Overproducing!! what the ...

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JFogarty said:


Do it till it stops improving the sound.
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In my opinion JF nailed it. Once more production starts making things worse it's being overproduced, up to that point it's being polished.
 
The more and more I read over this thread, I am actually finding out how silly the term "overproducing " is.... I makes no sense at all really.... Underproducing makes more sense as a descriptive word. Here's the scenario... You got 2 sculpture artists... One makes this bland white blob of cement thing, and calls it art, and then the other crafts one of them beautiful women with the missing arm and boobs hanging out and flowered headband out of the cement (you know what I mean, the greek statue thing)... anyways, just because the boobs guy makes one really nice and perfected, doesn't mean it's over-sculpted..... but yeah, I guess the blob guy's statue could be underproduced..... But then and again maybe it's finished in his eyes.. (and his admirers eyes also)... sorry bout the crude descriptions, but it was the best way of explaining it....:)

Joe
 
Over produced??

Make the song sound the best it can. If you have the money to spend a year mixing 1 song Do it. Over produced? Thats bull s*#t. A mix with so many FX/reverb/delay/whatever is just a bad mix. Badly produced not over produced.

My analigy is - Overproucing is like going over 0dB in the digital domain, ... you can't!
 
I just love these female anatomy analogies!!!
yeeeeeeeeeeeee haaaaaaaaaaaw.

Joe...... I didn't even know they had cement back then.

Zeke
 
In defense of the people on here (including myself) that believe in the "overproducing" term, nobody is saying that there is such a thing as something sounding too good. If an album sounds great it sounds great, and sounding great has never been a problem. However, too much of a good thing can be bad - there is such a thing as over-doing it. Perfection in performance is unnatural. Nobody is perfectly consistent or flawless, and if the production includes a lot of artificial tightening of the actual performance and compression to the point of removing all dynamics from the performance then it can ruin a song that depends on those dynamics for emotional impact (for instance). It's not about sounding good, too good, or not good at all, for that matter. It's about what you've done to the performance to make it sound the way it sounds. If you've done too much you can make it sound good but still ruin the song by sucking the life out of it. That's where I would apply the overproduced label.
 
Diragor keeps trying to make sense. Can I help? How about this definition of 'overproduced'? - the producer adds more than is good or necessary, and the song suffers. 'Overengineered' would mean putting up too many mics on the kick when one would have done the trick. 'Overpolished' would mean getting rid of so many of the so-called imperfections that the music sounds sanitized.

Overproduced, overengineered, overpolished - different ways of overdoing it. What word would you like for the situation where you've recorded 12 takes of the damn thing, and you're still thinking: "Just one more - I know I can do it better this time." Shall we call that 'overrecording'? Anybody can overdo things. My dad used to pound in four nails when two would have done it - no harm done. My mother-in-law used to overcook vegetables - there's no need to boil brussel sprouts for 25 minutes. It sorta ruined 'em. The other day I put four backing vocal tracks behind the acoustic guitar and main vocal. It was too many. Three sounded better.

I think the term 'overproduced' is useful, because it describes musical mistakes I've heard on recordings, but if you don't like that word, that's okay, just say it another way. You know, like: "John Simon never should have put all that orchestral stuff up behind Leonard Cohen on his first album."
 
Diragor said:
Perfection in performance is unnatural. Nobody is perfectly consistent or flawless,
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You must have never been to a Rush concert.

Maybe we should take all of the "overproduced" stuff, and make it a little more sucky. Imperfect it up a little. Shift some of the instruments out of tune.

This argument goes on and on. I don't mind a less than perfect "live" type recording. But I sure appreciate flawless music too. And yes, there are plenty of incredible musicians that play perfect music. At least it's perfect from the standpoint of what the human perception is.

Zeke
 
The term "Overprducing" is probably pretty inarticulate anyway you look at it. But are we, because we know the division of labor between producer and engineer and whatnot, splitting hairs?

I think I agree with the idea of inappropriate production. Maybe it refers to a mismatch between vibe/theme/genre and they way the recording portrays it. Like choosing the wrong frame for a painting.

And what about perfection? Plenty of room for interpretation there. Is the standard for perfection the musical equivalent of photographic realism in painting? Maybe overproducing is attempting to shape the recording according to the wrong standard of pefection.

We could go around and around on this without really disagreeing.
 
Why even try to define it. It's something you instinctively know when you here it. Sometimes very artificial vocal treatments and too many effects make me want to call something "over-produced". Too many unneccessary overdubs that take away from the arrangement and melody. Wild panning effects. Not enough space left for the songs to breath a little.
 
The point I will go back to is that this is about "vision" of the finale product.

Obviously, not all of us share the same "vision", and definately have different preferences.

This supports that "over produced" is really an inaccurate term. You may not like the production, but it is almost always the production that was sought by the producer and/or artist. If it was achieved, then how can that possibly be "over produced"? Just because YOU don't like it? :rolleyes:

Ed
 
Yes, I've seen Rush, and just like every other musician on the planet, *every single one*, they are imperfect. I'm talking about literal perfection and you're talking about "dude, that was perfect" kind of perfection. It's how you can tell a drum machine from human drummer (even one that's triggering electronic sounds) and how you can tell when someone is lip-synching. A human being cannot consistently perform any rhythmical part as accurately as a sequencer can, no drummer can produce the *exact* same sound from a snare drum with every hit like a drum machine can, and no singer can hit every single note as accurately as a keyboard instrument can. I suppose an argument could be made that none of those electronic devices can produce literally perfect results, since there are physical limitations on the capabilities of the electronics. But my point is that when you mold a performance to the level of accuracy of those things it's no longer a human performance and that can come through in the final product.

