Magazine handing out bad advice?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mistral
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Mistral

RyosaMusic
In one of last year's issues of Computer Music, there was a large piece called "The CM Guide To Mixing".. in it they make what I believe are some rather preposterous claims - first, they advertise that if you follow their tips you'll achieve "a great mix every time".. which in itself I take with a grain of salt cause there are too many variables to guarantee such a thing..

But two tips in particular caught my attention as being questionable, and I'd like to hear some of your opinions on these.. and I quote:

"We can't stress this enough - compress, compress, and compress again. The compressor should be the first thing, and often the last thing you add to any channel." They accompany this with a visual, of literally this. A comp insert, a load of effects, followed by another comp insert..

"Don't be afraid to push your levels into the red - trust your ears instead"

The problem I have with the first statement is that I have found that sometimes it doesn't even sound good to have ONE compressor.. let alone multiple. It seems irresponsible to coherse newbies into not only using, but probably way overusing a tool that's oft abused to begin with.

As for pushing levels into the red, I have a hard time believing anyone could advertise this as a GOOD thing, through my years of experience I have learned that in the digital domain, peaking is akin to distortion - whether your ears immediately pick up on it or not. And depending on the chosen software, it can lead to other kinds of undesireable artifacting and bugs as well. Isn't it much smarter to start off with lower channel levels and a high main output, if you want things to be loud? It isn't as if cranking the individual channels to 11 will change the intensity of the overall mix.

Thoughts?
 
Wow, an audio magazine publishing bad advice? I've never heard of such a thing! Who woulda thunk it? :D

--Ethan
 
Is there some other significance to that issue?

Duh, wait I get it now. Har har

And of course I'm not surprised by the mere fact that a magazine might publish bad advice, but that struck me as particularily amateurish.
 
Ethan Winer said:
Wow, an audio magazine publishing bad advice? I've never heard of such a thing! Who woulda thunk it? :D

--Ethan
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I think the article was written by some guy named Ethan Winer













:p ;)
 
I have that issue, it's the same one that details how to build low freq absorbers out of paper and burbur carpet.
 
cellardweller said:
I have that issue, it's the same one that details how to build low freq absorbers out of paper and burbur carpet.
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That was just a joke................. :( :mad:
Now I have to tear all that stuff down. :eek: :D :D
 
timboZ said:
That was just a joke................. :( :mad:
Now I have to tear all that stuff down. :eek: :D :D
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Come on man, everyone knows you need to use shag carpet to get down below 100 hz. :rolleyes:
 
Robert D said:
Come on man, everyone knows you need to use shag carpet to get down below 100 hz. :rolleyes:
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well, I personally use bass traps.
I had a couple of largemouth ones leftover from the fishing trip I took a few years ago. I recommend them over smallmouth traps purely because they are bigger.

I've heard bad things about crappie traps though....so stay clear of those. They just make your low end sound like crap



:p
 
Robert D said:
everyone knows you need to use shag carpet to get down below 100Hz.
Click to expand...
Austin Powers said:
Everyone knows you need shag carpet to get down, baby! Yeah! Shag!
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Coincidence?

:D

G.
 
Mistral said:
guess I shouldn't have expected a serious discussion - k bye
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Discussion of what? You already know that was an April Fool's issue and that the compression article was just as perposterous as you thought it was before you posted. What else do you need to know?

You want my ideas on compression? Look just a couple of threads away from this one at the "Compression Uncompressed" thread.

G.
 
April Fools issue? Do you actually believe that?

If you don't care to share thoughts on compression here, what about the notion of keeping levels in the red? Do you think as I do that under no circumstances might this be of any benefit? Or are there caveats I am not aware of?
 
Pretty irresponsible of them, as people obviously believed it...
On another note, I got a virus from a Computer Music CD that damn near killed my computer...and that's no April Fool's joke
 
Mistral said:
April Fools issue? Do you actually believe that?

If you don't care to share thoughts on compression here, what about the notion of keeping levels in the red? Do you think as I do that under no circumstances might this be of any benefit? Or are there caveats I am not aware of?
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April Fools issues of magazines is hardly a new idea. It's beeen done many, many times before. Sometimes it might just be one article, other times it might be the whole magazine. I've seen it done in everything from Rolling Stone to Stereo Review to Esquire, including fake Letters to the Editor.

I never said I didn't want to share my thoughts on compression. I said that if you went just a couple of threads away, you'd find that my opening post contained a link to a downloadable notebook that contains 42 pages of thoughts on compression that I worked up just for folks like yourself. I've spent the last couple of months working on it in my spare time, and if you think I'm going to type it all over again here just because you won't go a couple of threads up or down from this one to read it for yourself, you've got another thing coming.

As far as the going into the red thing, you just don't get it yet that you read a fake article. But if you insist, I'll say this much; before you talk about that subject, you have to define whether you're talking about the analog or digital domain, and if in analog, at what point in the signal chain are you talking about.

G.
 
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