Red Mosquito

tragabigzanda wrote:Songs keep getting better and the mixing/mastering keeps getting worse.

Two really clear indicators of poor use of compression are clearly audible on Brother the Cloud:

1. The way all the sibilant sounds of Eddie's vocal (the "esses") are louder than everything else he says. This is really common, particularly in pop music, but that doesn't make it sit right with me.

2. The way music slams into a brick wall when they launch into the chorus. When the electric guitars blast in right before the chorus starts, then that first drum hit comes in, you can hear how the song wants to burst from the speakers, but is limited so ridiculously hard that you can hear it get squashed.

Such inspired moments on this record, such a bummer they couldn't let things breathe a bit.

Strat wrote:I hear what you guys are saying, but im not sure i can hear what it COULD sound like.

tragabigzanda wrote:My hunch is that it’s a combination of the following:

1. For the vocal sibilance, just their being used to lead vocals sounding this way in pop music. I don’t think I ever once saw an established pop producer use a de-esser.

2. For the mix slamming compression, I think it’s a lack of knowledge. The soft/loud dynamics in popular music were pioneered (in the popular marketplace, not technically speaking) by Nirvana. The advanced way to deal with this is by using what’s called two-stage compression, and it’s well established. A guy named Mike Caffrey is kind of the master of doing it correctly. It’s long and complicated, but the short explanation is that it’s advanced and complicated…

I think their mix engineer has no idea how to do this, is more comfortable just putting a single compressor on the stereo buss and setting it very aggressively. Everything sounds full and up front on the quiet verse so he’s happy. The chorus still sounds loud, so he’s happy. But where the hell is all the air around the drums?!

McParadigm wrote:Been thinking about some of these songs over the last few days.

Invincible

I fucking love the paternal corniness of this song. The simplicity, warmth, and the abundance of kindness. The atmosphere. But I especially like the way it opens by speaking directly to you, sounding not unlike Dad playing a game of pretend with his child.

tragabigzanda wrote:

Strat wrote:I hear what you guys are saying, but im not sure i can hear what it COULD sound like.

Listen to At Least That’s What You Said and you’ll get it. And Jim O’Rourke doesn’t even use two-stage compression, he takes the old-school approach of lots of fader movement. Older U2 was the same way, and their dynamics are awesome!

Ms Harmless wrote:

Strat wrote:I hear what you guys are saying, but im not sure i can hear what it COULD sound like.

lemme try and listen for an example and get back to you

McParadigm wrote:Been thinking about some of these songs over the last few days.

Invincible

I fucking love the paternal corniness of this song. The simplicity, warmth, and the abundance of kindness. The atmosphere. But I especially like the way it opens by speaking directly to you, sounding not unlike Dad playing a game of pretend with his child.

Opening a rock record by playing imagination games with your audience, addressing them like you're Dora the Explorer, is a move we all understand to be unhip. I think the message here is: who even cares anymore? Been there, done that. Got the corduroy jacket.

This is someone who spent a lot of the last 30 years chasing other people's acceptance...first by trying to fit reductionist definitions of cool, then trying to regain lost relevance, and finally just struggling to understand what his own audience wants from him. This is a song that feels done with all of it, and that makes it the perfect start to this record. It can look backwards without trying to relive the past. It can grow old without needing to cover for the passage of time. And it can talk to its audience if it enjoys doing so...in fact, because it enjoys doing so.

This song is an invitation. You've grown up, kid, but hey...we can still play pretend if we want to. Here's an invisible boarding pass.

It's for you, so feel important.

Good and Evil

The flip side to Invincible. One of the most vicious things he's ever written, with a churning musical undercurrent that salivates with the want to hurt.

I think that's why it makes some people wish (wrongly [you're stupid]) that they could hear mid-90's Ed sing it, and why some others (wrongly [you're stupid]) compare it to Vitalogy.

These are targeted and sometimes hateful lines. Coming from a young man with an audience of millions, whose own shit is in no way together, it would have felt...I dunno. Gross. And it would also have been the eighth thrashy yell song of the night. Listen to this fucking furious song I wrote. Now listen to this other furious song about how turntables are cool.

The context of that era, where the songs still wanted to lift up but were collapsing under a terrible weight, would have defanged the song's snarling aesthetic. And the 'there's a human being in my sights' lyrics would have been poisonous to the surrounding music's pleas for the dream to somehow survive all this ugliness.

Coming in as a part of 57 year old EV's output, sitting near jaunty Elton John duets and crooning love songs, the song's unhinged qualities are exceptional to their surroundings rather than ordinary...and that imparts an authenticity on the burst of aggro snarl. This is no longer a sound or style that he routinely writes in, and this isn't a Comatose-style attempt to recreate that aesthetic in order to fulfill an artistic ambition. This feels like something that just exploded outward.

The expressed wish for the antagonist to glimpse their own death is all the more astonishing because Eddie Vedder has spent a lifetime uncovering anger, abuse, struggle, and redemption in his writing without it really coming to this. His fucking divorce record is mostly about self-reflection, for fuck's sake.

I love the performance of it, too. That shriek at the end (lifted up by the production, I'll admit) gives me chills.

