You ever wonder......

[dintymoore]

... everything to me is secondary to the song...

I couldn't agree with your post more, especially that the song is #1.

It took me a long time to figure that out. When I was a kid I was obsessed with becoming a good drummer, and I've been somewhat obsessed with getting the gear thing covered... but in the end it's about songs and how they make people feel. It's not about sound like it appears to be on the surface.

 

[RAMI]

everything to me is secondary to the song.

That's really so true. I often have a tough time commenting anything other than "I really dig this", or I don't comment at all. Because if I like the SONG, I can overlook imperfections in the recording of it, unless there is something just so obviously, annoyingly wrong. And if I don't like the SONG, then it doesn't matter how awesome the guitars sound, etc....

I bet 99% of the music I like wouldn't stand up to today's so-called standards of recording, mixing and mastering.

 

[RAMI]

A cool experiment would be to have a sort of "Fantasy MP3 Clinic", where people post some of their favorite songs by "big" artists, and have people critique them like they were home recordings. Probably wouldn't work unless it was restricted to "album" tracks that most people never heard so that they can be critiqued without bias. It would be pretty hard to critique a song you've loved for most of your life, regardless of the sound quality.

 

[grimtraveller]

Because if I like the SONG, I can overlook imperfections in the recording of it, unless there is something just so obviously, annoyingly wrong. And if I don't like the SONG, then it doesn't matter how awesome the guitars sound, etc....

I bet 99% of the music I like wouldn't stand up to today's so-called standards of recording, mixing and mastering.

In the three years before I really got involved with HR, I acquired about 250-ish albums, mostly obscure private/vanity pressings, made by hardly known artists (in many cases the only thing they ever did) in that 1966-'80 period, lots of whom were unsure as to whether or not they'd make another record and the quality of many of the recordings, sonically, cannot compare with most of what I've heard here. But I really don't care because while some of the Lps are ropey shit songswise, some are average, some are good, some very good, some excellent. And that's all that matters. They'd be laughed out of town here !
RAMI, it's fascinating, some of the songs you mentioned like "Stairway", "Walrus", "Raccoon" and someone mentioned "Wayward son " and "Street fighting man" - to me these are wonderful songs that demonstrate something that seems to have been missing from so much music recently - freedom. Freedom to try "ridiculous" things. Freedom to really experiment. Freedom to have fun being creative. The funny thing is that a 23 minute song like Pink Floyd's "Echoes" is actually no less catchy than alot of "get to the chorus quickly" brigade. I'll be singing these songs till I'm ready to depart this mortal coil........

 

[oretez]

anecdote(s) . . . in early '70's got separated from my record collection (that separation was a big reason why I started backing up all vinyl to cassette more or less at first listen) . . . one of the few recordings I had, personally (and significant other's taste ran to 'magnets & steel'), was Hendrix 'Electric Ladyland' . . . I did and do really like the album . . . wore out the grooves (much to SO's displeasure, can still hear the distinct sound of her shutting doors between rooms and as we were apartment dwellers the tone of the argument concerning neighbors is easily recalled) on the original LP

couple of years ago 'heard' the Hendrix did not like the sound of the final mix/master on the release . . . don't know whether that is true or not . . . on eventually returning to album for critical, if inadvertent (didn't mean to, I swear), reappraisal I started to hear myriad, plethoral of detail I would have wanted to fix (not necessarily in composition or performance) . . . in now sounds muddy and unfocused to me . . .

(as I said I still enjoy enjoy the album just think that in final mix/master it could have been treated 'better')

stemming from a similar time (my critical listening, recordings were maybe six years apart) one of the first recordings to get me interested in the technical end of production was Gene Clark's 'No Other'. I am, personally, subjectively, still fond of it but when I listen to it critically now it just seems like the mess it actually is (again not stressing composition or performance . . . but on this one I would have wanted to re-track a number of individual performances)

Commercially 'Electric Ladyland' was/is wildly successful, 'No Other' was received with, at best, critical and popular indifference. Represented an aesthetic dead end for Clark and more or less tanked his recording career (live performance was already moribund)

other the years I've been required to be economically judgmental concerning all manner of musical endeavor. No matter how educated you try to be concerning the range of musical expression (and I've never believed I have an 'ear' for pop taste, certainly not in advance of conventional fashion), how subjective you try to be . . . you are still forced into making decisions that are inherently 'snap'

