I love hearing photographers talking about their work, and the technical choices that went into making it.
One of the main reasons I love it is this: I know absolutely nothing about photography.
I know what I like (pretty much), but I couldn’t even start to identify why one use of lenses, or exposure, or f-thingy is different from another. I am a photo dunce.
My understanding of music is very different.
I don’t mean music composition – I almost failed my music O-level, and never ascended beyond the dizzy heights of Grade 1 theory.
But music production, I get. I know the tricks, I understand the techniques – I can immediately see how it all hangs together and why. Where records are concerned, I’m like that irritating Dad in the art gallery, lecturing his kids on exactly how Picasso layered his paints to make the vanishing point a bit more pointillesque. (NB: I know as much about painting as I do photography.)
You might think this would be enough to spoil my enjoyment of pop music. Interestingly, this isn’t the case.
However, via the wonders of my blog, it is enough for me to spoil your enjoyment of pop music.
Because over the next few posts I’m going to talk about a small number of pop records – actually, about bits of a small number of pop records – in the kind of forensic detail men normally reserve for car engines and power drills.
Why have I decided this now? Well, I’ve been inspired by today’s Twitter hashtag #dynamicrangeday.
It flags up an event designed to highlight the unpleasant but undeniable fact that commercially available music has (for years now) been losing its volume peaks and troughs. The quiet bits, in other words, are getting noisier until they’re pretty much identical, volume-wise, to the supposedly louder bits. It’s a process that’s been dubbed the Loudness Wars.
Like many other creeping changes to the world, few people are conscious of it, realise why it’s happening, or understand why they should be bothered. In a future post I hope to put your mind at rest on all of these factors, and much much more. Whether you like it or not.
If you’re interested in finding out more about the Loudness Wars in the meantime, you might want to listen to this short radio feature from America’s NPR.
Ah yes, the loudness wars. A pet hate of mine. It’s sad how the modern audience will listen to a CD master today, compare it to one from the 80s, and conclude that the modern one is better because it sounds louder, brighter and fuller. Yet the 80s master will invariably be much more exciting to listen to because of the dynamic range – the distinction between the quiet and soft and the loud and powerful.
Current production tends to render music hard to listen to as well. The constant barrage of peak noise is akin to watching a film that is extremely bright and over-exposed. Your eyes would tire and ache under the intensity, and so it is with your ears.
It is also true that compressing the waveform destroys the character of instruments – the warmth of a bass drum beat becomes distorted and twisted into a thump of white noise – I think there was an analysis of a Rush album that shows this exact effect.
I own some box sets of Genesis remixes released recently that suffer terribly from this problem. I think the new 5.1 mixes are wonderful, the multi-layered instruments and vocals now separated and superbly clear, but then during mastering they were compressed to hell. A band that, in the 70s anyway, probably exhibited a greater range between gently folky acoustic passages and powerful aggression than any other band, suddenly sound flat and homogenised all the way through. And all in an effort to be as ‘loud’ as modern productions are.
I think the key thing here is that my hifi has a volume knob. If something is quiet, I can turn it up. But then again, I guess music isn’t produced for decent audio systems any more. It’s made as mass-produced fodder for mp3 players, in poor-quality audio formats where it needs to be loud in order to come across in those tiddly headphones. I’m tempted to blame Apple for all this, although that would be unfair. But I think I will anyway
I’m really interested in the idea of 5:1 album mixes. .. part of me hates the idea, but another part of me knows why that is and thinks I need to get over it… I think you just inspired another future blog post!
For the likes of Genesis, of course, they probably just needed to go back to the old quad mixes
Bits of a small number of records? Like this?
http://reckon.posterous.com/vinyl-record-grooves-under-electron-microscop
No, but yay, that’s fantastic.
I spent an hour the other weekend boring my son on the art of vinyl mastering, how you can’t pan bass too far from the centre of the stereo field because your needle will jump out of the groove… and so on and so on and so on…