General audio discussion

Level 42-The pier interviews

Hi people.

I had an interesting email from BBC director Damon Thomas, regarding my Level 42 restoration mastering. I have no idea how he stumbled upon my site, but he was very encouraging about my efforts. On the strength of that, I set about working on some more. To eventually get the whole gig done (one day).

Anyway, it transpires that he directed a series of interviews with the band in the late 90’s. I did some digging on Youtube and found them.

So…for anyone who’s interested, here is that series.

As usual, thanks for stopping by, and please keep doing so.

Tone

Part1

Part2

Part3

RIP….the music industry

Hi people. Welcome to another random read from yours truly.

This week, it looks like we will see the introduction of the ‘3 strikes and you’re out!’ law, brought upon us by our ever loving government. To give us something else to concern ourselves with, and forget the disgusting handling of our once great nation, and the demise of it’s society.

So why do I think the music business is on it’s way out?. Why do you think the new laws about file sharing are being put in place???. I’ll tell you….

The music industry (including top artists/producers/studios/cd manufacturers etc) are losing so much ground, that apart from areas like the extremely powerful Nashville/country scene etc, it’s barely staying afloat. File sharing has had a major part in this downturn, but it’s not the only thing to blame. I think one of the things at the centre of it is quite exciting!. What is it??!!

It’s more like ‘who’ is it. Back in the day, you had your band. You worked hard and got noticed, then some fat cat put you in a studio (that was way too expensive for you to hire), recorded you, made you sound as good as possible. Then marketed and sold your music, and put a small percentage of the profits into the bands hands. Everybody happy .

Over the last so many years, the digital era has drastically changed the way the artist now looks at things. The fact is, most of them don’t even want to be ‘discovered’ by the fat cats. Because all he will do, is take their music, make it sound nothing like the artist intended, and probably not going to be stuffing lots of nice crisp bank notes into their pocket at the end.

I for one am over the moon about the way things are going, and it’s certainly not because there is a ton of online mastering work to be had….people are struggling financially.

Here’s an example of what is rapidly becoming ‘the norm’ for many artists.

Artist/band writes songs/music. They either record it themselves, or at some friends house. They may then have it mixed by someone slightly more competent , or do it themselves. They might then send it over the internet to an online mastering engineer. So now, that artist is in possession of, lets say, a half decent recording of some pretty great work.
Now, until recent years, this is where that ‘album’ or whatever would have stopped dead. Maybe sold at gigs etc. No longer the case!. We’re seeing more and more netlabels/independent record labels pushing out the material for these artists, for a small percentage etc, and with some of the new ‘Bandcamp’ style sites they can even do it themselves.

This isn’t based on my fantastic imagination by the way. I get to see and hear this first hand, through some of my customers. For whom I’m prepared to invest slightly more time than is financially sensible .

The bottom line is this….that artist has created and marketed the product ‘they’ wanted. Not some plastic imitation put together by some producer wannabe, just to get the most sales out of the product. And let’s remember…..that golden egg laying goose (the music industry) no longer exists. So it’s not like they’ve been short changed.

Well…to wrap this up. I for one am glad the plastic sounding music industry is on it’s last legs. Maybe now, some of the potentially great artists will have a chance to air their work ‘as intended’. Rather than send it through the commercial mangle just to grab the pennies they get thrown by mr fat cat.

If you’re one of the artists I’m speaking of….good luck!. Just remember….you make your own market now!!

Tone

World class!

Usual mid week beer and tunes here. Listening to Ben Folds Live album, for the chillout part of the night.

Give this track a listen, “Jane”, Great song, fantastic player and  really nice sound job. In fact, the sound on this solo performance had to be top class for it to work on cd.

Solo piano…..One of the few times  LF  multiband compression gets a green light .

It’s one of those crappy mp3 things. So Don’t over analyse it

Cheers for stopping by people

Tone

Mastering….is it just another in and out tray??

Hi guys

If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed my mini breakdown on friday night . I thought i had better give some kind of explanation. So here goes….

