The Death of Mistakes means

LINK TO ARTICLE

decent read.

great article, my favorite part was this

    Quote

Another kind of inconsistency has been methodically crushed over the last two decades, literally and figuratively, in what audio engineers call the "loudness wars": the competition for new recordings to be as loud as possible. If a piece of music can be compressed to a very narrow dynamic range -- a minimal distance between its quietest parts and its loudest parts -- then that means the whole thing can be really, really loud. It sounds bold and forceful when you put on a CD or play an MP3 file; it's clearer and less likely to flicker out when it's played on the radio. If you listen to a super-compressed, very loud recording next to an uncompressed version of the same thing with a wider dynamic range, the louder one is going to seem much more immediate and consistent. It's also going to be harder to listen to at length, because the natural dynamics of rock groups -- not just the difference between quiet parts and loud parts of a song

i think we know of a couple heavily talked about artists on here this passage relates to

i've always found the protools way of recording band music to be highly strange. i went to an audio engineering school that focused heavily on things like 'drum replacement' (making the snare drum of the drum track trigger a clean single snare drum sample every time it hits) or fixing the timing of drums by literally chopping them up and placing them on the perfect 16th note grid.

i think it's really created a scenario where most popular music you hear that uses real instruments is in reality 70% electronic music, whether it be drum replacement, autotuning, fake doubling, etc. i like to call it cybernetic music, hopefully conveying the negative stereotypes of being a cyborg

They've got some points, but mostly those points are "its not the 70s anymore". "rock" music that theyre talking about still exists and thrives and is still popular, but its just not played on "pop" radio. Articles like this just put our shittiest music in the limelight and take no time to point out the arists who are successfully breaking from the norm like the innvators before their time. Lots of producer and engineers or whatever are getting access to tools they couldve only dreamed about years ago, so theyre using them and not being creative because A. they dont know how yet or B. They have no room to be creative mostly because of who theyre working with (shitty bands, shitty record execs)

  On 11/13/2009 at 8:28 PM, 42Orange said:

They have no room to be creative mostly because of who theyre working with (shitty bands, shitty record execs)

i honestly think it has little to do with either the band or the shitty record exec, it's the strange ethos and techniques developed in the school of audio engineering that have led to this. and i disagree that it's just mtv or top 10 pop bands, i hear a lot of local bands who sound awesome when they play live but as soon as they put together a studio recording the engineer they use makes it sound cold and lifeless. It's something that effects most band musicians regardless of their popularity. It's actually hard to find an engineer who won't want to do this bullshit to your music right now.

edit: there definitely is a movement right now devoted to going against the grain int he production area, much like there was in the late 80s/early 90s against the sterility of 80s rock and pop production. this movement unfortunately is an extreme minority among producers

  On 11/13/2009 at 8:32 PM, Awepittance said:

  On 11/13/2009 at 8:28 PM, 42Orange said:

They have no room to be creative mostly because of who theyre working with (shitty bands, shitty record execs)

 

i honestly think it has little to do with either the band or the shitty record exec, it's the strange ethos and techniques developed in the school of audio engineering that have led to this. and i disagree that it's just mtv or top 10 pop bands, i hear a lot of local bands who sound awesome when they play live but as soon as they put together a studio recording the engineer they use makes it sound cold and lifeless. It's something that effects most band musicians regardless of their popularity. It's actually hard to find an engineer who won't want to do this bullshit to your music right now.

Well a lot of these local bands are what i'm talking about when i mean theyre getting access to these powerful digital tools for the first time, so they dont know how to use them. I find it hard to believe that its that hard to find an engineer who won't acknowledge the requests of the band. If the band wanted it to sound that way then thats they wanted it to sound and its partially their fault (again, their lack of creativity). Its funny that they would sound better live since most of the venues i know are compressed to death. Anyway you cut it though, its not optimal, but its definitely not the death of anything, just a bad. bad trend.

i think rock has gotten more boring with this "death of mistakes" while other genres have gotten more interesting.

  On 11/13/2009 at 8:53 PM, hahathhat said:

i think rock has gotten more boring with this "death of mistakes" while other genres have gotten more interesting.

yes

ACID MOOSIC

this is why you don't see photoshops in museums and some of the best electronic producers try to make their songs sound un-quantized.

they are even starting to do it for classical music, you can hear a lot of stuff on classical forums and boards about studio recordings "changing" parts of live recordings, dubbing stuff, changing single notes if they are errors, autotuning the piano, etc...

I mean wtf autotuning pianos

This is an interesting article and I agree with it mostly but I also agree that any the awesomeness of today's electronic music more than makes up for it. Fuck it, I never listened to classic rock and I don't think I ever will.

eric clapton was like hrrrnnRHRRRNN and the amps were like wheeee

If you wire up a human arsesphincter to a sine wave producer and slip it into the neck of a milk bottle along with some liver, you can get some terrific necro-bumsex. You can almost milk yourself with another persons body parts.

  On 11/13/2009 at 9:44 PM, blicero said:

this is why you don't see photoshops in museums

i've seen many photography exhibits with photoshopped images. it's just that in most cases the image was created with photoshopping in mind instead of it being an afterthought to fix an image that was shit in the first place. the eastman house in rochester has had some amazing exhibits of images put together in photoshop.

jus' sayin'

hmm, i think it's good and bad. the ridiculous compression war is pretty silly, but also the 'no compression' stance some engineers are taking is equally silly - sometimes you just want a 'sound cake', while also leaving the quiet parts quiet.

and re: digital stuff in rock, i also think it can be used tastefully. bands that blend rock elements with electronics obviously benefit from lots of edits and such - eg. the drum cutting and effects on pivot's first album are a great example. and i'm sure once the current autotune phase dies down we might start to see some actual creative uses of it, just like with vocoders i guess.

.. but then again, i do love when a band can be just 3-4 guys playing interesting raw music with guitars and drums, but that's what we have people like steve albini for i guess.

Awepittance: I fully hear what you're saying...did you go to Full Sail by any chance?

There will always be innovators, and then there will be the majority who just go with what's easy and current.