Obviously there are levels in between and it's all a matter of opinion anyway. To me there's a difference between punching in or digitally editing to remove an obvious mistake and recording triggered drums into a sequencer for perfect quantizing. If you're going for an industrial, mechanized sound like Fear Factory's Digimortal (in which the drumming, and possibly guitars from clues in some places, is obviously digitally assisted in some way) then it can be cool. If that was done to a Nirvana album I think something would've been lost. I am by no means suggesting that anyone should purposely make a record sound bad or perform poorly. I'm suggesting that human performances, which are going to be imperfect by nature, should be left in a more natural state most of the time, unless its purpose is specifically to sound unnatural or mechanical. If you don't agree, cool. I'm just venting opinions.

That was a bit off topic but it was brought up, so there's my shit for the pile.
 
sonusman - your post finally has made clear what I was thinking this whole time. If I call a record "bad" when it was exactly what the producer was trying to achieve, does that make "bad" an inaccurate word? To me there's nothing wrong with the word, if I think an album fits my definition of "overproduced" then that's what it is to me. It's a totally subjective term that's been adopted as kind of broad slang for something that's been heavily compressed, edited, filtered, buried in effects, etc. to the detriment of the material itself. That last part is the extremely subjective part that fuels this debate, I would suspect. For example, there's nothing more heavily processed than a Rob Zombie album but I wouldn't call it overproduced. Go figure.
 
Diragor said:
sonusman - your post finally has made clear what I was thinking this whole time.
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Dude,

You must not have read this whole thread. Because, this was stated so clearly and in much more detail earlier by Sonus and some others.

Zeke
 
Diragor said:
I'm talking about literal perfection and you're talking about "dude, that was perfect" kind of perfection.
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Dang, I have to retype all this crap because it didn't go through the first time.

First of all. The first thing you learn in 9th grade Algebra, is that no measurements are exact. They can be very close and very precise in relation to other standards. But, not perfect. If you will go back and read my post, you will see that I was talking about perfection from a human perception standpoint.

I think you make a huge leap when you start comparing perfecting a drum track, (from a human perception standpoint) to using a drum machine. I don't see the two as being very analogous. Maybe we do differ in how we define perfect.

Also, I wasn't inferring that you were really suggesting that one should deliberately screw up there music. I was exaggerating to make a point. The same point that has been made over and over in this thread. There are differing degrees of refinement in art. Some may like the cement blob, (as it was so eloquently illustrated earlier) and some may like a little refined boob in their concrete. IT'S EVEN POSSIBLE TO APPRECIATE BOTH.

Mechanical music..............adrenaline surge.

By the way......I never use the term dude, dude

Zeke
 
Ok, maybe I'm dense. Or maybe I've been arguing off the intended point. I just kept hearing "there's no such thing as overproduction" and I disagreed.

I didn't think the thing about perfecting a drum track was a very big leap, it's all about where you personally draw the line. You can do a LOT to drum tracks. When is it too much? When you compress all of the dynamics out of each drum individually? When you paste sections from another take into the final take? When you nudge a few notes into more precise alignment with a click track? How about when you use some fancy software to quantize every single note to align to machine-perfect 16ths? Or have the drummer play electronic drums and have the recorded sequence quantized? Those last two are nearly the same as using a drum machine to me. In those cases the drummer may have *composed* the part but he's no longer the one that performed it. But as you and I and many others have said, it also depends on the music. I can forgive NIN and other half human half machine acts because that's what they're going for.

I understood the exaggeration, I just disgreed that what I said even pointed in that direction to start with. I'm not anti-slick production; I'm anti-digitally-perfected-human-performance, er somethin' like that (again, depending on the intent).
 
I think one of the problems with the term "overproduced" is very well displayed in this thread itself. We, meaning people who know at least something about production, can't even seem to agree what "overproduced" means. I can count at least three different meanings applied to the term in various posts. When it boils down to it, what it really means is "I didn't care for the production."

Personally I think its pretty difficult to suck *all* the life out of a good performance. I don't care how much you compress "Stairway to Heaven" the strength of the performances will still come through, just maybe not as strongly (I'd love to hear sombody try this). Yes you can kill a brilliant performance, but I think you almost have to be trying to do so. To me it seems like it's the marginal performances, or the songs we wouldn't like anyway that wind up getting labeled as "overproduced." If the music fails, then our attention is naturally drawn much more to the production than it normally would be.
 
Overproduction is in the eye of the beholder. Odds are if one person thinks (key word: thinks...as in opinion) that a song is overproduced, the actual producer won't. After all, like people have rehashed numerous times, it is the producer's vision. His goal was acheived. One other comment. Like all forms of art, music tries to evoke an emotion out of people. If peoples' emotions are that "it was overproduced", the damn song did its job. I think this thread has mentioned overproduction so much, that it has lost all meaning whatsoever. :)

Peace, love and chicken,
Mike
 
Ya know...

...this whole THREAD is now "over-produced!!!"

:D

Bruce
 
Yeah, what Bruce said.....I think Im going to over-fuck the ol' lady tonight.....
 
In that case... do you want your foreskin back, Gidge??

:D :D
 
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