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Hip Pop Stop Today's hip tunes. New music that isn't Classic Rock or Jazz! |
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In Reply to: Broken Social Scene: Broken Social Scene posted by yotacowboy on November 9, 2005 at 16:55:17:
I think it is gloriously produced in almost every way, but I find it very fatiguing, too. And it cannot be due only to the use of too much compression in mastering, although that is a huge part of it. David Newfeld is a genius, and I think he was intentionally using compression, limiting and distortion to get the album to have the sound he heard in his head. I do not know enough about him to know what his techniques are, but I would be willing to bet that he uses a lot of plug-ins for these effects, and only a minimum of actual hardware outboard processing. Even if he used a lot of classic compressors and distortion boxes, I would be willing to wager he did tons of compression and tweaking of individual tracks, mixes and submixes totally "in the box". There is a subtle difference you can hear with these plug-ins. They can sound awesome, and warm, but it always sounds like a digital approximation of "awesome" and "warm". The sound he got on the drum tracks is amazing, but there is something about it that says it went through plug-ins along the way. It's like each drum hit is so compressed that it is at a constant level over the course of the entire transient, with only the variation of frequency content to differentiate the hit from the decay. And it does not "breathe" the way a hardware compressor set that way would sound. The overall mixdowns make me feel claustrophobic at times. There are extended segments in many songs where you can tell that if you looked at the audio in protools it would be pretty much a bunch of squared off waveforms that never drop more than 3-6 dB below max level--like a brick wall (and one with nasty digital square wave distortion at that). But the music and production are such genius I will undergo the pain over and over to listen. And to be fair, it's no more overly compressed than any of the other albums being released these days. And I may be wrong about Newfeld. This may not be his fault at all. He could have delivered a final product with appropriate dynamic range. With stem mixes so common nowadays, the distortion I hear may have been caused by an overzealous mastering engineer with lots of submixes to play with. What's so stupid is that when these songs get played on the radio, the station's compressors squash them to death anyway. Actually, the station's compressors and the compressors used on the recordings can actually "fight" with each other, bringing down the level of the song lower than if it had been compressed less in mastering. So what is this compression arms race all for? Is it for the MP3 market?
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- Re: Broken Social Scene: Broken Social Scene - djsaint 20:47:40 02/15/07 (0)
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