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I got an email from my father today directing me to an internet forum debate regarding how over-compression in mastering is ruining music today and I responded with what you’re about to read–the simplest, most easy-to-read breakdown on this topic I could come up with–an explanation that anyone will be able to understand. No flowery or abstract adjectives, just the meat and potatoes. If something still isn’t clear, leave a comment. I’m mostly posting this article to save myself some time (to direct our clients to) but this post may be helpful for other mastering engineers who’d like to do the same.

Note: this post refers to sound compression, not MP3 or zip compression. Learn more about the differences between sound compression and data compression here.

What Is Mastering Compression?

Mastering compression* (”limiting”) reduces the dynamic range of a recording. Dynamic range is the range between the loudest and quietest point in a recording or section of a recording. Dynamics and loudness are inversely proportional: the less dynamic a recording is, the higher the average loudness of that recording can be, and vice versa. Today, there is said to be a ‘Loudness War’ between labels trying to release the loudest records possible.

The Pros and Cons of Loudness

When we’re talking about the consequences of loudness, we’re really talking about two different things:

• From a macro perspective: A louder/less dynamic recording means all of the sections of the song will be about the same volume. For ‘Verse Chorus Verse’ style songs, the benefit is that the song comes in loud right off the bat and stays loud from section to section. The downside is it means the chorus doesn’t “hit you” or sound as big as it otherwise might because there is little or no change from the verse to the chorus. In fact, if there’s more stuff going on during the chorus, individual elements may actually get smaller. For example, heavily compressed rock mixes tend to have a bigger snare sound during the verses than the choruses.
• From a micro perspective: Compression from one beat to another is hard for the untrained ear to hear, unless it’s very extreme. And even then it is hard to explain what it is you’re hearing–you just know it sounds bad. At this scale, compression makes the mix sound more “exciting” right away, but if overdone can be fatiguing on the ear to listen to. Perhaps more importantly, the drums will often be less punchy if a mix is more heavily compressed.** A former coworker and assistant to one of my all-time favorite mixers once said to me, “mastering ruins everything.”

Is Louder Better?

There was a psychological study which showed that people consistently prefer recordings that are louder, even by an increment as small as 1 dB, even when they’re not told what the change is. (Anyone want to find the link for me?) If you want an extreme example of over-compression, just listen to the radio. They use a more complex system of compression to get recordings even louder than CDs. And yet for every person who puts up a fuss in the blogosphere/messageboardiverse about mastering ruining music today, I have a memory of someone in my childhood telling me how they like the sound of radio. It just has that magic je ne sais quoi. There have been studies which indicate that loudness has a strong effect on which radio station a person will stop on when channel surfing.

While I consider myself to be more of a ‘new school’ engineer rather than one pining for the days of yore, I sometimes wish more records today had bigger dynamic changes. My favorite example is “Quiet” by the Smashing Pumpkins, which came out in 1993 before the Loudness Wars really began. It will probably be hard to tell on YouTube, but when the guitar solo comes in on the record, the song just gets so much louder. If you already have the song cranked, the solo will hurt your ears a little bit. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is rock & roll.

For a case study in consumer backlash against loudness, check out my post about the Metallica album Death Magnetic.

*The type of compression I’m talking about here is “limiting”, a specific type of compression that comes at the end of every mastering engineer’s signal chain. I’m using the term compression throughout the post because it will be more familiar to musicians and readers.

**If I know that a project I’m mixing will be mastered by someone else, I usually try to make my drums a little punchier than I want them in order to compensate for the effect that mastering will have, unless I know the mastering engineer tends to go easy on the compression. This is also why it is usually best to select a mastering engineer that your mix engineer has worked with in the past, so that the mix engineer can anticipate what will happen to the mix in the mastering stage and mix accordingly.

My girlfriend and I met at a Swell Season concert.  Many of you might know them as “that band in the movie Once” that won an Academy Award for Best Original Song from a Motion Picture, but they are in fact a real couple with a real band making real music.

