A couple of interesting things popped up today about The Loundness War. Firstly this article in Rolling Stone. It’s one of the best I’ve seen on all the issues around overly loud records and how as audio technology evolves, the worse music sounds - and I’m not talking about content or style. As well as covering all the different aspects of the issues around The Loudness Wars - it also details the problems of MP3 with regard to sound quality and how engineers and producers are trying to counteract the negative aspects of this technology. There are also plenty of sonic examples detailing the problems around overly loud records and low rate MP3’s.
For me, one of the interesting things in this article was information about an organization called Turn Me Up! which is attempting to bring The Loudness War to an end. I’ve joined them for certification as a mastering engineer and I also hope to submit records that I produce/mix for certification as well - as long as my clients are up for making their records less loud!
It’s hard to say how effective any “bottom up” campaign will be against overly loud records. Whenever I talk to my clients about this, or discuss it with other people in the music business it would seem that everyone is reluctant to be the among the first to take the “risk” of making a less loud, yet better sounding record. And being a mastering engineer working in a service industry, I have little option other than to deliver what my clients want in order to keep my business afloat. What we need is high profile bands and artists to put out records that are less loud and make a point of doing so. Much like when Radiohead used the release of their In Rainbows LP to promote a new business model - a similar thing could be done for forwarding the idea of quieter and better sounding records. And Radiohead would probably be a great band to do such a thing.
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So after writing that, I went over to the forum attached to the Radiohead site and posted this.
Will anything happen?
Tracking drums at Audrey Studios today for All India Radio. Recording drums seems to be the holy grail for lots of audio types and it’s a fair call. Lots of mics in a small area equals trouble, and it takes some time to figure out how to make it work for you. One of the things that is hard to get around is a good sounding drum kit. You must have this or else all your labour will come to naught. You can make any kit sound OK if you know what you’re doing as far as tuning, re-skinning and general maintenance go. But if that’s not your bag, you got to hire yourself a fine sounding kit.
Enter Travis Demsey. Aside from being a renaissance man (…he’s a busy guy), Travis has racked up a mighty collection of drums in his time. I think he told me once that when he was on tour instead of partying on, he’d get an early night after playing a show so that the next day he and his drum tech could head out into whatever town they were in to track down another set of vintage drums. That’s how you end up with 80+ odd kits I guess…! Travis puts his large collection to good use by hiring them and himself out to recording sessions. Travis appears with whatever kit you need, a few snare options and hangs about to set them and tune them to taste for your session.
Anyhow, Travis has this a’67 blue sparkle Ludwig set that is similar to this, - it’s a great sounding set of drums. I’ve used it once before with All India Radio. You can hear the (low resolution) results here on a track called ‘Four Three’. It has a great big old bass drum that sounds larger than it looks and has this great bottom octave - by bottom octave, I’m talking about the low down sub frequencies that you feel as much as hear. When you’ve got all the mics in place and have messed about with the options, it’s always a good feeling when you sit down to start doing the first bunch of takes and the kit sounds great. It makes the drummer happy to play and the band happy that their music is going to have a good solid foundation.
I get to hear and work on lots of records where people will track their own drum-kits themselves at home (or wherever they can). Usually the reason for doing this is money. Hiring a big room in a decent studio is not cheap if you’re an independent musician/band, and the idea of hiring a drum-kit on top of this (when the drummer usually has one) seems outlandish. At the same time however most everybody wants their records to sound as good as they can. There is a false economy here, because when you hear a lot of these self recorded drums they don’t sound so great. Usually the money saved on the DIY approach goes to paying a guy to sit down in front of a computer and replace all the sounds to get a better, but still not great result.
I think that it is possible to get a good drum recording with the equipment and resources that most people at home have access to. One important factor is the amount of experience the person recording has at recording generally (experience is a subject that I like to bang on about at length, but won’t here), and the other is the sound of the kit and the room it’s being played in. Instead of paying a studio nerd save yourself some money, and either get a guy to make your kit sound good (new skins, a good tune and all that) or hire a top sounding kit in for your session. This will get you much closer to a good drum recording than any amount of expensive mics and fancy recorders will.
So, when in doubt, reach for ‘67 Ludwig.
Saw this article in today’s AGE about Chunky Move’s “Glow”. I’m heading up to Sydney next week to put the show into the Sydney Opera House and operate it for a weeks worth of shows. I really dig this show. I think it’s one of the only successful ‘multi-media’ (…worst term ever - it makes me want to scream, or at least say a bunch of nasty & amusing stuff..) performances I’ve worked on.
I was chatting to some friends the other day about how it has taken about the last 10 years for ‘new-media’ work to start being interesting - rather than just stuff + screen, of which most is crap and dull. I think that it’s taken this long for artists to a) get a handle on the tech and b) start to be able to conceptualise from the ground up a place for the computer in performance. Thankfully the ideas seem to have moved on from the more process focussed stuff like, “Check me out - how awesome is that I can move and the stuff on screen does as well!?” or “I’m moving pixels in Melbourne and on the screen someone is moving the same pixels from Canada. It’s like talking on phone but slower and crapper. It’s the future.”
Apart from multi-media rants, I’ve been flat out mixing 2 records, one for a band called ‘Dust’ whose music I can best describe as ‘folk rock streaked with country, psychedelic and prog rock flavors’. The other disc I’m in the midst of is for ‘The Red Tree’ whose music is somewhere in the Sigur Ros territory of vast and expansive beauty. Then there has been the first two weeks of a new semester at RMIT, and more besides…
Sleep is for losers.
