“Wimpy loud sound”
There’s a cool two-minute video over at TurnMeUp that illustrates the problem with today’s recorded music being too freakin’ loud to sound any good.
Recently I’ve been making a conscious effort to mix my songs at much lower volumes. It’s funny, but I think every DIY recording artist probably has a similar epiphany: you start out not really knowing what you’re doing, mixing songs so they sound good. Then you discover things like EQ and compression plugins and start using them on everything, making everything nice and loud (it’s a lot like discovering filters in Photoshop; suddenly, everything looks better with a drop shadow.). And then one day you go back and listen to your earlier recordings — and they sound better than your new stuff! Wha?
The hottest, loudest CD I own, without a doubt, is King X’s Dogman while the quietest one is probably Damien Rice’s 0.
Previously: Ubiquity