Our anniversary came up on Tuesday (she’s put up with me for a whole year now) and we were taking a trip down memory lane.  Being sentimental types, we kept trying to find ways to incorporate the Swell Season into the evening but couldn’t quite come up with anything exciting beyond listening to the record (which we didn’t end up doing anyway).

The band is great live.  Glen Hansard is a bit chatty on stage, but it is an engrossing couple hours of storytelling (and they’ll start touring in November so get tickets if you can).  But the film is fantastic if you’ve never seen it.  It probably has the best making-a-record sequence committed to film.

The only thing that bugged me about that act in the movie was after they finished recording, the engineer turns to the group and says “Well, let’s give it the car listen” and they proceed into a very scenic montage of the group piling into a car and driving around Dublin listening to the record.

The idea is that no matter what, a professional CD should sound good in the car.  It doesn’t matter who mixed it or produced it or what kind of car you drive, you should NEVER put a commercial album into your car stereo and say this doesn’t sound right.

In practice this is totally false.  In fact there are a number of CDs that sound absolutely horrendous in the car—The Who’s 2006 release Endless Wire comes to mind (which is a shame because Pete Townsend takes the time to outline every piece of vintage gear that they recorded and mixed with in the liner notes; proving once again it’s not what you have, it’s how you use it).  But still, the car listen is a pretty decent barometer in most cases.

Personally, I hate the car listen.  In the eyes of many pros, the car listen demonstrates that you aren’t familiar enough with your room and your gear to know when you are making the right decisions.  For most situations, you should be terrified if you are in the studio with a house engineer who says “Well, let’s give it a listen out in the car.”  That’s a bit like an architectural engineer saying “Well, I’m pretty sure the building is level, but we may want to give it another look around noontime when the light is better.”

Admittedly there are times when it might be necessary to use the car listen.  When you first come to a new studio, you might take a book of CDs into the new listening environment and play them in the control room to get used to the character of the space and the gear.  Then you might take your first mix out from the control room to the car, which is a portable, familiar listening space that has reasonable frequency range (as opposed to headphones), and test the mix out in order to make sure you properly assessed the room and made the right adjustments.

So what makes the car listen so appealing?  Well there are a number of factors that are present in automobile listening situations that you can’t test in the somewhat academic environment of a professional (or semi-professional) recording studio.

For one thing, everyone is familiar with what their car sounds like, so clients like to hear things in the car because they don’t have to actually go home to hear their music on a familiar loudspeaker system.  They can just walk out to the parking lot.  Of course if you go into the engineer’s car (like they did in Once) that is only for the benefit of the engineer.

Another benefit is that you get to hear what the record sounds like in noisy environments.  Studios are meant to be clinical, noiseless environments where you can hear minute details and imperfections.  They are ideal listening situations, but the real world is rarely ideal.  Most of the time consumers are going to listen over the hum of an engine going 60 miles per hour with the AC blaring and wind gusting against the windshield.

In those instances, you will lose most of your top end since environmental noise buries those frequencies very easily.  Also, bass reproduction suffers in the car because much of the energy goes out away from the car as well as inside it.  The thin material of the car doesn’t retain and resonate low frequencies the way it does mids and highs.

You can listen to the record in a real world situation and say “Well, Kanye usually gives me a bit more low end than this on the highway” and adjust accordingly.

Bear in mind that I’m saying a professional engineer who works at a particular studio consistently should never suggest a car listen, if you are patronizing a studio though, by all means take the record out to the car and give it a listen.  The engineer might even be grateful that you broached the subject so he doesn’t appear unprofessional. 

At the studio, you have to trust that the engineer is making the right decisions with your art, but it is never a mistake to check his work.

Despite the democratization of music production technology over the past ten years, most of the mastering process is still a black art to most people.  You can buy a cheap microphone for your computer at Wal-Mart to record your bedroom demos, but for some reason you still can’t get your music as loud and clean as Kanye.  The brave can attempt a lot of it at home with varying degrees of success, but an esoteric lexicon still exists that causes many to second guess their ability to deliver a professional product.  “Red Book” falls into this category.

