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I'm Not Sure I'm Ready for This...


Anderton

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Not because I don't like the idea of people altering my music - otherwise I wouldn't have loved the assistance from the "SSS Production Squad" in my last batch of tunes. But check out this article...my concern is that everyone will have a different idea of what a song should sound like, and just like nothing will ever exist in a definitive physical medium, a song may not exist in a definitive version. I also think there might be copyright implications, just like there is with remixing, should people want to try and monetize their versions...

 

I dunno. Seems kind of pie in the sky right now, but I'll be keeping an eye on this.

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Alien Ant Farm videos aside, do we allow people to jump into the screen and become part of the movie? Maybe someday we will... but music has always been interactive to at least some degree - most of us have probably learned songs from the radio or played along with records / CDs / MP3s at some point or another. I don't know if I want to release stems and have people working up their own mixes, but OTOH, I'd love to have access to all of the old Beatles and Motown masters... but honestly, unless they make the mixing process a LOT easier, how many people are going to want to dive in and try to "best" a professionally done mix?

 

 

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Some years back (in the early 90s)I bought a 'CD' of Todd Rundgren called 'No World Order'. It was actually a data CD for very early Windows, which included an app that allowed you to remix the music on the CD. Pretty ground-breaking stuff at the time. Pretty ground breaking for now, even. And, of course, it wouldn't work at all after the very next Windows upgrade.

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It sounds too gimmicky to me to garner more than temporary notice - something to tinker with a bit, but gets boring pretty soon. People are quite comfortable in general just being part of a passive audience still. Why customize a particular song when you can just switch to another song?

 

Used to be - maybe it's still there - this setup at the Seattle EMP museum where they have what looks to the average person like a recording studio set up. It was really just a mixing board, partially activated, where you can move the track sliders and toggle mutes and fiddle with Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). It was interesting for about two minutes for most people - typically a family would come in, the kids would immediately start moving knobs and sliders but get quickly bored as nothing amazing would happen. You could see the dads thinking "huh! I've always wanted to get to mess with one of these" and make a few tentative slider moves, soon figuring out that, ok, you can change the relative levels of stuff.....so...that's kind of interesting, but not all that interesting.

 

I'm fine with any kind of collaboration, so I've got no issues with the principal of the thing, really. It's not a new idea by any means as someone mentioned above. But people don't pick songs to listen to like they pick clothes to wear. I just think the typical person would not be interested, and the really interested person would soon move on to something more like actually making music.

 

The "everything belongs to everyone" crowd has a nice fantasy going - and there is room for collaboration that technology is making more convenient. But the whole point of being a consumer is letting someone else do the work and you just make a choice and pay for it, done deal.

 

The old formula for product idea success is "add convenience to a commodity". This idea seems to add complications, not convenience. Most people won't want to work at improving their entertainment - they already find it tiring just to change channels with a remote. I find listening to music an entirely different activity than making music. When I listen, I absolutely want to be passive and receptive, let the music take total control.

 

Probably everyone looks at the stereotypical shots of recording studios (40 million sliders and stacks and stacks of super-cool looking gear) and of DJ set-ups, and feels an itch to try it out, see what it's like. Lesson one in music production quickly sinks in- nothing comes quickly or is amazing without a whole lot of boring education and work first.

 

I will say this, 'tho, thinking about it a little more - I can imagine some of this technology working it's way into karaoke, or maybe even some club situations. Which would be interesting, but no game-changer for music in general.

 

nat whilk ii

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I have, on a handful of occasions, 'remastered' albums that were too low in level or too high in level (and, in one or two cases, that had deal-breaking bad EQ), mostly for level reasons when the albums in question wouldn't gracefully integrate with the other music I tend to listen to (which tends to run in the -14 to -11 dB RMS range).

 

For instance, one of my favorite albums, The Columbia Masterworks 1930's - The Jazz Singers, had average levels down around -20 dB RMS, making it only about half or less as loud as I would have liked shuffled into my usual eclectic music mix. It wasn't yet in the stream-o-sphere but I ripped the album from my CD of it and uploaded it to my 'personal locker' [i use Google Music] -- but I quickly found it was way too quiet to shufflie into my other favorite tracks. First I tried a simple compressor but couldn't get the level up. So I ran it through my DAW I could use my favored compressor's brickwall limiting since that much-touted Columbia Remaster had a couple of nasty volume spikes that needed to come down.

 

Amazing that the high priced ME's at Columbia, working on what was, at the time, a prestige, premium re-release anthology couldn't do a decent job with the levels, but there ya go, huh?

 

[The album is now available on a no-name, low-budget re-release label and, indeed, they did remaster to get the levels up, probably about 2 dB louder than what I did.]

 

And, speaking of Columbia -- who hasn't listened to the Dylan 60's work and idly wished they could reengineer/remix the albums to cut the icepick-stab of Bob's screeching, way-too-loud harmonica? I wouldn't want to get rid of it because it was part of what he did and it does communicate -- but it also just stabs into the ears at times. (Worse yet was what that harmonica did when it hit the speakers in my first car stereo, high frequency IMD distortion that took on a musical identity of its own. Not a nice one.)

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Wow Blue, don't you find -11dB to be a bit on the hot side?

 

I typically shoot for around -15 or -16dB, but it depends on how dynamic the material is - the more dynamic, the less compression you can get away with without harming the material IMHO.

