Sound Recorded Over and Over Again
Why Do All Records Sound the Aforementioned?
Drastic to get their music on the radio at all costs, record labels are employing powerful software to artificially sweeten it, polish it, brand information technology louder — squeezing out the last drops of its individuality
T here was once a piffling-watched video on Maroon five'due south YouTube aqueduct (now deleted, but visible here and here) which documents the tortuous, tedious process of crafting an instantly-forgettable mainstream radio hit.
It's fourteen minutes of elegantly dishevelled chaps sitting in leather sofas, playing $15,000 vintage guitars next to $200,000 studio consoles, staring at notepads and endlessly discussing how little they like the track (called "Makes Me Wonder"), and how information technology doesn't have a chorus. Even edited downwards, the tedium is mind-boggling as they play the same lame riff over and over and over over again. At one point, vocalizer Adam Levine says: "I'1000 sick of trying to engineer songs to be hits." But that's exactly what he gain to do.
Annotation: This article originally appeared in the March, 2008 edition of Word Magazine. That was a long fourth dimension ago—before YouTube started to usurp radio as the place where people discovered music, earlier music streaming services, before the vinyl revival and before audiophile digital music players like Neil Young's Pono.
The final version of "Makes Me Wonder" came in three versions: Album, Make clean (with the discussion 'fuck' removed from the chorus) and Super Make clean (with 'fuck' removed more thoroughly, and 'God' removed from the 2nd verse). Information technology was a spectacular hit, number ane in Panama, Croatia, Cyprus, South korea and Hungary and many larger countries. Why? Because it was played on the radio over and over and once more.
When you lot plough on the radio, y'all might retrieve music all sounds the same these days, then wonder if y'all're but getting old. But y'all're right, it does all sound the same. Every element of the recording procedure, from the offset takes to the last tweaks, has been evolved with one simple aim: command. And that control oftentimes lies in the hands of a record company desperate to get their vocal on the radio. So they'll encourage a controlled recording environs (boring, high-tech and using malleable digital effects).
Every finished rails is so coated in a thick layer of sound polish earlier existence market-tested and dispatched to a radio station, where further layers of polish are applied until the original recording is barely visible. That's how y'all brand a mainstream radio hit, and that'southward what record labels desire.
To be precise, "Makes Me Wonder" was particularly popular on U.S. radio stations playing the 'Hot Developed Gimmicky' format, which is succinctly described within the radio industry equally: "A station which plays commercial pop and stone music released during the past xv or twenty years which is more lively than the music played on the boilerplate Developed Contemporary station, but is all the same designed to appeal to full general listeners rather than listeners interested in hearing current releases."
Playlists of Hot Developed Contemporary stations are determined by a calculator, about probable running Google-owned Scott SS32 radio automation suite, which shuffles the playlist of 400 to 500 tracks, inserts ads and idents and tells the DJ when to talk. The playlist is compiled after extensive research. Two or three times a year, a visitor like L.A.-based Music Inquiry Consultants Inc arrive in town, rent a hotel ballroom or lecture theatre and recruit 50 to 100 people, carefully screened for demographic relevance (they might all be white suburban housewives aged 26–40). They're each given $65 and a perception analyzer—a little black box with one scarlet knob and an LED display. So, they're played 700 seven-second clips of songs. If they turn the knob up, the vocal gets played. If they turn it downwards, it doesn't.
If a station needs more upward-to-appointment information (bearing in listen that they're "designed to appeal to full general listeners rather than listeners interested in hearing electric current releases") they tin can run a 'telephone call-out exam,' where people from the right demographic are cold-called and interrogated about 30 7-second clips played over the phone.
So Maroon Five's job is clear. But as a modern politician's chore is to deliver seven second soundbites, their task is to deliver vii 2nd audio clips which will encourage young-ish people with a high disposable income to turn a little scarlet knob at least 180 degrees clockwise. No wonder they look and then stressed.
Fortunately, there are armies of producers, engineers, software programmers and statisticians lining up to aid our heroes to arts and crafts the perfect innocuous but shiny-sounding enquiry-ready pop hitting. "Information technology'south similar digital photography," says the prolific producer John Leckie, who has worked Radiohead's The Bends, the first Stone Roses anthology and A Storm In Heaven past The Verve. "Twenty years ago, if I showed you a picture of me standing next to the Pope, yous'd believe it, and recollect I'd met the Pope. Today, you'd presume it was Photoshop."
John'due south career started as a tape operator at Abbey Road, where he witnessed Phil Spector recording All Things Must Pass with George Harrison. Phil wanted a big audio, and so he filled the studio with musicians. The anthology was recorded pretty much live in one room with three drummers, two bassists, two pianists, ii organists, six guitarists and horns, playing together onto six tracks of an eight track recorder. Vocals took up the last two tracks.