If you just google “Red Book CD” or “Red Book Master” you’ll wind up with a bunch of questionable mastering sites offering a lot of warnings but not a lot of information.  They say “Oh, you can make a CD at home, but is it a Red Book??!?!”  Then they proceed with obfuscating generalities that encourage you to accept the fact that you are out of your depth and that you should use their service, in part, to obtain such a mystical artifact.

Well allow me to demystify the term and you’ll see that getting a Red Book master is not reason enough to choose a mastering house.

“Red Book” refers to a document created in 1980 by Sony and Philips.  A team of about 8 researchers was tasked with creating the specifications for standardizing compact discs (CDs if you’ve been living under a rock…on Mars…with your fingers in your ears and singing “la la laaaaa” to yourself at the top of your lungs for the past 30 years).   Researchers in the companies had a propensity to house their reports on the various forms of CDs in color-coded folders or books and refer to them as such.

These eventually became known as the “Rainbow Book Series”.  Lesser-known standards also included “Yellow Book” for CD-ROMs, “White Book” for video discs, “Beige Book” for photo discs, and “Scarlett Book” for super-audio discs.  The specifications found within these books dealt explicitly with standardizing production for the companies.  With Red Book, the virtual monopoly in CD technology at the time by Sony and Philips contributed to most of the other manufacturers adopting the same standards for compatibility across the board.

The Red Book stipulates that a standard CD should be 120 mm in diameter, 1.2 mm thick, and composed of specific materials (polycarbonate plastic substrate sandwiching some form of thin metal and coated in lacquer if you want to be explicit).  Pretty much every commercially available CD conforms to these physical standards.

Interesting aside:  the companies originally wanted 60 minute of play time with 100 mm to 115 mm discs.  The ultimate choice of 74 minutes came from the suggestion by Herbert von Karajan, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, that the CDs should accommodate Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony, which was recorded in 1951 at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany.   This increased time necessitated the increase to 120 mm diameter discs.  The first test disc ever made was pressed in Hanover in 1981 and featured Von Karajan conducting the same group, so his opinion must have been important to the researchers.

 

Additionally, Audio CDs must have three areas: the lead-in, the program, and the lead-out.  Every disc-burning program that writes audio CDs uses these areas.  The lead-in contains the table of contents and directs CD players to the track markers and song titles and so forth.  The program area is where the actual audio is housed (in Audio Engineering, program is just a term used to describe any kind of sound content).  The lead-out contains no data and indicates to players that the CD has ended.

Lastly, the Red Book stipulates what kind of files can be used and how they should be encoded and organized on the CD.  Discs can contain up to 74 minutes of audio, up to 99 tracks with a minimum of 4 seconds per track, with the possibility of 99 separate sub-divisions within each track.

The program content must be the standard 44.1 kHz sample rate, 16-bit depth and be two channel stereo.  Data is stored in frames of 1/75 second length and data is written in sector sizes of 2,352 bytes per frame.  Frames are encoded in such a way to minimize the effect of damage to a CD and house error correction and display information.

That last bit is a little abstruse, but basically all of these are the standard for every disc-burning program out there.

So what’s the big deal with Red Book masters?  The short answer is that there isn’t one—at least not today.  Understand that the Red Book was written in 1980, before commercial audio CDs ever even hit the market.  These were the standards the companies decided on before ever releasing a CD and were to be used as the template for mass producing CDs for the future.  In a large part, the Red Book is merely a description of what an audio CD is, not some uber-special type of audio CD that you need to have special gear to create.

Once upon a time, the means of creating audio CDs existed only in big manufacturing plants and the common-folk had to patronize these establishments to get their discs reproduced.  Now, technology has come so far that virtually every disc making tool available to the consumer can and does follow these standards.

