go louder you know. But this is as much volume as my rowdy hormone-charged 16 year old self can handle, so the knob is staying here. If we stuck around for the party this weekend it would be more of the same. You can’t hear yourself talk above those tunes. Fast-forward back to 2010...How can we say music is louder today when it was already at the threshold of pain back then? Music is not louder today. The volume knob is just further to the left and the sound is destroyed.
We are not the voice of the singer’s father telling him to turn that shit down. We are the voice of reason trying to help him rock as hard as possible, keep his audience, and claw out of the background and into the foreground.
And there is no reason this can’t happen RIGHT NOW. Storage is almost free. Create and sell two versions of the album if you can’t talk the band down. One good, one crushed. Can’t afford two masters you say? You don’t need two masters. Have a professional talented mastering artist make the best version possible. If that means crushed, if that actually is an artistic intent (I’m looking at MGMT and not too many other bands), then by all means do it. Just make the absolute best master possible with no consideration for anything else. That is your good release. Then have the intern or a trained helper monkey wring it through a loudenator. That is your loud release. Yes, the proper mastering engineer can make a better crushed song. So what? We’ve already established that the defense for crushing is nobody cares what it sounds like. So let it go. You have two versions now and only had to pay real money for the good one. Print a double-sided disc. Or print single sided but throw the crushed version on the extra space as a 128 kbps mp3. Hell, program a player that reads multi-channel FLACs with one version on channels 1 and 2 and the other version on channels 3 and 4.