I still and will always struggle to articulate those decisions in a way that balances real information while acknowledging the inevitable subjectiveness of them. But fact is, if I can not contribute something significant to a clients 'goal' (dream) I need to divorce (or better avoid in the first place) myself from the process. There are a lot of reasons I tend to not haunt MP3 listening clinics (quite honestly they tend to depress me, but that is part of the learning to articulate thing perhaps) . . . but a significant one is poverty of the delivery format coupled with anonymity of internet expression . . . it is hard to guess intent from a distance and if I guess accurately, well let's just say that would be part of the depression.

but then if one is performing music for the applause I guess one is already damned

once heard Lucinda Williams assert that if one more expert told her a song need a bridge (to be a hit) she was going to shot them

 

[mcmetal]

I'm still learning how to mix and i know my ears are far from where they need to be.I'll sometimes go to the clinic and give a listen to what some of the folks here are putting up.

I'll listen to something that to me sounds pretty well recorded and i can't hear nothing really out of place.Then i'll read the posts on how this,that and the other should be done differently.I'm thinking it sounded just fine.

I'll admit i'm easily impressed.I think some are overly critical and analytical. Guess if you're gonna post something though then you're opening yourself up to the critique.

I think in the long run if it helps the poster get better at mixing than it's a good thing.I know that since i've been into home recording i tend to listen to everything differently.Sometimes thats a good thing but sometimes all the over-analyzing gets in the way of just enjoying the song.That's when this helps.Then mostly everything sounds good.

 

[grimtraveller]

....what kind of reviews some of the biggest songs in rock history would get here in the MP3 Clinic if being heard for the first time?

I often hear tunes and notice things that, if it was just some home-recorder posting it, would be shot down right away.

In this regard, I've often thought of Norman Smith. He was the engineer on all the Beatles' records up to and including "Rubber Soul". Then he became a producer for the Pink Floyd {as they were first known on record} and one of the most underrated bands of the 60s, the Pretty Things.
If you listen to the Floyd's first album, there are some things on it that would make many wince. On 'Matilda mother', as they come out of the organ solo, the song jerks in gut wrenching fashion into the final verse. The editing is abysmal. It sounds like me on my portastudio ! And remember, a number of the Beatles' final recordings, even in Smith's time, were editings together of two separate recordings, so he should've known better. On Floyds' next LP, one of the major pieces is "Set the controls for the heart of the sun". But there's some awful editing there too. No smoothness or subtlety ! Saying there was no digital editing is no excuse. Tons of songs were edited with block and razor and one would never know. And he does the same thing to the Pretty Things' track "Baron Saturday" from 'SF Sorrow'. There's a sudden drop in levels once the percussion melange kicks in. On Floyds' "Interstellar overdrive", the band play live this 11 minute piece and then a few weeks later, they overdub - but with a difference. The entire band once again play live to the original piece, a kind of improvisation and on final mix, guitars, basses, organs and drums just criss cross and collide randomly across the stereo spectrum (it was recorded on a 4 track, some of the album at the same time the Beatles were in Studio 2 recording "Pepper"). It's two performances played together !
But each of the songs I've mentioned (and others I haven't) and the albums from which they came are, in my opinion, utterly totally awe inspiring. Brilliant. The epitome of English psychedelia. The Floyd stuff in particular quite simply changed my musical headspace when I was 16.

 

[MCI2424]

....what kind of reviews some of the biggest songs in rock history would get here in the MP3 Clinic if being heard for the first time?

I often hear tunes and notice things that, if it was just some home-recorder posting it, would be shot down right away.

"Stairway" to Heaven" is way too long and the drums don't come in until about 5 minutes into the tune. I'm sure some of our "experts" here would be telling the OP that it's a long, boring song (I realize many people think it's a long boring song anyway) and that it has to lose about 2 minutes to ever become a hit. Those flutes are really corny, too. You might want to try another patch, like an organ or something, but the flutes gotta go.

"I am the Walrus". That electric piano at the beginning is way too distorted and so are the vocals. You need to re-track those. The fade-out's way too long and gets really noisy. Remove some of those tracks, will ya?

I was going to post 4 or 5 other examples, but you get the point. Just look at the guitar "solos" Neil Young gets away with. If anyone posted any of that, they'd get laughed off the board.

So, my point is....I have no idea what my point is....I guess it's that, once you're an established star, you could put out crap that an un-known home recorder would be told "This sucks".



