So I have been hooked on recordings produced by T Bone Burnett, and I always am struck by the sort of “tone” they have and how things like drums and guitars always have a depth to them that I find lacking in most modern recordings… I was listening to a CD put out by a rather well known major label and even mixed and mastered by some big name guys who’s names are well known in the industry and it was amazing how bad they sounded… To clarify I suppose I must say that my biggest beef with the sound was more to do with the space that was around each instrument… Or the LACK of it! See whenever I play with a band that had drums… The sound of the drums sort of excited the room and made some sort of ambiance from the air pressure that was being moved by the attack, guitars have a natural push to them as the speakers compress the air around the amp itself, while the sound of the room is filled with the sound of each of these sources there is sort of an effect created by this music that if you are all in tune and playing your best sounds rather pleasing to the listener.
Cymbals in modern music also seem to have a brittle sound to them these days that doesn’t suit my ears either… I suppose in a perfect world we would all still be recording in well treated rooms that sounded great, and we would still be rolling tape into a well tuned 2 inch machine… The reality is that as gear has gotten easier to come by; so the lowest common denominator of sound quality has also been lowered to meet the less than stellar sound of the newfound common gear… Now I am not an elitist by ANY means and in fact if you were to look into the studio here on the home front many would laugh at the collection of lower end mics and freeware or else donationware plugins. Tape is not cheap and hard drive space is getting more and more easy to come by so I don’t see digital audio going away anytime soon, and for just the financial reasons alone… However my hope is that someday the sound quality of digital audio (or the lack of it) will one day be tamed to be as pleasing to the ear as tape was in the the 60′s. Of course vinyl and casSet are almost a lost cause as a medium for playback but there is NOTHING stopping the industry from demanding better sounding playback systems in the digital age… The decrease in sound quality will not stop at iPods and and computer speakers but also in the gear used by our radio stations as well.
But my point here with this post is more to do with the fact that so many recordings are now being made with the latest cheaply assembled USB output device from the big box store down the street and while great gear will not always warrant great sound…. A great song recorded on good gear can still be a better listening experience for the end user. On the other side of that we have groups recording on state of the art gear without the skill backing the music itself, let alone the talent in the control room making all the sonic magic.
The following will be a list of my three biggest complaints with the modern recordings I am hearing around the industry these days.
1: Harsh and hyped highs with very rough sounding attack in the upper frequency range, making it hard to listen to music on either headphones and or car stereo systems….
2: Huge production of multi track audio with sounds stacked on top of sounds… I understand wanting a fuller sound, trust me I really do, and The Beatles did some amazing layering with their albums, but really… All those synth pads and distorted guitars on top of distorted bass, on top of the in your face drums… All this backing what I consider the most important part of a song: The vocal… I don’t even know if I wanna get into talking about auto tuned vocals compressed to death and then thrown through a wide range of EQ and delay and reverb and other botched attempts to make the vocal sound “cool”
What ever happened to great lyrics sung by a singer who had decent phrasing and pitch that actually made the song memorable?
3: LOUD LOUD LOUD LOUD LOUD final mixes! See I think that with the amount of electronics we have today we really don’t need to make mixes as loud as we did back in the day because power amps speakers are much more efficient than they were back in yesteryear… Still we are making recordings as loud as we possibly can in hopes that someone will listen. Frankly my thoughts have always been that when the recording comes on and it’s loud from the start I am going to turn it “down” but if it is clean and interesting sound I might just crank it up so I can listen to it! The loudness war for loudest recordings has taken the biggest toll on what it means to have a great recording, when you have to sacrifice sonic clarity in order to be more “in your face” then you need to question what you are really wanting to achieve with your music in the first place.
If the recording “sounds good” then it will get cranked, and possibly louder than the recording that sounds lousy and is hard to listen to at full volume.
I have to say I have not always tracked songs all that well, and my own musical short comings have had their toll on the final performance of the song… Yet every time I push that red button in the studio I try just a little bit harder to create something better than the last take.
