my odd perspective on modern mastering

[djslayerissick]

i apologize in advance:

its the oddest thing - i've come to enjoy the stylistic sound of digitally "over-mastering" my music. that added distortion that everyone complains about - for my stuff, i actually like it. to me, it has become the equivalent of the much vilified "warm" adjective. its just adds so much aggression - and i dont mean just "loudness" - i mean the actual distortion that occurs from chopping off transients, normalizing, EQ'ing, then chopping off some more transients (or whats left of them), and repeating the process several times.

on someone else's music, probably not - almost definitely not, unless they wanted that sound for their style like i'm going for. but it just sounds right for my music.

maybe its b/c i've grown up listening to music squashed to death. or maybe i'm just wierd.

[Lostboy]

you mean so it sounds like the new zwan album? or maybe acid mother's temple's "electric heavyland" (or is that analog distortion?). give us an example.

i remember billy corgan saying (about his new album) "yeah, we wanted this to sound loud at ANY volume." i thought that was funny, because i imagined all these little kids buying the album and having to play it soft so their parents wouldn't yell at them, and going "this album is LOUD man!"

[soundguy]

I hear people say this all the time, every time I hear it I always question wether the person really has any clue as to what is really happening to the music.

DJ, have you actually had one of your records professionally mastered by one of the new school guys?

Compression is a great thing, if anything, I totally overuse it. But it has a place. By any estimation I can muster, the only point of the current trend is to have the CD be the loudest one in the player. Period. If you want your record to sound loud, there is thing called the volume knob, when you turn it clockwise, the record gets louder. Its a pretty simple concept.

The way records were mastered 10 years ago, they were mastered so they could be played LOUD. The way records are mastered today, they are mastered so that at the lowest volume, they have the same density that the 10 year old record did when it was played loud. Unfortunately, these new records positively can not be played at a high volume. As you make the thing louder, it doesnt get louder, it doesnt feel bigger, it doesnt get more powerful, the only thing that really happens is the distortion that resulted from all the clipping becomes more apparent. Where the old record, when you crank it, gets nice a big, the drums get louder, all the small dynamics start to peek through, on the the new record, there are no longer any small dynamics and what you are left with is distortion. Would you rather be amplifying the dynamics that YOU put in the mix, or would you rather be amplifying the distortion that the mastering engineer left behind when he compressed all the dynamics up to the same level as the kick drum? Really, in a very simple form, this is the decision. If a low whisper is now as loud as your leading kick, what happened to all the energy in the kick that was 15dB louder than the low whisper in your mix. It went SOMEWHERE, or really, when it disappeared, it left behind a ton of distortion everytime it passed the threshold on its journey 15dB down into a limiter. This is something that you are gonna pay someone thousands to do to your mix? In my world, this is something that you pay someone thousands to make sure never happens to your mix...

there is positively an appropriate place for compression and limiting at mastering. This is certainly what the mastering process is all about. Its the total disregard for the sound of the thing for sake of level on the CD which is really where the problem lies. and ultimately, there is only so much dynamic range that you have in the first place. Once you clip it, its gone. But, you have ME's that are not only clipping, but pushing it several dB's beyond that clip, so in reality, the record isnt getting any louder at all, it just gets more dense so at a low level it sounds loud. the louder it sounds low, the shittier it sounds loud. If you are in a rock band or a metal band especially, the question for the masses I have is why in the fuck is it more important for the record to sound loud when it is low, than it is for the record to sound loud when its loud?

We all like what we like for sure, and for the folks who really actually dig the sound of new CD's, my hat is off to you as Im jealous because there is a lot of cool new records that I would love to listen to but my tinnitus physically cant tolerate, and its a real drag for me. I think by and large, however, a good portion of people just havent thought about the process to really analyze what they are trading for what. A low level dense CD that will not support a high level playback is a decision that a marketing executive behind a desk makes, this is not something that musicians or recording engineers thought of.

If you want a loud record, record a loud record. MBV "Loveless" is a perfect example of a record that is loud because of brilliant engineering, not because of some mastering engineer. and you can crank that record and it doesnt hurt. Lessons can be learned from that example.