(Chili, if you want to move this, no problem. I really didn't know where to put it, and it sort of has something to do with the MP3 Clinic, but not really)

You hit the nail on the head. So true, so true.

Most established acts in history paid a studio, made an album, made millions and went touring. AT some point the engineers that made these albums LET IT GO for the greater good. Most here are probably still mixing their first song done a decade ago.

 

[Dr. Varney]

I am thinkin' you are thinkin' too formulaic.

Dr. V

 

[DrewPeterson7]

I think that's for good reason though... clearly, the world has changed.

This, really, though for slightly different reasons.

It's a question of context. Today, "Stairway" might sound long and almost embarrassingly pretentious, but back in 1971 when it first hit the airwaves it was coming completely out of the blue. Here were a bunch of British hard rockers who were recording this intricate, long, epic rock piece that probably owed as much to the classical and epic poem formats as it did to "Eight Days a Week." They were diving headfirst into uncharted territory and trying to do something no one had ever done before with rock music, and seemed to take their work just as seriously as Bach, Da Vinci, or Tolkien.

The problem is that sort of white-knuckled earnestness is awfully easy to, well, to fall into self-parody, and nearly forty years of people wanting to make a "Stairway" grade epic masterpiece have sort of triggered a gag reflect whenever we're confronted with flute over an acoustic section in a rock song or almost awkwardly serious lyrics. The very fact that "Stairway" happened, I think, and was as successful as it was at the time makes it that much harder for guys like you and I to record something similar today without falling into the trap of irony or pretension.

I don't think it's JUST a question of attention spans shortening and people no longer having the patience for that kind of a gradual buildup in a song - Tools done awfully well for themselves, and the fact that all 9 minutes of "Schism" were all I heard on the airwaves the summer it came out and is still in frequent rotation on rock radio I think speaks volumes. I think it's that forty years ago what Led Zep was doing was fresh, and today, because we've had it for forty years, it would seem a bit cliche.

 

[gcapel]

That's really so true. I often have a tough time commenting anything other than "I really dig this", or I don't comment at all. Because if I like the SONG, I can overlook imperfections in the recording of it, unless there is something just so obviously, annoyingly wrong. And if I don't like the SONG, then it doesn't matter how awesome the guitars sound, etc....

I bet 99% of the music I like wouldn't stand up to today's so-called standards of recording, mixing and mastering.

Agreed, some of the coolest stuff I like is demo's of unreleased material. The quality is terrible. I almost believe I could have done the production with a rat shack mic and boom box and it would have been the same result. But the musical content is great enough to overcome the poorly engineered production.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

It's a question of context. Today, "Stairway" might sound long and almost embarrassingly pretentious, but back in 1971 when it first hit the airwaves it was coming completely out of the blue.

While I don't disagree with your thesis, I think there's another factor involved here:

"Stairway" would be perfectly successful today if it was released as a mid-format video.

The major paradigm shift in the music industry since the classic rock days is that it's only partially about the music now, now it's about the multimedia package, of which the music is only a small part. The money has also shifted it's center of gravity from the recording to the performance. Live shows no longer sell the albums, rather albums and videos are used to sell the live performances.

A worldwide "Stairway tour" - for worse or even worse - based upon a mid-to-long format video would I'd bet rake in millions of dollars these days, even if they only sung the "Ballad of Gilligan's Isle" version.

G.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

Hmm. Interesting thought, Glen - I'm not quite sure what to make of that, but I'll definitely be mulling it for a bit.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

I'm not saying I advocate it; I'm old school - music should be listened to, not watched. But I also know that I am a dying breed in that regard.

G.

 

[frederic]

I'm in the dying breed category with you Glen. Does that mean you're bringing the scotch?

When I made my post I tried to be brief as not to clog up the thread with extensive verbeage, so no, what I said was not all encompassing in any way. I just tried to hit on the big things I've seen change over the years.

RAMI - to your comment about commenting on other's MP3's in the mixing clinic - I agree with you 100% - if it's a good song, with good muscians, I think the technical aspect of the recording matters far less because we're probably not listening to that technical aspect anywhere near as much.