I suspect that the only reason this term even exists anymore is because of stand-alone hard disc recorder/burners like the Alesis Masterlink, which give the option to record different kinds of discs.  Since many recorders are capable of recording at much higher (and some at much lower) quality than standard audio discs, the Red Book option is selected so that whatever you’ve recorded comes out playable from the burner.  I speculate that the “Red Book” option on these recorders is meant to be a short-hand for burning a playable disc as opposed to a data or archival disc.  Also, since many of the professional hard-disc recorders were made in the 80s and 90s, companies were still tinkering with Super Audio CDs and other forms of discs that might have been included as options.

Think back 10 years ago when you were burning CDs, maybe one in every ten or twenty didn’t work or some would only play on a certain brand of CD player, or maybe it only played on your computer but not your car or in your car but not your CD player.  Across the board, these problems have been reduced with error correction and more intuitive interfaces, not to mention the fact that the average consumer now knows the difference between a data disc and an audio disc and can recite the sample rate and bit-depth for Audio CDs.

The Red Book standard is in many ways simple antiquated jargon for specifications that we can safely take for granted anyway.  Some might latch on to this term because it’s something they can use to sound more professional than you.  Of course, by and large the people employing the term don’t know any better, they just know that they can push the “Red Book” button and make something without knowing what it is. 

If you burn your disc using an audio-CD writing program, using a normal CD-R, and using a modern CD Burner, then you’ve got yourself a Red Book disc.  I would suggest burning at the slowest speed possible to minimize errors, but other than that you are golden!

The snare drum is an instrument that receives a lot of interest in the mixing stage.  Prince famously said that the most important things in a mix are “the boom and the slap.”  Many people like their snares “thuddy” while others prefer “punchy.”  One term that I hear a lot is “poppy” and unlike the previous terms, poppy implies a very specific effect.

First, let’s agree on our nomenclature.  I use the term poppy to mean something that sounds like it is popping, i.e. “I want this snare to really pop here.”  This is not expressly talking about the kind of snare drum found in typical pop music (although many of the snare drums in pop music might be described as poppy).

What sonic qualities do you think of when you pop a balloon with a needle?  It’s loud, it’s sudden, and it’s short (that’s what she said…).  So in terms of an audio waveform, something described as poppy should theoretically contain a lot of initial transients and then go away relatively quickly.

You can achieve this effect in a number of ways.  One way is to use single-ply heads on the snare drum.  A thinner drumhead takes less energy to excite and has less dampening.  Of course thinner heads, especially on snare drums, aren’t well equipped to take the kind of beating most rock drummers would apply and not everyone wants to go to the trouble of changing drumheads every time they want a certain effect.  Furthermore, thinner heads tend to ring longer so it doesn’t create the sudden shortness that we are after.

Another way might be to use an exciter or transient shaper.  These are somewhat more obscure pieces of audio gear and not everyone has access to them or would know how to use them properly.  A much simpler way is to simply use a compressor.

As you are probably aware, a compressor is a form of Automatic Gain Control.  If are in charge of managing the volume of the track, you’d sit at the mixer with your finger on the fader and listen; if the sound got just a little too loud, you’d turn the fader down just a bit.  When the sound returns to normal, you push the fader back up to the starting position.  If the sound got wayyyyy too loud, you’d turn the fader down a whole bunch, then go back to the starting position.

Compressors can do all that for you.  But as in the example, there is going to be some amount of time between your ear recognizing something is too loud and your finger being able to execute the gain control on the fader.  Compressors generally have the same problem in reaction time.

Of course nowadays we have all kinds of cool things in the digital domain like lookahead limiters which can actually see what’s coming from an audio level standpoint and apply the proper compression necessary so that the compression is relatively inaudible. 

But in the analog world, no compressor is a look-ahead (without using a whole lot of analog rigmarole involving delays and such that I won’t go in to).  That means that there is ALWAYS window between the initial sound getting to the compressor and the compressor kicking in that passes signal through the compressor untouched by the AGC.  This window is adjusted by the “Attack Time” knob on the compressor, but no matter how fancy an analog compressor is, the Attack Time is always going to be greater than zero.