Density is critical to heavy music. when the glass overflows, however, you have a mess, not a party.

dave

[djslayerissick]

i've been wrestling with this for months now - reading all the various rants that are anti- modern mastering. i havent "wanted" too like it b/c so many engineers/recorders are against it. but i do.

i would argue that the music still has "dynamics" - but not necessarily in volume. the dynamics are coming from the sound/tone of things rather than the volume. the volume stays pretty much consistent, getting a little louder in the choruses, but the big difference (in this song, at least) comes from the whether the guitars are trippy or raging, vocals are ethereal or screaming, etc.

i realize most are just doing it to get "louder" on the cd cut, but thats not my biggest concern (altho, i will admit it doesnt hurt). i like the fact that it distorts the cymbals a little bit, and all the drums really. (havent you ever put some distortion on your drums - just a little bit? like running the bass drum through a Sansamp?) and it adds some hair to the loudest screams. the rhythm guitar gets some added bite that i can never seem to get by any other means. the lead guitar blends into the rhythm better instead of sounding like they arent even the same kind of instrument. btw, i dont like Zwan - just doesnt do anything for me. but i do like SP's Machina - the album where *everything* has distortion - guitars, bass, vox, drums

and ANOTHER THING:) personally, i dont crank the volume too loud, even on the heaviest, gut-churning metal bands - i would rather listen to at a relatively sane volume and still have the "feeling" of it being loud. i dont want to go deaf from listening to music, but i still want that feeling. your ear is still recieving the same volume in the peaks in both mixes, but one just has a higher average volume. technically, they are the same volume, but one doesnt *have* to be cranked to be loud. and like most people nowadays, i have a decent woofer that gets me the extra power from the kick that was "lost" in the mastering.

BUT - i'm still not ruling out the fact that i just may be naive on the whole subject - wouldnt be a first.

[thunderboy]

I dynamics. Why F up dynamic music with BAD MASTERING?

...and isn't the "Modern School" of mastering driven by the desire to have the loudest product on the radio - a goal that is impossible to achieve since everything transmitted over commercial radio is squeezed into a dynamic range of about 1dB? It's like turbo-charging a car whose cruise control is set to 55mph...or not...coming up short on metaphors for this one...

STOP THE MADNESS!

jt

[soundguy]

thats actually a pretty good analogy, turbo charging a car forever set at 55 mph.

I think people need to understand how this is actually ruining their records. Go turn up Led Zeppelin 4, then go turn up Californication. Please tell me you can hear a difference. Californication on one has the density that LZ4 has on 10, but of course, as you make californication louder, the drum kit doesnt open up, its in your face the whole time. Of course, by the time you get LZ4 on 10, john bonham is bacially in the room with you, which is probably the coolest effect ever, but somehow density on 1 became way more important than what the record sounds like at a good listening volume.

If you want distortion on your drums, put it there. If you want distortion on your vocals, put it there. You can have all the distortion you want on all the sources you want and still have some dynamics between your sources. Looking towards mastering as your provider of these effects, IMO, is really not understanding what mastering is for.

There used to be a time when you would hear a song on the radio, and it would sound compressed and terrible, but then you could kick back and throw on the LP and be all "aaaaaaahhh, thats better". There was actually a reason to buy the LP. If anyone rememered what happened to Soundgarden "Spoonman" when it was played on TV and Radio, some little acoustic guitar got sucked up louder than the vocal via the broadcast compression. If this record was mastered today, of course that would never happen because all the air would have been sucked out of the mixes during mastering.

I just threw on the audioslave record while I type this. Perhpas one of the most defined recordings I've heard in a long time and of course you cant listen to the thing, the vocal completely keys the compressor the whole time, but the drum kit is right behind it. Whats the point of stressing over a good mix if you are just going to compress it so much that all your relationships get fucked by a mastering engineer? This stuff is so compressed, it might as well be mixed in mono. I would imagine that in the studio, this shit probably had incredible depth, but listening to the CD, well, its about as 2D as music gets. Bore. Funny, this record found its way into the hands of some very qualified ME's who's work was rejected because it was not loud enough. "Im sorry, your work is too good, we were looking for you to make this sound like shit, we've hired someone else".

sad.

dave

dave

[markpar]

Great posts, Dave. I am in total agreement.

