noisewreck said:
1a. Too many people use click tracks because they can't fuckin keep time, have no sense of rhythm, and don't wanna face the reality.
1b. We are so fuckin used to hearing all that sequenced/arpeggiated 80s synth stuff that we shudder at the idea of having accelerandi and ritardandi in our music, we are afraid to have controlled changes in tempo.
Hey man, leave the 80s alone! You seem to attribute "us" to the listening public at large, and that is not the case. Most people are happy with whatever is playing in the background on their way to work. There are plenty of music fans out there, but the fact that you didn't work in a nice, slow interlude between all your songs that has lots of tempo and dynamic changes doesn't really concern them.
And don't bother saying "Well, they used to care", because I honestly don't think the public at large was ever concerned with the amount of dynamics in a guitar solo. Most people listen to a song, either like it or hate it for whatever general reason, and that's that. Most people weren't sitting around in 1967 commenting on the use of dynamics on Sgt Pepper, and they aren't sitting around commenting on the lack of dynamics on the latest Nickelback CD (they are both technically pop, just from different timeperiods, so the comparison is technically just).
Do those of us who play and record wish that modern music had more dynamics and fluid tempo? Perhaps... but we are in the minority, since we are the few who actually know to listen for that stuff, and either appreciate its use, or get up in arms about its abcense.
For those of us writing the music, if we want to and choose to write music in a single tempo, with minimal dynamics, and we know it, then fine - that's our choice. If you can't write that stuff in elegantly, then maybe you AREN'T a good musician - or maybe the style of music you play doesn't really call for it, so it never became a priority.
noisewreck said:
2a. Too many fuckin people use Melodyne, Autotune, cut/paste of 60 billion takes to make one worthwhile listening to instead of practicing.
2b. Conversely some producers are willing to have a singer have a take after take after take so that they get all the notes perfect and forgo that one perfect take that missed a note or so... just because "oh my god... that note was off" Hang me now! Personally, I'd rather hear a great performance with one or two notes off than a pastiche of cut and paste nonsense.
Again, it comes back to the producer and the engineer deciding what sounds 'good'. Since the mass market doesn't seem to care whether Lindsay Lohan's latest single has a flowing tempo and a rich use of dynamics, the people creating the music sacrifice it to get a product out faster.
As for non-mainstream music, do you notice it there as well? At that point, it comes down to what the studio does to the artist's music. If they still decide that to put out a modern CD, everything has to compressed flat and bumped up to 0dB, that still isn't the artist's fault... unless you record everything, print the CDs and put it out yourself, you are definitely forgoing a lot of the process that goes into putting out a cd, and part of that is the mastering process, where a lot of this happens.
From the technology end of things, I do agree that technology has all but ruined pop music. The bands we love and listen to now, that were around 30, 40 years ago, were "pop" at the time. As my comparison above shows, if you take two bands different eras that were both pop, who do you grab? A pop sensation like the Beatles, and a pop sensation like Britney Spears? They're both pop... but technology and a market losing interest in well-done music has led way to what we have nowadays.
noisewreck said:
3. We have come full circle back to Baroque times with tier dynamics. This section sounds quieter because less instruments are playing, that section sounds louder because more instruments are playing, and nothing in-between... while everything is compressed and is actually at the same level. A lot of classical recordings are guilty of this shit too. What's worse is that the average consumer is so fuckin used to this that they get annoyed with dynamic movie soundtracks. Take my dad for example. He's got the remote in his hand all the time, constantly fiddling with the volume on the damn TV and cussing out the poor film AE because the horse carriage all of a sudden sounds louder than the princess' conversation a second ago.
I agree with that other guy about the movies - on my mediocre sound system, I want to hear the dialogue, but I don't then want to have to keep turning down the volume when something on-screen explodes... I should put a compressor on the stereo output of my television
All that aside, this last comment again comes down to the quality and concern of the listening audience. They put up with this stuff because they don't sit around nit-picking about the music, as long as it has some decent sound quality, and isn't full of static and poorly mixed. Sorry, but that's modern day audience quality for ya.
), play everything evenly (same loudness), compress dynamics (gotta have that shit under control you see)... yadda, yadda, yadda.