I was checking my new followers, and came across some kind of audio based referal service. So i clicked on the “mastering” heading (well i’m going to aren’t i ). In there, i see so called mastering services hawking their wares for £25 a track. Now we all know this goes on, and normally i couldn’t care less, but on this occasion it got to me. It was maybe down to the fact i had just handed over PS010 to public spaces, which i have been working on for a few weeks between jobs. Let me explain…I come from a rock based background…guitars bass and drums(vocals optional :p), so the public spaces compilation was quite a different deal for me. However…when i handed that over, a small part of me went with it.

I’ve said before in my blogs etc, mastering is the very first thing in my life, that i have wanted badly enough to actually keep going at, and anyone reading who has fought through the same thing knows how damn hard it can be. So many facets, so many tools… so many setbacks!. I certainly never thought about getting rich out of it, i invested 2 years of my life and all the money i had left into trying to make it happen.

So….with my fury at reading about cheap “mastering” , i tweeted

“people are mastering for £25 per track. i cant force myself to knock “shit” out that fast. so what am i gonna learn to do next “…..

It may have a smiley face on it, but dont be fooled, for some  reason, the bottom had just fallen out of my sad little world!!. Then, a follower  who i dont think i’ve ever spoken with before replied with “45 minutes a song is too fast? That’s a pretty good living, no? There’s always investment banking…“  . i have no idea if the guy was serious, but either way, it was a wake up call to me, that as with every other god forsaken business on the earth… there are too many people doing the wrong job! .

I then went on to tweet something along the lines of…”i’ve wasted my time learning this stuff”, to which all my twitter mates started asking what was wrong and trying to boost me back up etc, and thanks guys!!, the net may have many bad sides to it, but through it, i’ve met many like minded intelligent people. I could only dream of finding such friends in the cold reality of the semi caveman society we now live in.

So…back to the point. Is it just another job?. I know I haven’t  been doing it long compared to some, but long enough that its no longer a glorified hobby. My approach is still the same….it gets my very best, and sometimes, even when the material isn’t my usual listening style etc, i get a feel for it, get inside it, to be able to make that material all I possibly can.Trust me when i say, theres always something i’m not happy with in a finish, something i couldn’t quite fix…or some trade off in sound somewhere. I actually blame myself for not being able to fix mix mistakes!

All i want, is to replace someone that doesn’t deserve that seat, in front of the great monitors etc. I’m actually worried about what i will go onto, if i cant manage to make this work. Watching a comedy panel show the other night, someone made a comment about the moon landing astronauts, how everything after that must seem very pale/average.

After 25 years of doing complete passionless rubbish, just to put bread on the table for another day of monotony, and also discovering that i’m only about 76pence in the pound,  i’ve had a small taste of that moon landing. There wont be any going back, one way or another.

Thanks for reading my sad little heart felt rant. I thought i’d better explain

Tone

My take on loudness…….and other stuff

Hi all

A very popular subject right now. i’ll try to put my own points to the already OLD debate.

what is it?,how does it happen?,whats wrong with it?

well…we cant go above 0db on a cd, it just distorts over that, so the way we make thing seem louder is by cheating with some audio tools. mainly compressors and limiters. this has  been the case for quite some years, and it used to work. but some things have happened…..its being abused….and some of the people doing it arent very good at it!!.

i think part of the reason loudness became an issue, was when tape was pushed out of the scene. we used to have the multitrack machine, plus the mix down to tape. thats a lot of saturation along the way. it certainly didnt create recordings at -8db rms , but helped to keep everything audible throughout a song. digital offers none of that.