-mark

[heylow]

Dave....

Abso-freakin-lutely!

you want distortion on your drums, put it there. If you want distortion on your vocals, put it there. You can have all the distortion you want on all the sources you want and still have some dynamics between your sources. Looking towards mastering as your provider of these effects, IMO, is really not understanding what mastering is for.

Abso-FREAKIN-lutely!




heylow

[djslayerissick]

[quote]you want distortion on your drums, put it there. If you want distortion on your vocals, put it there. You can have all the distortion you want on all the sources you want and still have some dynamics between your sources. Looking towards mastering as your provider of these effects, IMO, is really not understanding what mastering is for.
[/quote]

i dont want the distortion on the tracks. i only want it at critical points where everything is overloading - like at the first parts when the chorus kicks in and at major changes in the riffs, not the whole song.

maybe i'm referring to just over-compressing the whole mix more than anything. using compression to create that extra hair on the loudest hits of the song. and making the tonally quiet sections as loud as the heaviest sections seem.

you're right - i am mis-using the mastering process. but i'm just not convinced that the traditional approach to mastering is better for the sound i'm looking for. but then again, i have not had it done "professionally" yet by someone who is really a master at mastering - obviously, i cant afford that yet

[tiger vomitt]

yo so what! so the dude likes how super crushed music sounds... he has a right to feel that way. i agree that in the right situation it is a very cool sound. not usually, but on the right songs, hell yeah.

[soundguy]

Im definitley not trying to tell someone what to think, that is for sure. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and there is no accounitng for taste.

I am a rabid fan of the super crushed sound. If you want your record to be super crushed, record it that way and MIX it that way, no problem. Taking your mixes to a ME with the intention of crushing it there, again, IMO, is really not understanding what the process is all about. Its about optimizing your mixes for the free world and putting together a package with continuity. If you are looking for distortion here or there or whatever, thats totally a mix decision.

DJ, if you dont want distortion on the whole song, just at critical points, how do intend to achieve this if you go to a mastering session and limit the shit out of the tracks? You are going to impart distortion on EVERYTHING, and its not selective distortion at all. Unless you are mixing your choruses 4 dB louder than the rest of the song so when you go to master, only the chorus hits the limiter that hard, you've really got to reevaluate your strategy there.

When you run your entire mix through heavy limiting, basically whats happening is every single sound, when you cross a point, becomes the same volume. that means that your vocal, finger noise on the strings, hi hats, everything, its all as loud as the kick drum. What musician would ever want that? I just think a lot of people have not thought about how records are being destroyed.

If you want a TON of compression on your record, it is very easy to do and you still can have depth to your recording. If you create a few stereo busses, send your drums to a stereo buss and compress them there, send your guitars to another, compress them there, vocals to another, compress them there, you 'll wind up with a very compressed record, however, everything will be allowed to sit in its own little space and do its thing. If you just want distortion on the drums for the beginning of the chorus only, send your compressed stereo drum buss out to a fuzz box or whatever and bring it back to the board on another two faders and just bring in those faders in parallel with the compressed drum submix when you need that little touch of distortion. If you mix this way, your drums will sit where you want them, the guitars can sit around them and the vocals can sit on top of everything. When you get to mastering, you can add more compression to your mix, but we are talking like 1 or 2 dB of compression to glue all your elements together a little better if the song isnt rocking like it should or if you didnt hit thee tape hard enough when you mixed. when you play it back, your tune will have depth and it will have power and as you make it louder, the space between your different busses will grow and the song will open up. Again, go crank "four Sticks" and then compare that with a new record at an equivalent volume. Very different thing is happening with the relationship between where the drums are, where the guitars are and where the vocals are.

If you elect to just do a mix however you do it, show up to mastering and tell the guy to limit everything 10dB, what you get is a mix that never ever opens up no matter how loud you make it, its completely 2 dimensional as every single source is in a constant battle to be the loudest thing that you hear. These records get unbelievably tiring to listen to, not so dissimilar form a classroom of third graders all yelling ME ME ME ME ME ME ME! at once trying to get the teachers attention. The distortion that you get as a result of this is the direct result of your waveforms being clipped as they dive into limiting and whatever gets clipped is going to get distorted. You dont really have selective control over where that distortion is going, and if you are REALLY limiting your mixes the way things have been going lately, it wouldnt matter if you had control over where it was going because its on EVERYTHING as the new records have every bit of that mix keying a limiter.