For many people, this was a golden age. Recording a group of musicians playing together in an acoustically pleasant space is a tremendously difficult business organisation. It's all most where you place the microphones to capture the instrument sounds, but also the room sounds. Recording engineers at Abbey Road wore white coats and spent years as apprentices before they knew enough to practise the job properly. When you listen to a tape made the former fashion—like the Buena Vista Lodge anthology—you lot're hearing a recording of a room. Which happens to have some musicians playing in it.
In the early 70s, recording started to change. Four tracks turned into viii, then 16, then 24, then 48. Engineers looked for ways to go more than control over the sound. They started to create expressionless rooms, with very dry out acoustics. Microphones were moved much closer to instruments, which were recorded i by i. With a make clean, pure sound on tape, they could add artificial room sounds later on using repeat chambers. At that place was an explosion in audio creativity, equally people were able to experiment endlessly. Records like Tubular Bells or Queen albums would never have been possible in the 60s. The white-coated engineers were replaced with experimental producers like Trevor Horn.
The music sounded exciting and unlike and strange. If yous stick your head really shut to an acoustic guitar, or someone singing, or a piano, yous'll hear strange, unexpected things. The aggressive click of plectrum on metal. The ambient resonance of pianoforte strings. The new studios could capture all this.
Compare an audio-visual rail from Neil Young'due south Harvest (1972) with one from Johnny Greenbacks's American IV (2002):
Rick Rubin'southward recordings of Cash are extraordinarily intimate and affecting. But they don't sound anything like Johnny Cash sitting in your living room playing some songs. They sound like you lot're perched on Johnny Greenbacks's lap with i ear in his oral fissure and a stethoscope on his guitar.
When people talk about a shortage of 'warm' or 'natural' recording, they often arraign digital engineering science. Information technology's a red herring, because copying a great recording onto CD or into an iPod doesn't finish it sounding good. Even cocky-consciously sometime fashioned recordings similar Arif Mardin's work with Norah Jones was recorded on 2 inch tape, then copied into a reckoner for editing, then mixed through an counterpart panel dorsum into the computer for mastering. Information technology's at present rare to hear recently-produced audio which has never been through whatsoever analogue-digital conversion—although a vinyl White Stripes album might qualify.
Until surprisingly recently—maybe 2002—the majority of records were made the same way they'd been made since the early 70s: through vast, multi-channel recording consoles onto 24 or 48-track tape. At huge expense, you'd rent purpose-built rooms containing perhaps a 1000000 pounds' worth of equipment, employing a producer, engineer and tape operator. Digital recording into a calculator had been possible since the mid 90s, but major producers were often sceptical.
By 2000, Pro Tools, the industry-standard studio software, was mature and stable and sounded good. With a laptop and a small rack of gear costing maybe £25,000 you could record most of a major label anthology. So the business shifted from the console—the huge knob-covered desk in front of a pair of wardrobe-sized monitor speakers—to the computer screen. You lot weren't looking at the ring or listening to the music, yous were staring at 128 channels of wiggling coloured lines.
"In that location's no big equipment any more than," says John Leckie. "No racks of gear with flashing lights and big knobs. The reason I got into studio engineering was that information technology was the closest thing I could find to getting into a space ship. Now, it isn't. It'south like going to an accountant. Information technology changes the creative dynamic in the room when it's merely i guy sitting staring at a figurer screen."
"Before, you had a knob that said 'Bass.' You turned it upwardly, said 'Ah, that's better' and moved on. At present, you lot take to cull what frequency, and the slope, and how many dBs, and information technology all makes a difference. In that location's a constant temptation to tamper."
What makes working with Pro Tools really different from record is that editing is absurdly easy. Almost bands record to a click runway, so the tempo is locked. If a guitarist plays a riff fifty times, it's a fiddling job to pick the best ane and loop it for the elapsing of the verse.
"Musicians are inherently lazy," says John. "If there's an easier way of doing something than actually playing, they'll practise that." A band might jam together for a bit, and then spend hours or days choosing the all-time $.25 and pasting a rails together. All music is adopting the methods of trip the light fantastic toe music, of arranging repetitive loops on a grid. With the structure of the song mapped out in coloured boxes on screen, there's a huge temptation to fill in the gaps, add together bits and by and large ataxia up the audio.
This is also why yous no longer hear mistakes on records. Al Kooper's shambolic Hammond organ playing on "Similar A Rolling Stone" could never happen today because a diligent producer would discreetly shunt his chords back into pace. Then there'south tuning. Until electronic guitar tuners appeared effectually 1980, the ring would melody by ear to the studio piano. Anybody was slightly off, but anybody was listening to the pitch of their instrument, so they were musically off.
