The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Anyone seen this video on how loud mixes are ruining music?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

Now I feel vindicated when people say my mixes are too soft. I meant to do it that way, see? In your face. Anyway, I never realized there were so many useful things on Youtube. There were a lot of related movies on mixing and the like. I'm going to check it out after I mow the lawn and the termite man comes.

And my response: Fuck soft 80s production bullshit. Long live distortion.

Project-D wrote:Anyone seen this video on how loud mixes are ruining music?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

Now I feel vindicated when people say my mixes are too soft. I meant to do it that way, see? In your face. Anyway, I never realized there were so many useful things on Youtube. There were a lot of related movies on mixing and the like. I'm going to check it out after I mow the lawn and the termite man comes.

I'm so confused... I have a John Mayer CD where almost every track has an ridiculously loud snare hit as the first sound. It is so load compared to the rest of the song that it makes me flinch. I figured it was intentional, and some sort of trick to force the mastering engineer to not overcompress.

but this youtube dude suggests that modern rock mastering engineers give no shits for the relative level of the snare to the other stuff. (It's hard to believe they would bury the snare hits in pop rock)

So is John Mayer just an ahole with a loud shocking noise at the top of his songs - or - has he managaged to avoid the loudness wars??????

Well, I've been toiling with this issue a lot of late. I like my production to have dynamics, so I will only maximize my volume dynamically and not let the loudest hits peak. In other words, everything in the mix increases equally. But every time I enter a fight, my songs were so quiet compared to the rest and it was bugging me. So on the last two songs I tried a new technique I thought of. I still maximize the total volume, but I push the peaks. To make up for it, I've been making my drums sharper and louder in the mix down. It's still not as loud as some of the others, but it is up there and the dynamics seem to be pretty nice.

Ken, whom I respect greatly for his studio engineering advice, once told me not to give up dynamics in production for the sake of volume. Let the individual listener decide what volume to listen to your song. So that has stuck in my head, but I'm pushing the limits to see what I can come up with.
I will say, my last couple mixes sounded pretty good on most systems, but I noticed that in my daily driver system which is a stock but a decent system, it peaks the system at a medium volume, so back to the drawing board for me. I need to work on that issue some more.

Billy's Little Trip wrote: Ken, whom I respect greatly for his studio engineering advice, once told me not to give up dynamics in production for the sake of volume. Let the individual listener decide what volume to listen to your song. So that has stuck in my head, but I'm pushing the limits to see what I can come up with.
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I've compared a lot of my mixes with commercial mp3s and find that some of them are a little quieter. Then I have mixes (non-commercial) from songs that I've downloaded that have me rushing to turn down the volume. I think some mixes are trying to wring every bit of volume they can from the track at the expense of dynamics, but I think it's one of those "where will it end?" type of things. Here's an analagous situation: orchestras have been tuning slightly sharper than A=440 to give themselves more "brilliance", turns out though, that some opera pieces that go to the extremes of the vocalists range, are getting too high. (Mozarts "Queen of the Night" aria from Magic Flute being one). Digital cameras (consumer level) will produce pictures that are oversaturated so that the color is more "vivid" and "lifelike". I'm not saying louder is bad, it's just one-upsmanship can get out of hand.

WeaselSlayer wrote: Fuck soft 80s production bullshit. .

That is very cool

I haven't watched the video yet, and I will because the modern rock production trends are really starting to chaffe me, or perhaps the opposite for that matter and thats whats chaffeing me. If you know what I mean.

I have noticed the snare hits these days are getting softer and softer...less frequency range on that particular instrument AS WELL AS the high bite taken out of distorted guitars and then ADDED BACK making it easier and softer to mix. Its haveing a very watered down effect to my ears. Too much subtle reverb...if thats even possible... if you get what my ears have been hearing. All this in the name of louder mixes.

Evenenessance, Linkin Park, Eve 6... etc... watered down guitars with no grit, bite, edge.. just pretty chorused and reverbed ... just watered down.

I think if you listen to anything Steve Albini's ever touched, you'll hear why recording techniques and mixing are lightyears beyond what they used to be. It's loud as hell and it's crystal clear. That stuff about "we have a volume knob, WE should control the volume" is dealing with a whole other thing all together. What if you had to adjust your volume for every different album you wanted to listen to? Or song even? It's just a lame argument for something that really isn't even a problem.

"Loudness" and "dynamic range" are completely different.

The 'loudness' referred to here is the over-compressed, minimal dynamic range mixing that tends to dominate the popular market right now. Most commercial records today are staying between -1db and -.3db, some even higher. Nashville is particularly obsessed with this right now.

This doesn't mean that your 'quiet' mix never reaches -.3db or above, it just means that the average level of your mix is lower. There are still some producers putting out high-range tracks, like Arif Mardin (Norah Jones, Queen, Willie Nelson) and John Alagia (Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer).

High dynamic range mixing is starting to be seen in the same light as recording to tape. "Oh, they're going for the vintage thing."

Part of the problem lies with the way the media is delivered to the listener. Most radio and TV stations compress and limit the hell out of these tracks (with pop and hiphop stations further bumping lows and highs), so a track with high dynamic range would end up sounding weird (you can hear this particularly well when poorly produced commercials air). A highly-compressed mix will come through these radio limiters relatively unscathed.

Hearing the same track on the radio and then on cd can be a surprising exercise.