So if you imagine patching a compressor into a snare drum track with the threshold relatively low with the ratio relatively high, the snare drum will sound and for a brief moment the attack transients will get through untouched, almost as though there is no compressor in the chain, before the compressor snaps in and reduces the level.

This has an interesting effect because those first few transients will always be at full volume since no analog compressor can operate fast enough to catch them.  No matter how hard you squish and flatten the snare drum, in the analog world some will always get through untouched.

Of course you don’t need to have analog gear to accomplish this, any analog compressor emulator will do the trick as well as any digital compressor not set in look-ahead, soft limit, or brick wall mode.

So this window provides that initial explosion of attack transients.  When the compressor kicks in, the snare drum suddenly drops in level making the snare drum appear to be shorter in duration.  You can add in reverb or even make the threshold higher so that the snare drum doesn’t drop drastically in level, but the point is to use the compressor to accentuate initial transients.

This effect was popular in the 70s and 80s and can really make a snare drum cut through the mix without overtaking it.  Instead of focusing the ear on a grand legato snare drum with a half second decay time—which might sound over the rest of the band—the mind is instantly focused on those first few transients that occur in literally hundredths of a second and then get out of the way.  Like I mentioned in my comments on Keith’s blog post about Claps and Snaps, shorter rhythmic sounds focus the ear on the exactitude of the beat causing your attention to snap suddenly to the meter of the tune rather than rounding everything out and blending many things together.

If any of you dear readers have any sonic descriptors you’d like me to analyze, feel free to comment below and I’ll do my best to sort it out for you.

Today the Wizard of Waukesha passed away at the age of 94.  The father of multi-track recording techniques and a pioneer in musical technology, Les Paul was really the start of the modern music industry.  Anyone who has ever plugged a guitar into an amp or put sound on sound owes Mr. Paul a huge debt of gratitude.

I remember my first trip to New York—the first thing I did when I got off the plane was catch a cab to the Iridium Jazz Club on Broadway to get a glimpse of the man who started it all.  I had purchased the tickets weeks in advance.  Over the phone, a surly and quick New Yorker told me that he played two sets every Monday and the first one had sold out.  For the next few weeks, I had nightmares in which I stepped off the plane, turned on my phone, and got a message notifying me that Paul had died during his early set. 

Well fortunately for me that didn’t happen and I had the honor of witnessing one of the greatest figures in the history of the music business toward the end of his prodigious life still doing what he loved best.

You can read his awe-inspiring story anywhere:  how he revolutionized the guitar, how he created sound-on-sound, how his experiments with multi-track recording techniques changed the face of popular music.  This post is not meant to be a biography chronicling his achievements in the music world.  Instead, this is a celebration of a man whose relentless pursuit of his own passions allowed him to achieve those innovations and whose spirit, like gravity, drew crowds of professionals and amateurs alike toward him.

Surely if Les Paul had never been born, somebody else would have perfected the electric guitar.  Leo Fender and Adolph Rickenbacher both created and marketed their own solid-body electrics during the 30s.  And surely if Les Paul hadn’t been around, Bing Crosby would’ve found somebody else to tinker with the Nazi tape recorder brought to him from The War. 

But the fact is, Les Paul was around and his enthusiasm for all things musical made him the prime target for anybody with anything music related.  Ultimately, that is how one man could have been at the center for all the activity in the early music technology business—people simply wanted to be around him.  They knew that he was the kind of guy who could and would milk a musical idea for all it was worth.

His early career was a time when you couldn’t go to Guitar Center and get an hecho en Mexico Telecaster for $130.  You had to carve an electric yourself from a plank of wood.  You couldn’t just walk in to Best Buy and get some portable Japanese hard disc recorder.  You had to invent your own recording device from scratch, solder it up, and test it out. 