However, even if I dig the song very much and am naturally semi-ignoring the recording technique and their imperfections, if the poster is asking for technical advice, I try to give it to them (if the mood suits me at the time) because they're asking for a reason, and it gives them an opportunity to see many opinions in response, and in turn WE ALL have an opportunity to learn, even if the music posted isn't our prefered genre or the equipment is different, and even if we all disagree - that disagreement actually I find more beneficial because it makes everyone think - myself included.

While most of us joke around, poke fun, tease and sometimes run our mouths a bit too much sometimes, in the end we all have the opportunity to learn something.

In that light, I try to be mindful that for every poster in the mixing clinic with the moose-sized balls posting their work - whether it's astounding or terrible, there's probably 20-30 people reading feverishly in the background who do not have the balls to post their work - and they're learning too.

Just as I, you and everyone else did and still are.

I really do miss the days of "I wonder what this knob does" whether twiddling it produced a pleasant or disgusting result. To me, those days were my favorite time in my musical life - where learning something new was the common place, and the difference in recording ability with each thing learned was an astounding change.

As you know, the longer you're in this field professionally or not, what you learn later on may be a big deal, but the results are not too significant generally because it's the basics that make a huge difference.

Not sure if I phrased that well, hopefully you and others can grasp my thinking a little bit.

 

[Dr. Varney]

Two retired old hookers at the bus stop. One says to the other:

I really do miss the days of "I wonder what this knob does" whether twiddling it produced a pleasant or disgusting result.

Dr. V

 

[Monkey Allen]

I don't reckon many classics would get genuinely panned in the clinic. What are some classics...Sweet Child Of Mine just came to me off the top of my head. If someone posted that it'd be all over. The only negative comments might come from someone petty enough to feel jealous. What are some other classics...Smells Like Teen Spirit...all over! Heartbreak Hotel...put down your glasses! At worst you'd just have to comment in the negative along the lines of not my kind of music but it's good. I seriously doubt that if someone lobbed in and posted I Am the Walrus in the clinic, that it wold be shot down by anyone but the most jealous/ audiophile kind of recording man's recordist snoot. Robert Johnson's Preaching Blues is a classic. If anyone posted that and it'd never been heard before then only the slow or stupid would not appreciate the shit out of it. I suppose it boils down to what kind of people would be hanging out in the clinic. And that's probably the key. Well...that is the key.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

I'm in the dying breed category with you Glen. Does that mean you're bringing the scotch?

Oooh! Can I come!

Glen, thinking a bit more about your comment, I think you're generally right, and the only real "difference" would be that show today being a little more consciously a "multimedia" display than a musical performance. A little more self-aware, I suppose. We're splitting hairs, though.

Also, food for thought - I suspect that if I recorded a song in my bedroom studio written by Jimmy Page and sung by Robert Plant, I'd get a lot of positive feedback about the "old school" sounding riffs, and who the fuck is that guy singing, man does he have a set of pipes, right before I got approximately 1,274 critiques about the high end in my mix or a bit of phasing on the vocals or an indistinct low end, et al. I'm not sure exactly what that says about Rami's question - I think, perhaps, that given the context we're a little more attuned to the technical side, but my sense has been if someone posts a killer song or performance, it'll still be commented upon for that.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

but my sense has been if someone posts a killer song or performance, it'll still be commented upon for that.

You're probably mostly right about that...but I think we've all kind of strayed from the original point, which is that there a whole lot of commercial "professional" recordings out there that on a technical or sonic level are really not very good, but we tend to either let that slide, or actually think they *do* sound good, simply because we tend to not want to question the artists and engineers with brand names that we like.

I'm/we're not talking about the quality of the musical content so much as we are the sonic quality of the production. Take away the brand names and we suddenly become more honest with them and ourselves about what we're actually hearing.

[Food Analogy Alert ]
And sometimes it goes beyond band names; sometimes it's a matter of what we grew up on listening to. It's the same reason why so many adults still think that Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is still the ultimate mac and cheese, even though if they had it for the very first time today, they'd think it was crap as far as mac and cheseses go.

G.

 

[RAMI]

I'm/we're not talking about the quality of the musical content so much as we are the sonic quality of the production.

Yes, that was more my intention. It's not about "I'd like this song if I heard it for the first time". It's more a case of the "production" (which includes the mix, the length of the song, the audio "imperfections", etc....).

I'm convinced that home recorders can't get away with as much creativity or stray from formula as much as something that we've accepted as "pro" can get away with. When a home-recorder strays from the norm, I think there's more chance he/she will be told it doesn't work.