Today, the process of recording performances, then editing them together into what the ring and producer consider a finished track, is just the offset. Record companies demand to ensure they'll get that perfect 7-second snippet for the radio testing session, and then they've added yet more polishing processes.
Once the band and producer are finished, their multitrack—usually a hard disk containing Pro Tools files for perchance 128 channels of sound—is passed onto a mix engineer. L.A.-based JJ Puig has mixed records for Blackness Eyed Peas, U2, Snowfall Patrol, Dark-green Mean solar day and Mary J Blige. His work is taken and so seriously that he's frequently paid royalties rather than a fixed fee. He works from Studio A at Body of water Way Studios on the Sunset Strip. The command room looks like a dimly-lit library. Instead of books, the floor-to-ceiling racks are filled with vintage sound gear. This is the room where Frank Sinatra recorded "It Was A Very Good Yr" and Michael Jackson recorded "Crush It."
And now, information technology belongs to JJ Puig. Tape companies pay him to substantially re-produce the track, merely without the artist and producer breathing down his neck. He told Audio On Audio magazine: "When I mixed The Rolling Stones' A Bigger Blindside album, I reckoned that i of the songs needed a tambourine and a shaker, so I put information technology on. If Glyn Johns [who produced Sticky Fingers] had washed that many years agone, he'd have been shot in the head. Mick Jagger was kind of blown away past what I'd washed, no-ane had ever washed it before on a Stones record, but he couldn't deny that it was great and fixed the record."
When a multitrack arrives, JJs assistant tidies it up, re-naming the tracks, putting them in the order he's used to and colouring the vocal tracks pinkish. Then JJ goes through tweaking and polishing and trimming every sound that will announced on the record. Numerous companies produce plugins for Pro Tools which are digital emulations of the vintage rack gear that all the same fills Studio Ane. If he wants to run Fergie's vocal through a 1973 Roland Space Echo and a 1968 Marshall stack, it takes a couple of clicks.
Some of these plugins have become notorious. Auto Tune, developed past quondam seismologist Andy Hildebrand, was released equally a Pro Tools plugin in 1997. It automatically corrects out of tune vocals by locking them to the nearest annotation in a given key. The L1 Ultramaximizer, released in 1994 by the Israeli company Waves, launched the latest round of the loudness war. It'south a very simple looking plugin which neatly and relentlessly makes music audio a lot louder (a field of study we'll return to in a little while).
When JJ has tweaked and polished and trimmed and edited, his stereo mix is passed on to a mastering engineer, who prepares information technology for release. What happens to that stereo mix is an boggling marriage of art, science and commerce. The tools available are superficially simple—you can really simply change the EQ or the volume. Simply the difference betwixt a mastered and unmastered track is immediately obvious. Mastered recordings sound like existent records. That is to say, they all audio a footling bit alike.
In a typical week, xxx% of the U.S. Elevation 40 has been mastered at Sterling Sound in New York, which has seven studios working round the clock. There aren't many mastering engineers in the world. The Strokes recorded Is This Information technology on an old Apple Mac in Gordon Raphael'south basement studio. Only it was mastered by Greg Calbi, who too did Born To Run and Graceland.
The business of mastering is infinitely complicated. Mastering engineer Bob Katz has written a 400 page book on mastering techniques, which ends with a verse form most the fine art of mastering:
"I see:/a world which recognizes craft and training/
in audio itself which is not disdaining…"
The mastering engineer's principle tool is compression. (Sound compression is completely unrelated to data pinch, which is what turns a CD into a MP3 file.) Information technology's a unproblematic-but-complicated audio technique. The loudest parts of a rail are made quieter, which means you tin can turn the overall level upwardly, without getting distortion, and then it sounds louder. Why are Boob tube ads then much louder than TV programs? Considering their soundtracks are heavily compressed. Why are commercial radio stations much louder? Considering they're heavily compressed.
Bands, producers and record labels have always wanted to make loud records, for radio play and jukeboxes. At Motown, they realized that tambourines can cut through nigh annihilation else. If you've got someone shaking a tambourine somewhere on a rails, everyone in the pub can hear it when information technology comes on the jukebox.
With vinyl, at that place were clear physical restrictions about how wide the grooves could be, and how many grooves you could fit on a vii-inch unmarried. Mastering engineer Bob Ludwig created ultra-loud master of Led Zeppelin II, but his version was pulled when it skipped on a record actor endemic by Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegün'south daughter (if your copy has "RL" scratched in the run-out groove, it's his main, and worth a chip on eBay.)
