Why does everything HAVE to be so damn loud!?!?!?!?!?!?
I have pre-mastered mixes that are fully 3dB RMS LOUDER than most anything I have ever heard out of the 70's and through the mid 80's! More recent stuff by selected artists still have very low average volume and just sound killer! I have a friend in Atlanta who is doing beautiful sounding work and this stuff NEVER hits 0dB on a digital Peak meter. NEVER.
Ask yourself if you are sacrificing a great sound to gain a couple of dB in the mix. Did all of a sudder, because your recording isn't as loud as Everclear, you start to lose a rich tone? Did all of a sudden the "space" around instruments disappear? Did certain things start to take on an edge that sort of hurts when you hear it?
Loud is not always good! With some of the recordings I hear, professional and otherwise, I can't even listen to the whole CD without fatique. I CANNOT imagine having to actually spend a month in the studio working like that!
I recently did some work with a band, re-mixing a few songs, and recording a cover for them that was LOUD!!! I finally had to force the issue. We re-mixed a song that was going on a compilation of Portland bands that an ex Capitol A&R guy is putting together, and I just didn't give the band a copy of the pre-mastered mix, nor the post "mastered" mix that the guitar player wanted to squash the shit out of and add MORE high end! I made them wait 2 weeks, even though they reminded me every other day that I need to get them a master to send to this guy. I finally gave it to them, both the pre-mastered and post mastered mixes. They thought the post-mastered that they were in on sucked bad, but they didn't know which was which. I just made them pick the one they thought sounded best. They picked a no EQ, but slightly volume increased mix, which I still didn't think was all that great sounding in comparison to the original mix. This thing is a "bit" loud, but still quieter than a lot of stuff being put out on the market. The one that had eq and was really squashed sounded about as loud as other stuff, but they agreed the song just didn't sound that good that loud. I think they might have learned a lesson. I HOPE they learned a lesson. Loud is not always so good.
Can you imagine what some of this stuff you hear on the radio sounded like before the evil labels told the mastering engineers to make as loud as the other crap out there? I can. I have heard some. I indeed heard some of the better qualities the mastering engineer added, but also heard the uniqueness of the bands recording get killed in the pursuit of LOUD. It was a shame. It was also hard to listen to the post mastered product.
I am not saying that mastering a bit louder is necessarily bad. I am not saying that changing a bit of eq is bad. I am just suggesting that most music does not suffer so badly in the mixing that it only needs to have 3dB of dynamics!!! Things don't HAVE to be "everything, all the time"! It is okay to have seperation and dynamics! Really, it is okay.
Maybe some of this stems from the amount of live sound work I have done lately. I have mixed the good, the bad, and the ugly. What continues to impress me though is that live, you are at the mercy of the performance and little else. Try to squash the mix of a loud band in a 36X52' room when the guitars on stage are blasting at 95dB on there own. It just isn't going to work....
But where this becomes relevent in what I am talking about is that when the band finally decides to tone down a bit for a certain part or whatever, the dynamics are simply amazing. Very REAL. Of course, what can you expect from a live performance eh?
I don't mind mind having to turn up the volume of a playback device if the mix is a bit more quiet than the last bands thing. I REALLY like how different bands sound very different on tape. I don't see the need to make everything all one volume, or with similar EQ characteristics. I have found that older recordings had many more differences in the overall sound than newer ones do. This is the folly of a lot of questions that people are asking these days about mixing and mastering. They all want "someones" sound, rather than dealing with "there" sound. This is further amazing because seldomly do these people sound like who they want to sound like!
I posted in another thread once that "this is MUSIC, it is supposed to have dynamics". All of these "everything, all the time" recordings are a total bore to listen to because they lack meaningful dynamics. They lack meaningful space between all the intrumentation. They lack meaningful color to each sound. It is as though the sounds were picked because they didn't make the meters jump up when that instrument came in.
Mix to sound good! Bottom line is that who cares how loud it is. It does not take too long to start realizing when you are starting to push a mix to that point where extra volume means giving up tone. If the damn mix sounds better a bit quieter, who is to argue with that? Who cares if it is not as loud as the next guys stuff, does it sound good?
That is the ultimate question you should always ask yourself when making decisions about the mixes Peak volume. Sure, it is okay for the song to eventually achieve 0 or -1dB on the meters at it's loudest point, but you don't HAVE to have the mix hovering around -4dB for 75% of the time.
Break from the norm boys! Don't fall for the game of being louder than the next guy. Mix and master to SOUND GOOD and forget the rest.
The one CD I have mixed that I feel very good about is also one that I mastered. It was my first mastering job where I was actually paid....
I can play it over and over again and not get fatigued from listening. What is funny is that it is really not too much quieter than many modern recordings are, yet, it has a LOT of dynamics. This CD earned me another shot, this time in the tracking stage too on the bands next CD. Everybody likes it. Of course the songs are good, but the production is very natural, and like I said, far more attention was placed on making it sound good rather than making it sound like something else (which would have been unachievable really. This band sounds like they do, and that is that.....) This band get old people at their shows and these old farts like the more "retro"? sound of the CD. The young people just say it sounds really good and unique. Not ONE person has ever complained that it wasn't loud enough, or that the eq was very different from other stuff in their collection. Most just think it sounds good.
I learned a lesson from this that I hope to carry into every production I ever work on again where the artist will step back and listen to the recording from the stand point of sounding good for WHAT it is, rather than what they think it should sound like.
I hope some you will follow your own sound too and forget trying to compete with the Jone's next door.
Ed
P) you said that using the bass of a keyboard is wasting time except for Madonna music etc.