There were no books on multi-track recording effects, no blogs, and no degrees in audio engineering.  But by the time he was 10 years old, he was already learning about radio electronics at the local radio station.  He first experimented with overdubbing by adding new bumps to his mother’s piano rolls.  He was building crystal radio kits before he learned how to drive.  Despite his life of innovation, Les Paul never even graduated high school.

Les Paul’s story is a great American tale of a man driven by his passions to create, innovate, and perfect.  Even toward the end of his life in that dim club on Broadway, his fervor was palpable.  His set at Iridium was a captivating hour-plus of storytelling and jamming.  Interspersed with music, Paul regaled the audience with brilliant anecdotes of his life in the music business: things he had done or people he had met.  He then invited numerous guest musicians (amateurs and pros alike) onto the stage and played through songs with them, smiling and laughing all along the way.

In 2005 Paul released his first recording since the 1970s.  Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played earned two Grammys and featured guest performances by Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and many more.  Like his sets at Iridium, the record was a testament to a long and fruitful life at the epicenter of modern music.

Surrounded by friends and family, Les Paul died today of complications arising from pneumonia and left behind a long and inspiring legacy not only of accomplishments and innovations, but also proof positive that when talent and passion intersect anything is possible. 

Les, you will be missed.

I am a big fan of the English language. When I was little and the teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, the first thing I said was “A DINOSAUR!” (Mom always said I could be anything I want to be…). After that, my childhood ambition was to be an etymologist. I discovered rather quickly that that isn’t much of a growth industry, so I pulled the plug on that dream. But people who know me know that I like to speak colorfully but precisely and so certain words really get my goat.

The latest word that really irks me is “massive.” I can’t watch the news or listen to NPR or read a newspaper without this word appearing several times. I understand that everyone intends for this word to mean “really big” but as a student of language and physics, I just can’t accept certain uses. In quantum physics, massive means anything that has mass. An elephant is massive, a feather is massive, Cowboy stadium is massive, a molecule of oxygen is massive. At rest, a photon has no mass. It is a zero-rest mass particle and is therefore non-massive.

Granted, this is a bit of an esoteric definition and not everybody is well-versed in quantum physics, but I still think massive should only apply to real things that have real weight. Like what exactly is a “massive earthquake” or a “massive heart attack”? What part of those things are massive? An Earthquake can have lots of destructive power, but in the end there is no mass to the earthquake, it is a seismic consequence of earthly phenomena, but not a tangible thing. A heart attack can be serious, but there is no substance to it, it is a biological event.  I know that the dictionary says these are acceptable uses, but it’s a bit like calling something a “basic acid.”  Yes, that is technically correct, but there is a certain level where that phrase is laughable.

These are the things that keep me up at night, waking suddenly in a cold sweat.

Yes, I have a girlfriend…

Well in the music business we have another term that is way overused and now saturates common parlance due to the disturbing popularity of American Idol. “Pitchy” is often the epitome of inexact speech in the music business and it usually serves little purpose other than being a polite way of saying “Hey, you sang that wrong.”  But just what the heck are they intending to say?  I mean, anybody who sings should be pitchy in that they have pitches.  You certainly wouldn’t want to sing without pitch.

There are three real uses for the term pitchy.

I’m a producer and I know that you sang that out of tune, unfortunately I don’t know whether your were flat or sharp so I’m going to use a vague term that could mean either. I don’t have time for proper ear training or simply didn’t pay attention to know what exactly you did, so I’m going to send you on a wild goose chase for the next few takes and let you figure it out on your own. Thank God you paid me all up front!

This is typical producer-speak that you’ll hear in the studio numerous times through any vocal session. Many producers don’t like to admit at any time that they don’t know what’s going on. They’ll take shelter in vague terms like this so that they can appear to be in control while getting the artist to do the leg work for them. Clever indeed.

You’ll often hear this application of the term from non-singing producers and those who gained their musical credibility by playing set-pitch (like a bass a la Randy Jackson) or non-pitched instruments (like drummers).