I'd say -11 is the uncomfortably loud end of what I tend to listen to. (Louder stuff is usually just reading about something somewhere and checking it out, typically some pop thing that is totally annoying, anyway, but, you know, I just want to keep a toe in the water... every now and then I find out I missed something cool because I was too stuck up to pay any attention to the whole media thing.)

 

Also, keep in mind I was talking about the range of stuff that I tend to listen to -- and that I was trying to get in the middle of with my handful of personal 'remasters' of other people's commercial releases that would otherwise be 'too quiet' to play nice with other tracks in an intermix.

 

For my own stuff, self-mastering, I've been aiming for between -13 and -14. I guide myself by RMS but my ear has veto power -- I compare it to my own reference tracks. I figure if my own tracks don't play nice together, loudness-wise... well... then I'd be like 90% of the veteran major label artists out there with a bewildering range of loudness that often makes it impossible to comfortably shuffle their albums. And that would be embarrassing since I couldn't blame it on some nameless, tin-eared label drone. (It's a shame, it seems to me, that our musical heritage is largely in the hands of such incompetent toads.)

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This is kinda like the Linux GNU public license.....which some don't adhere to, ...supposedly free open source software which anyone can modify, free of charge, but some will charge for "their" versions.

 

BTW, I'm also an active contributor here. Something I may have said may have sparked a lyric idea !! :)

 

Dan

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It sounds too gimmicky to me to garner more than temporary notice - something to tinker with a bit' date=' but gets boring pretty soon. People are quite comfortable in general just being part of a passive audience still. Why customize a particular song when you can just switch to another song? [snip']

 

Yes, that whole post is right on. The music industry keeps thinking that the world is filled with "potential musicians," and they keep looking for that "Holy Grail" product that will get those people playing music. But the reality is that making satisfying music is a skill, a discipline, and is not easy. That's why so many "auto play" keyboards end up in the closet.

 

But I would find some kind of "focus group" panel really helpful, as I do with the SSS Production Squad.

 

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Wow Blue, don't you find -11dB to be a bit on the hot side?

 

I typically shoot for around -15 or -16dB, but it depends on how dynamic the material is - the more dynamic, the less compression you can get away with without harming the material IMHO.

I'd say -11 is the uncomfortably loud end of what I tend to listen to. (Louder stuff is usually just reading about something somewhere and checking it out, typically some pop thing that is totally annoying, anyway, but, you know, I just want to keep a toe in the water... every now and then I find out I missed something cool because I was too stuck up to pay any attention to the whole media thing.)

 

Also, keep in mind I was talking about the range of stuff that I tend to listen to -- and that I was trying to get in the middle of with my handful of personal 'remasters' of other people's commercial releases that would otherwise be 'too quiet' to play nice with other tracks in an intermix.

 

For my own stuff, self-mastering, I've been aiming for between -13 and -14. I guide myself by RMS but my ear has veto power -- I compare it to my own reference tracks. I figure if my own tracks don't play nice together, loudness-wise... well... then I'd be like 90% of the veteran major label artists out there with a bewildering range of loudness that often makes it impossible to comfortably shuffle their albums. And that would be embarrassing since I couldn't blame it on some nameless, tin-eared label drone. (It's a shame, it seems to me, that our musical heritage is largely in the hands of such incompetent toads.)

I've been meaning to get back in here and add a bit to this...

 

Day before yesterday I was listening to my usual wildly eclectic mix of stuff and one track jumped out at me, from twee retro-folk rockers the Ditty Bops -- but the next, an old track from the Louving Brothers wasn't much quieter.

 

So I used a stream ripper to intercept long excerpts of both tracks and dropped them in Sound Forge to use the stats tool...

 

The Ditty Bops track was -6.7 and -7.2 dB RMS per channel in the main part of the song. But -- get this -- the Louvin Brothers, good, ol-fashioned bluegrass, were squashed to -8.8 and -9 dB RMS. (Interesting that the sides were different, since it was MONO and both channels maxed at 0 dB RMS (as did the Ditty Bops -- today's ME's huh? =/ )

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...my concern is that everyone will have a different idea of what a song should sound like' date=' and just like nothing will ever exist in a definitive physical medium, a song may not exist in a definitive version.[/quote']

 

Classical conductors have sped up and slowed down compositions (and altered their dynamics) for as long as people have been composing. Ravel re-orchestrated Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and arguably improved it greatly. So it's not like this is something new.

 

The idea that a song could have a definitive version is a by-product of the creation of the gramophone record, in which music could be frozen in time. It was technology that made that concept "normal". Now that technology is moving on, it's going to stop being "normal", and something else will be normal instead.

 

Same as it ever was :-)

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Classical conductors have sped up and slowed down compositions for as long as people have been composing. Ravel re-orchestrated Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and arguably improved it greatly. So it's not like this is something new.

 

The idea that a song could have a definitive version is a by-product of the creation of the gramophone record, in which music could be frozen in time. It was technology that made that concept "normal". Now that technology is moving on, it's going to stop being "normal", and something else will be normal instead.

 

Same as it ever was :-)

 

Conductors are supposed to interpret the music. They are also by and large, eminently qualified to do so. I wouldn't want Joe Condodweller tampering with my symphonies.

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