Topic: Lazy songwriting techniques

[Goldentony]

Yeah, there was 4 of them originally. The two left are Homer Flynn & Hardy Fox. Homer is still the singer/Skull/N Senada which I think was always suspected but more or less confirmed when a photo of him turned up a few years ago, and then a guy who looked a lot like him started doing Youtube videos in an old man mask with a suspiciously familiar voice. The other two in the Cryptics were Jay Clem & John Kennedy. I always heard they left after The Mole Show tour turned into a farce, but everywhere says they split in '82, and the tour didn't get underway til late 82/early 83, but it's around then.

There's a pretty good video on their early days up here -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vonj9nVu4XE

[Morrison Lard]

Metal bands, whether tuning to E / D / C / whatever,
going from the lowest open to an octave of that and pissing about with a twiddly hammer-on, and calling it a riff. Shame.

[olliebean]

On the face of it it seems sensible to me. iTunes doesn't mess with the level within a track. It just tries to match up the levels of the mid range between tracks so that playlists have a consistent presence. This is a particularly good idea for headphone users who are worried about blasting their eardrums, I reckon.

Yeah, it would be, only my iPod touch adjusts the volume not before it starts playing a track, but a fraction of a second into it. So with Sound Check turned on, a very quiet song followed by a very loud song results in an ear-splitting fraction of a second of deafening sound when the loud song starts before Sound Check kicks in. I don't know whether all iPods do this, or it's just an iOS thing. Bloody stupid software design, anyway.

[Sam]

I don't like it when a song starts, and then later on finishes.

I hate it when the guitarist uses any of the middle strings.

I find perfect fourths extremely lazy.

I don't like any songs with 'the' in the title, or the letters B through K.

The biggest cliche is music from the western or northern hemispheres.

Anyone called Bob, or a name, shouldn't be allowed to make music.

The only sound I can tolerate is an alto flute being played on a Tuesday by a low ranking administrative clerk, and even then, only if she's allergic to pollen.

[Petey Pate]

It didn't ruin the original CD release though, did it?  The original still exists.  I have it.  I don't hate the remasters as much as most do, though.

The original CD release of Money was coupled with Lumpy Gravy and was remixed with new bass and drums tracks (played by Arthur Barrow and Chad Wackerman).  It was mostly hated by fans and so subsequent CDs used the original vinyl master, which didn't happen with Cruising with Ruben and the Jets.  Here's a guide to the differences between the remixed version and the original release.

http://lukpac.org/~handmade/patio/vinylvscds/money.html#minifaq

http://lukpac.org/~handmade/patio/misc/why.html

[thecuriousorange]

I don't want to hear any more songs about people who want to "make it", whatever that means.

Like Livin' on a Prayer. Or Buck Rogers by Feeder.

[McFlymo]

The loudness war is all well and good, but don't forget the creative use of limiting and compression: squashing the dynamic range isn't all bad.

Radio stations have had strict limiters in place on the end of their audio chains for technical broadcast reasons[1] for years. So it's fair to say many who have been big fans of discovering music via the radio will barely notice the extreme mastering effects.

But yes, for overall mastering: Squash less, let people turn it up more.

1.	something about the limited band of frequencies that analogue stations are allowed to be contained in. Higher levels could push the radio signal into other frequency bands, effectively stepping on the toes of other radio broadcasts, whether they are other radio stations or airports etc.

[NoSleep]

Nah... the limiters they used to use on radio are nothing like the brickwall limiting used in mastering today; it was much nicer.

[McFlymo]

uh... Yea it is.

In fact it's arguably more aggressive for legal reasons:
http://www.orban.com/support/orban/techtopics/Appdx_Radio_Ready_The_Truth_1.3.pdf

[Johnny Yesno]

I guess there must be a difference in how hard the limiters are driven, though. I've never noticed radio limiting introduce the kind of artifacts that people complain about with loudness wars limiting. That's not to say that classical music fans have never complained about a lack of dynamics on radio stations that choose to compress/limit aggressively.

[NoSleep]

Even those sound files in the pdf show it isn't as aggressive as what mastering engineers are doing to recordings for release nowadays. Sure... in 2001 (the date of publication) radio stations were using digital brickwall limiters, but I thought we were also talking from before then, when many more people listened to the radio. I remember (and have recordings of) the compression/limiting on radio in the 80's & 90's was much more pleasant than what you will hear on actual releases today.

Whatever the legal reasons (which, I assume, predate digital limiters) are for using limiters, the old pre-digital ones sounded better on the radio.

[McFlymo]

I guess I can't argue about what people perceive personally between radio limiting and commercial mastering techniques these days, but the thrust of my jibb is that I find there's an air of Audio-Snobbery involved in this 'Loudness Wars' debate.

Like:
Snob: "My ears were literally worn out and climbing off the side of my head and asking me to put them to bed, the dynamic range was so unbearably low!"

Other person: "Oh yes, what were you listening to?"

Snob: "Oh a spot of Napalm Death. Ahmmm, nyyessss. What? What?"

Too wide a dynamic range is dangerous for your hearing when the jump between low and loud is extreme also.

[Johnny Yesno]

I guess I can't argue about what people perceive personally between radio limiting and commercial mastering techniques these days, but the thrust of my jibb is that I find there's an air of Audio-Snobbery involved in this 'Loudness Wars' debate.

Like:
Snob: "My ears were literally worn out and climbing off the side of my head and asking me to put them to bed, the dynamic range was so unbearably low!"

Other person: "Oh yes, what were you listening to?"

Snob: "Oh a spot of Napalm Death. Ahmmm, nyyessss. What? What?"

Too wide a dynamic range is dangerous for your hearing when the jump between low and loud is extreme also.

I think it's more a 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' problem rather than snobbery. There do appear to be some terrible examples of mastering around these days caused by overzealousness with limiters. However, there also seem to be some damn fine loud recordings created, at least in part, by people who are wizards with compressors and limiters.

[NoSleep]

I guess I can't argue about what people perceive personally between radio limiting and commercial mastering techniques these days, but the thrust of my jibb is that I find there's an air of Audio-Snobbery involved in this 'Loudness Wars' debate.

It isn't a personal perception.

The example you gave (from that pdf) of radio compression:



Doesn't compare to the crushination on many masters today, or even this one from 1997 presented earlier in the thread:

This has got to be the worst ever remastering job - Iggy Pop 'Raw power' :

Stooges—Search and Destroy (Raw Power, Columbia Records, 1990 CD release)


Stooges—Search and Destroy (Raw Power, Sony Records, 1997 remastered CD release)

I only have to look at the waveforms from the Orban to see it's a lot more musical with even a little room for dynamics; more of a compressor than a limiter, really. Not ideal but certainly not a brickwall.