got played on the radio

[FALKEN]

for the first time.....it was very exciting..I recorded it. The station is owned by clear-channel....they smashed the living crap out of it. they played two songs. the first sounded okay...the 2nd one was pretty bad sounding...way more compression artifacts going on than the first. also, tiny tiny noises that I didn't even know were there JUMPED out of the speakers. I mean....small amounts of distortion in the chain became very loud pops. I think they eq'd the crap out of it too. My vocals which were tracked with an oktava mk319 sounded sooo airy-distorted...like el cheapo condensers...only it doesn't sound that way on MY mix! just on the radio.... (and I listened to the radio through my monitors, and recorded it to PC...hey; they're MY songs!!) yeah...I didn't make big time yet..this was only a local show, but it was very cool all the same. I am going to have to figure out now what makes some songs in the program work better than others.. surprisingly enough the songs that sounded the best I expect used the most compression... or it could just be mastering. I have no clue......

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

for the first time.....it was very exciting..I recorded it. The station is owned by clear-channel....they smashed the living crap out of it. they played two songs. the first sounded okay...the 2nd one was pretty bad sounding...way more compression artifacts going on than the first. also, tiny tiny noises that I didn't even know were there JUMPED out of the speakers. I mean....small amounts of distortion in the chain became very loud pops. I think they eq'd the crap out of it too. My vocals which were tracked with an oktava mk319 sounded sooo airy-distorted...like el cheapo condensers...only it doesn't sound that way on MY mix! just on the radio.... (and I listened to the radio through my monitors, and recorded it to PC...hey; they're MY songs!!) yeah...I didn't make big time yet..this was only a local show, but it was very cool all the same. I am going to have to figure out now what makes some songs in the program work better than others.. surprisingly enough the songs that sounded the best I expect used the most compression... or it could just be mastering. I have no clue......

At lest part, if not most, of it is indeed the fact that radio stations add their own compression or gain/limiting to the signal.

This is actually a good point to bring up in the whole "volume wars" debate; radio broadcasts are even more squashed than the CDs. It's one thing to compare one's mix to commercial CDs, it's yet another thing altogether to compare a home mix to a radio broadcast of a commercial CD because of that extra ironing.

you are pretty much right on target with much of your analysis.; the extra radio compression will tend to emphasize "faults" otherwise buried in the mix in much the same way that adding pre-mastering compression to an overall mixdown will do the same. The ones that sound better on the radio will tend to be the ones that are "cleaner" in the lower volume and in the midranges.

G.