If someone came to me and said, I really love the sound of my mixes on the radio, then sure, new school mastering is for you. But to say I like the way music gets clipped in mastering, Im a fan of the new school is really a dangerously simple acceptance of a horrible practice. There are ways to achieve this in your mix and actually have your record sound good, without having to compromise all the air in your recording to get the sound you want.

If you like the clipping and artifacts you get from "overcompression" thats fine. I do too. so does Tchad Blake, and a long list of other engineers making incredible records. You are not alone. there is a huge huge huge difference however, between slamming a pair of submixes into a compressor during mixing and slamming your entire mix into a limiter in mastering. If you have a drum, guitar and vocal submix going to three different stereo compressors, even if they are all the same compressors, chances are you are going to have each box set differently to deal with what you are sending to it. Surely, your vocal submix is going to want a grossly different compression scheme than your drums, especially if you are recording metal where the drummer is playing lots of cymbals, really loud, all the time. If you slam and clip and artifact up your submixes, you get the SOUND that you want, but since you used three different boxes to do it, while your dynamic range is now very different, there is still a dynamic between the drum kit and the vocals. By mixing like this, you can wind up with a grossly compressed mix that has a lot of dynamics and movement in it. go listen to a tchad blake record, Peral Jam Binaural or Sheryl Crow are both good examples of this kind of thing.

The bottom line is that it is a lot of work to get your mix huge. somewhere alongg the line, some ME convinced the world that loud was a replacement for huge. If you limit your mixes, they just get smaller. they get louder, but they are smaller. If you mix your record so it can be huge, when you turn it up, once it opens up it will always be bigger than the tune that is fighting with itself to be loud.

I would try this. In the end you may prefer crushing your whole mix and if you do it enough you can probably learn to mix to anticipate what is going to happen in mastering, and that is all well and fine. But before you go and jump into that fire, you should investigate other mix techniques to get your records to sound the way you want them to sound before just taking the easy way out and limiting the life out of everything all at once.

dave

[djslayerissick]

[quote]If you slam and clip and artifact up your submixes, you get the SOUND that you want, but since you used three different boxes to do it, while your dynamic range is now very different, there is still a dynamic between the drum kit and the vocals. By mixing like this, you can wind up with a grossly compressed mix that has a lot of dynamics and movement in it.[/quote]

ok. finally a perspective that makes sense to me and explains the issue in a way that i will accept. thanks for the posts, dave. this is what i was hoping to gain from these posts - an alternative to over-mastering that will still have the effect i'm trying to achieve.

this makes sense on its own, but i have avoided doing it in the past b/c of previous threads on the subject. many times over, people have posted to avoid "compressing the life out of" individual tracks and to let that be done to the whole mix in order to "preserve the dynamics". i'm sure this is true when going for that specific sound, but now i'm thinking that the opposite is true for the effect i want.

now i'm going to try doing the over-compressing/mastering to the individual tracks, mix, and do "proper" mastering to the whole mix.

[vvv]

I knew this stuff, but couldn't explain it so well; thank you all for a book-marked thread.

[jajjguy]

DJ, it sounds like you're going for a kind of lo-fi effect with clipping, using computer processing. That's probably different than what the expensive mastering engineers would do, which is more like ironing everything flat. If you've found an effect that works for your music, then obviously you should go for it. But i doubt that means that you'd like this kind of mastering job. (I could be wrong: what DO you think of the Audioslave record, for example?)

You should probably consider what you're doing to be part of the mix process rather than the mastering process. Your stuff could still probably benefit from some tasteful mastering (i mean the good kind), even after you're done with it.

The real function of mastering is not so much to make it loud (though that is of course part of it) as to make it translate, and that is something that what you're doing (adding clipping effects) won't necessarily accomplish, for all the usual reasons like your monitoring chain isn't perfect and so forth.

[Rick Hunter]

Wow...
uhhh....
If only I can remember all of that to look cool in front of my friends.

thanks dave,