I forgot what my point was. I just got off a plane. Leave me alone.

I really don't enjoy the super "loud" mixes with little to no dynamic range. On the other hand, as stated, it sucks when your song seems "too quiet" compared to the others in the fight. So I try to find a compromise between dynamic range and average loudness, leaning more one way or the other depending on the song (leaning towards loudness for rock/metal, dynamic range for folk/acoustic, for example).

It would be great if we could have a little oasis here in SongFight! land, free from ear punishing mixes with no dynamic range but some people want their stuff to sound "professional" and sadly that's the common "professional" approach...

I could write about this topic for days. But I don't have days, so I'll keep it short. Some thoughts about perceived volume and dynamic range:

The listener controls the volume. This is the iPod generation. People don't put the needle to the record, turn on the high-fi and sit back like the Memorex guy any more. Instead, their finger is always inches from the volume button. I suspect this goes double for the SF crowd, because of the great disparity in volume between entries (I personally use ReplayGain to lossless-ly normalize the volumes when I listen to a fight, so that after the BeWells song ends I don't get earfucked by a spiteful Josh Woodward when Big Mountain Fudge Cake comes on). The point is, no matter how loud you make a mix, the end user is just going to set the volume how they want to hear it. So, as Bob Katz says, "Do you want to make a song that people will want to turn up, or one that people will want to turn down?"

For the most part songs don't need to be compressed to be "radio ready" (assuming we're talking about big-boy radio, as opposed to internet radio or college radio or local radio, etc etc). FM Rock radio uses low-threashold multiband compressors to maximize signal strength and homogenize all the songs. Which is why, when I turn on the radio, Bohemian Rhapsody has the same dynamic range and tone as American Idiot. I'm sure TV stations do something similar.

That video in the first link explains it best, but excessive limiting really really does suck all the "ROCK!" out of rock. I love the Queens of The Stone Age, but I dare you to listen to their new album all the way through. Sure, it's one of the loudest albums I've ever heard, so kudos to that, but the drums have no oomph at all, and once you turn the album down to a reasonable listening volume the songs sound small and mushy.

I would even go so far as to say that dynamic range reduction tends to make a song seem quieter. Some of the songs that I think of as being really loud (Song 2 by Blur, lots of stuff off the first Rage Against The Machine album, plenty of [earlier] System of a Down songs) really have a modest average RMS. The reason they seem so loud is because of their wild dynamics, not in spite of them.

More later.

Interesting Puce.
The thing that hit home the most:

turn the album down to a reasonable listening volume the songs sound small and mushy

This bothers me. I was hoping it was just my ears after listening to my song loud. If my songs sound like shit at low levels, (referring to the production) I have to rethink my process.

I think the mixing tip I've heard most often is to mix with the volume at an almost inaudible level. It helps to make sure the important stuff isn't overwhelmed by the inconsequentials.

After that is listen to the mix at a normal level, but from out in the hallway (or whatever's outside your mixing room). The sounds have a chance to mingle a bit before they hit your ears, again showing if some things are getting too much emphasis.

If you want to hear over-compression, listen to Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers - or anything mastered by Vlado Meller (Stadium Arcadium - RHCP; De-loused in the Comatorium - The Mars Volta; even Milestones - Miles Davis (the loudest jazz album I have ever heard, ugh).

I think over-compression has a bigger effect on music sales than many would think. Over-compression causes fatigue in your ears making it almost unbearable to listen to a whole album all the way through. People are not going to want to buy something that doesn't make them feel good. They may not consciously sense the 'loudness' but they will feel the impact, although it may be subconscious.

Music today sounds good only in cars and as background music.

It's always the right volume, right?!

bean... wrote:If you want to hear over-compression, listen to De-loused in the Comatorium

Nah. De-loused is a staggeringly loud album, but it also has a great dynamic range; certainly better than 90% of rock albums being released these days. It sounds to me like the apparent volume has been achieved by boosting the mids way up until they're physically painful to listen to (that's probably Omar's doing), then applying clipping. Check out This Apparatus Has Been Unearthed, or the kick drum on Take The Veil Cerpin Taxt: constant clipping.

But yeah, most Meller (or, Meller / Rick Rubin) albums are pretty damn alarming.

Puce wrote:

bean... wrote:If you want to hear over-compression, listen to De-loused in the Comatorium

Nah. De-loused is a staggeringly loud album, but it also has a great dynamic range; certainly better than 90% of rock albums being released these days. It sounds to me like the apparent volume has been achieved by boosting the mids way up until they're physically painful to listen to (that's probably Omar's doing), then applying clipping. Check out This Apparatus Has Been Unearthed, or the kick drum on Take The Veil Cerpin Taxt: constant clipping.

But yeah, most Meller (or, Meller / Rick Rubin) albums are pretty damn alarming.

Dude, just listen to Inertiatic E.S.P.!

It's BREATHING! Could you just imagine the FORCE of each snare hit without it being squashed to shit?! The snare at times just sounds empty and broken. But yeah, those high mids (2-10k) are...OUCH! at points. The guitars almost sound goofy they are so hyped.

The dynamic range is due to the playing and arrangement - all due to Jon Theodore (IMHO).

If that album was just (unbrickwall limited) drum tracks I would probably dig it more than I do of the actual version - not to say that I don't dig it already...