Radio testing makes loudness more than important than e'er before. Your vii-second sample has to cutting through when played down the telephone to a mum with a screaming kid in the groundwork. Software similar Waves L1 (which has now evolved to L3) takes a track and slams every millisecond to the maximum level. With multiband compressors, the runway is split into three frequency bands. The bass, mid and treble are all independently made as loud every bit possible. That's why yous tin still hear all the words on a Girls Aloud single playing on a transistor radio half a mile away.
Loudness is hugely controversial. In interviews, mastering engineers are always clear that they'd never push a rails too far, that it'southward all Some Guy's fault. But 1,275 people have signed an online petition to get Red Hot Chilli Peppers' Californication remastered because: "The music should not exist mastered but to make all of the songs audio as loud as possible when circulate on radio."
Excessive loudness doesn't hurt sales. (What's the Story) Morning Glory was one of the loudest CDs always released until Iggy Pop broke the tape with his unlistenably distorted 1997 remastering of The Stooges' Raw Power.
So the rails has been recorded, edited, mixed and mastered. Information technology's burned on CD and in the shops. Does the polishing stop? Not quite. Just equally labels compete to get their music on the radio, so radio stations compete to sound loudest and brightest. Radio stations take always used compressors to help their programming audio clearer and cut through interference.
Now that radio stations are entirely digital, they tin become much further. Commercial stations now routinely edit songs themselves, trimming intros, chopping out boring bits, editing in station idents and—I'k non making this up—speeding up songs which they remember are likewise slow or tedious for their demographic. Some stations routinely play every track at +3%.
Of course, non everyone does it like this, although about commercial releases will have at least the final layer of mastering polish. There are plenty of people who reject the polishing process, merely they're non getting much U.S. mainstream radio play: Aberfeldy recorded their debut album Immature Forever in mono, using a single microphone to tape the v piece ring playing through bombardment-powered amplifiers. The White Stripes famously recorded Elephant on 8-rail tape at Toe Rag studios, and the album was mastered by veteran vinyl cutter Noel Summerville (who mastered the Clash'southward Combat Rock).
When former school producers and engineers talk about modern music, they're convinced that better recorded music would save the music manufacture from itself. Producer Joe Boyd wrote of the Buena Vista Social Club album (4m copies worldwide): "Its success is usually ascribed to the motion picture or the brilliant marketing. But I am convinced that the audio of the record was equally if not more important." Beautifully recorded records by Norah Jones, Bob Dylan and others accept certainly shifted units. But the Cerise Hot Chilli Peppers' brutally mastered Californication has sold 15m copies worldwide.
Why does most music audio the same these days? Because tape companies are scared, they don't desire to take risks, and they're doing the best they tin to generate mainstream radio hits. That is their chore, after all. And as the skies go along to darken over the poor benighted business of selling music, labels are going to cling to what they know more fiercely than ever.
And so is that it? Have we arrived? Will records continue to increase in loudness and homogeneity until literally everything sounds similar Californication? Optimistic engineers dream of a solar day when the world'due south music listeners spontaneously rebel against over-processed music. The Loudness War will end and people will stop buying Blackness Eyed Peas records. A new era of loftier-fidelity recording will be born, and men in white coats will once again pace confidently through acoustically-lively studios placing their vintage microphones with care.
Pessimistic engineers can run into an endless war confronting fidelity, as always-more than sophisticated technology makes popular music louder and shiner than ever. As hi-fi systems are abased for earbuds and mobile phones, there will be no reason to make overnice-sounding records. Worse however, the applied science behind systems like Waves Ultramaximizer could easily be built into an iPod, automatically remastering all those dull old Neil Immature records into Large LOUD IN-YOUR-FACE BANGERS.
In reality, applied science might save the recording procedure. At the moment, Pro Tools operates at twice (or four times) the resolution of a CD. A smashing deal of quality is lost as those huge files are squished to the CD format, before existence further squished into MP3s on your iPod. In a very few years, we'll take 1 terabyte iPods, easily capable of handling thousands of recordings in their original high-definition form. At the same time, every office of the signal chain—from earbuds to digital/audio converters—is improving and getting cheaper. Studio software is too constantly developing, so perhaps mastering and compression can become more subtle and less annoying. Information technology's quite possible that we'll look back at the starting time years of this century as a crude interval of low-fidelity sound. And perchance the record manufacture will even persuade usa to re-buy all those old records nevertheless once more.
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Tom Whitwell is a digital product consultant in S London. He is gradually re-purchasing his iTunes library on overpriced vinyl, and designs open source music hardware at Music Thing Modular . Follow Tom: Linkedin | Tumblr
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Source: https://medium.com/cuepoint/why-do-all-records-sound-the-same-830ba863203