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July 4, 2007
“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.
Agreed on all counts.
Damien Rice’s “O” is a great example of that: it shows what you can do with increased dynamic range. If you give the music room to breathe, then you’re also giving it room to bash in your skull when the time’s right (see the second half of “I Remember”).
I find it interesting that you mention this. As I was telling you in person, my impression was quite the contrary, push the envelope to the edge right before it clips. Yeah, kinda like the picture above. Yet, my production is different than yours, obviously.
Still, I guess the only reason I push the envelope is because I always get irritated to listen to other podcasts that are recorded so soft I can’t understand them. I figure for talk it may be fine to push the envelope to the edge. Then again, if I am playing a song of yours that is recorded soft, I’ll push the envelope for you on my mixer.
However, as I think about it more, could it be that what you are referring to is no so much that everything is recorded loud? Rather, that there are no dynamics? If everything is recorded at the same level, then it won’t matter if it’s loud or soft. It won’t sound good as good. And yes, with discovering new effects processors, especially like a compressor, it could ruin the feeling for the recorded music. You won’t get the valley’s and the peak’s in the music.
Well, I could go on and on, so I’ll stop. After all, this should only be a comment on your blog, not a blog entry itself.
Hey Justo, it probably makes sense for you to get a hot signal for podcasting since it’s mostly voice, and voice is usually the most dynamic when it comes to loud/soft volumes. I usually compress the heck out of my vocal tracks when I mix.
I do use some multiband compression on the final mix to make parts “pop” but I try to use it sparingly.
An engineer/mastering buddy told me that there’s no reason to have your max peaks any higher than -3db when doing the final mix, pre-mastering.
[...] and “sweetening” the tracks with light compression and EQ stuff. He didn’t slam the volumes through the roof either, which was great since I didn’t even mention [...]