Try, Picture, Mrs Mills

I dunno, man. Learning there were three special guest star tracks right at the end of the record really drove home for me that I wasn't going to like it...especially with the first single being a Tom Petty tribute. I thought, 'here we go...a whole record of Ed the classic rock cypher and sycophant. Can we just not?"

But not only do I like these...I realllllly fucking like Try.

Mrs Mills is probably the weaker of the three for me, but they're all good fun. Not exactly cool, but we've covered that. And in the case of both Stevie and Elton, Ed's rediscovered joy of just fucking playing your ass off seems to be wonderfully contagious. Instead of celebrity retirement 'safe space' music, we get the same "gave a child a rootbeer" sugar rush that infects all of the playing on the record. 1 2 3 4!

tragabigzanda wrote:

Ms Harmless wrote:

Ms Harmless wrote:

Strat wrote:I hear what you guys are saying, but im not sure i can hear what it COULD sound like.

lemme try and listen for an example and get back to you

OK I think a good example might be Betterman, as it has very similar tempo, groove and instrumentation, and should share the dynamic power and range of the verses into the chorus; listen to how the crunchy electric guitar suddenly layered over the acoustic after the snare hits kind of increase the excitement and emotion of the song, instead of just... kind of existing in the same emotional space as the verses (as in BtC); I think there's more oomph in the final part of BtC but I feel like that's because they're layering guitars on top of each other to make up for the lack of that dynamic shift

Good ears!

tragabigzanda wrote:

Strat wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

Ms Harmless wrote:

Ms Harmless wrote:

Strat wrote:I hear what you guys are saying, but im not sure i can hear what it COULD sound like.

lemme try and listen for an example and get back to you

OK I think a good example might be Betterman, as it has very similar tempo, groove and instrumentation, and should share the dynamic power and range of the verses into the chorus; listen to how the crunchy electric guitar suddenly layered over the acoustic after the snare hits kind of increase the excitement and emotion of the song, instead of just... kind of existing in the same emotional space as the verses (as in BtC); I think there's more oomph in the final part of BtC but I feel like that's because they're layering guitars on top of each other to make up for the lack of that dynamic shift

Good ears!

Does tacking on a live performance make any difference for this approach?

Not automatically, no. But live performances are likely to include some audience noise, plus maybe some other less desirable stuff. That extraneous audio would be more audible with heavier compression, so the band theoretically has to work with a wider dynamic range to let the undesirable quieter stuff stay quiet.

tragabigzanda wrote:

Tj wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

Strat wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

Ms Harmless wrote:

Ms Harmless wrote:

Strat wrote:I hear what you guys are saying, but im not sure i can hear what it COULD sound like.

lemme try and listen for an example and get back to you

OK I think a good example might be Betterman, as it has very similar tempo, groove and instrumentation, and should share the dynamic power and range of the verses into the chorus; listen to how the crunchy electric guitar suddenly layered over the acoustic after the snare hits kind of increase the excitement and emotion of the song, instead of just... kind of existing in the same emotional space as the verses (as in BtC); I think there's more oomph in the final part of BtC but I feel like that's because they're layering guitars on top of each other to make up for the lack of that dynamic shift

Good ears!

Does tacking on a live performance make any difference for this approach?

Not automatically, no. But live performances are likely to include some audience noise, plus maybe some other less desirable stuff. That extraneous audio would be more audible with heavier compression, so the band theoretically has to work with a wider dynamic range to let the undesirable quieter stuff stay quiet.

I think I understand, but let me name some songs that I think succeed at what we are talking about LBC, Given to Fly. Over the Hills and Far Away, Room At the Top. Yes or no on these?

If you're talking about nice dynamic range, with a louder section that bursts out from a prior quieter section, then yes totally. If you're talking about live recordings, then I'm not sure what you're referring to.

Tj wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

Tj wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

Strat wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

Ms Harmless wrote:

Ms Harmless wrote:

Strat wrote:I hear what you guys are saying, but im not sure i can hear what it COULD sound like.

lemme try and listen for an example and get back to you

OK I think a good example might be Betterman, as it has very similar tempo, groove and instrumentation, and should share the dynamic power and range of the verses into the chorus; listen to how the crunchy electric guitar suddenly layered over the acoustic after the snare hits kind of increase the excitement and emotion of the song, instead of just... kind of existing in the same emotional space as the verses (as in BtC); I think there's more oomph in the final part of BtC but I feel like that's because they're layering guitars on top of each other to make up for the lack of that dynamic shift

Good ears!

Does tacking on a live performance make any difference for this approach?

Not automatically, no. But live performances are likely to include some audience noise, plus maybe some other less desirable stuff. That extraneous audio would be more audible with heavier compression, so the band theoretically has to work with a wider dynamic range to let the undesirable quieter stuff stay quiet.

I think I understand, but let me name some songs that I think succeed at what we are talking about LBC, Given to Fly. Over the Hills and Far Away, Room At the Top. Yes or no on these?

If you're talking about nice dynamic range, with a louder section that bursts out from a prior quieter section, then yes totally. If you're talking about live recordings, then I'm not sure what you're referring to.

Was referring to studio recording. Live Brother the cloud sounded great.