Tech stuff

“i always normalize my audio to 0 db, why isnt it as loud as commercial stuff?”

this will make some of you smile, but the fact is, plenty of people dont know. the 0db is a peak level, which we cant exceed. to make the track louder, we need to keep the peak level as high and as constant as possible. This is measured in RMS…. root mean square(yeh, that dont mean much).

why are we hearing so much about it now?

over squashed material has pretty much been kept quiet (sorry, no pun intended)until some huge blunders brought it to everyones attention recently. the metallica “death magnetic” fiasco (brought to my attention and many others via fellow Mastering Engineer  ian shepherd) never should have happened. if nobody heard that level of sonic destruction before it hit cd, then a few people are in the wrong job, and i’m gonna do just fine in the audio game . after all…we’re not talking about someone mixing death magnetic in an acoustically untreated room in front of some reasonably priced monitors. That cockup took a lot of money to make!!

which brings me to my next item…..producers

i’m gonna get this out the way fast….the music game is all about money, so their job is to shape the audio material into something that will sell. the major percentage of listeners cant even hear the difference between poor mp3 or cd quality these days anyhow. as long as its cheap or preferably free….they dont care. so…thats that then??…..NO!! .

the word “producer” seems to have many meanings today. some bloke raps over an old popular record….he’s a producer?. another says “lets put a triangle in there” ,he’s a producer?. another says “lets squash that some more”, he’s a producer? . there doesnt seem to be any real definition for the word anymore. For the record, a Producer to me, is Bob Rock, Gary Katz,Michael Brauer, a new fav.. Mutt Lange(Nickelbacks “Dark Horse” is an awesome rock album), and of course Trevor Horn.  there are loads more greats of course, but this is my memorable hit list.

one of my all time favourites, Donald Fagens 1982  “The Nightfly” is a highly lamented album, well produced by Gary Katz. this album will be in many audio geeks collections

side note its slightly light around 80-120 hz ish, but the sub detail is so good that you hardly notice.

But then check his 1993 “Kamakiriad”. this was produced by Walter Becker, the superb writer and guitarist from steely dan. this album, although containing some good tunes, is full of mistakes. its harsh in the mid/upper mids, the low end is thin, and the mastering engineer clipped a freq 50hz ish which makes it a bit buzzy. there is even distortion in a few sections (not sure what stage this happened at though). i know every album cant sound exactly the same, but changing production on this was a mistake….sorry walter

i dont think anyone should have the final say on the sound of an album unless they have THE BEST HEARING.

Examples

HOW LOUD BEN!!!

squashed amy

Metallica's "enter sandman" More realistic dynamics

The examples above show amy winehouse and ben folds both averaging -9dbrms and peaking at -5. enter sandman averaged -15 and peaked at -9. it could push slightly harder, but this is not a “quiet” track by any means.

one artist i must applaud, is Ben Folds. His album “way to normal” was mixed by a guy i consider the best mix engineer in the world….Michael Brauer. it should have been an instant ear pleaser. however…i can only presume it was fold’s producer Dennis Herring, who said “louder”, and managed to create an album i didnt even hear all the way through. it was that bad, that the album i had been waiting for got binned !!. i recently asked Brauer if he had anything to do with the crushing (already knowing his style too well to think he did), to which he replied  he was” a bit pissed off with the mastered job, but the Mastering Engineer was under instructions”. Ben listened to what his fans said, and went back and remixed/mastered it. so i bought it again.

this will make me sound very fickle, but although its a great album, both in writing and sound, it doesnt have what his early albums had. “but tone…you love sound, and the early material wasnt as well recorded”…..very true! , however, if you get the chance, give his self titled album a listen. there is just so much atmosphere in those songs, that i can quite easily forget the recording quality and disappear into the very room they were playing in….and thats a true recording to me.

The Eagles “Long road out of eden” . a long awaited album. although not being over loud, the sound of this album was sterile. new valves needed in some of the outboard possibly.

so yeh…i’m slightly off topic, but am i? . loudness is just one of the issues currently being missed in the quality control department of the audio world. but why? . is it because most of the target audience have tinny little pc speakers. or the fact most of them will convert down to 128kbps mp3 and think its fine. is it because budgets are being cut, and job turnaround has to be quicker?.whatever it is, i dont like it.

Summing up

a song has an optimum level, push it further, and you just hear its crap….LOUD!!

its going to take some bold moves from major artists to start to fix this problem. but somehow people need reminding how fantastic a well produced cd sounds.

Not the best structured read, just the way my brain seems to spew information. but Thanks for reading

Tone