This usage is sometimes permissible because musicians are very delicate people, especially singers. Many, especially those who focus on live performance, prefer to just get behind the mic and wail, not really caring for a critique on their performance. In the studio, they’d just prefer the producer to say, “Nah, do it again one more time with feeling!” Eventually they’ll get it. As a producer/engineer it is our job to decide when it is proper to be delicately oblique and when it is necessary to be unapologetically exact.

I’m a singer who is having to do a little bit more vocal acrobatics than I am used to. So I’m a little under on those high high notes and a little over on those low low notes.

Despite all the explanations of the term “pitchy” that try to make it sound overly technical, this is probably the best use of the term. This is when the singer kind of varies between being flat and sharp.

For instance, I am an awful singer and my comfortable range is probably about a perfect 4^th. But hey, people don’t pay me to sing on their records. If I were to try and go beyond that range my pitch center would naturally pull anything beyond that range back toward the center. Therefore, all the notes higher than a 4^th might be flat and all the notes lower than a 4^th might be sharp. The opposite might be true for someone who in their mind is trying to overcompensate by overestimating the distances on highs and lows.

In these instances, it isn’t really prudent to go out and say “Ok, you were sharp here, here, and here and you were flat there, there, and there.” So instead someone might say that you are pitchy, but I think that statement needs to come with a footnote saying that you are undershooting the highs and overshooting the lows.

You’d probably encounter this kind of pitchiness with singer/songwriters, indie musicians, and people who aren’t overly confident in their voice. Present company included…

I’m a singer singing in genre and I like to bend notes! It’s ethnomusicological!

This is common in blues and jazz and is the ivory tower version of pitchiness. For example, on the last word of the song, the band lands on the tonic and the singer starts just under the pitch and bends so that they are in tune, ultimately winding up on the desired pitch.

Of course in this instance, the flatness and sharpness aren’t necessarily undesired and there would be no reason for a producer to call it pitchy. They’d just say “Wow, what soul!” It might be necessary for someone to ask if you could do the scoop a little quicker or slower so that it doesn’t sound like a mistake, but ultimately it’s just character.

I suppose I should talk about the ethnomusicological underpinnings of this kind of inflection. Jazz and blues are rooted in an African (American) tradition that is historically grounded in untrained singing. Bending may have originated simply from common singers initially missing the note, but improvising a way to get to the right note and sound artful in the process.

Ultimately, I think that Randy Jackson is utilizing the first kind of pitchiness in his commentaries in order to stylishly obfuscate and not embarrass himself on national TV. But in his own explanation found here, he seems to side with definition two.

Airy:  Spaciousness, often a pleasant mostly treble-based reverb sound.  Extended frequency response that runs up through the top end of the bandwidth.

Brittle:  Peaking in high-frequencies, weak fundamentals with slightly distorted or harsh highs.

Crisp:  Good high-frequency response with good transient quality

Crispy:  Constant, but perhaps random high frequency sounds not unlike frying foods.

Delicate: Extended high frequency range without being harsh.  Emphasis on high frequencies extending to 20 KHz, but without the peaking. 

Edgy:  High frequency emphasis from about 3.5 to 6 KHz with harmonic content overly strong in comparison to fundamentals.  Can deal with high frequency distortion and rasp.

Piercing:  Hard on the ears, screechy and sharp.  Narrow peaks occurring between 3 and 10 KHz.

Raspy:  Harsh sounds in the 6 KHz range that sounds like a scratchy voice.

Sibilant:  S and Sh sounds are overly emphasized. 

Sizzly:  Similar to crisp, like the sound of the decay on a riveted cymbal.

Steely or Shiny:  Lots of top end from 3-6 KHz with peaky highs (as opposed to flat but boosted top end)

Sweet:  Flat high-frequency response without distortion and extended the full bandwidth.  

The final section of the audible spectrum is the high frequency or treble portion. Humans theoretically are able to hear up to 20 KHz (that is, newborn baby girls can theoretically hear up to 20 KHz at normal listening levels; for the rest of us, considerably lower). So what could happen in the 16,500 Hz range if no new instruments can sound there? 

It contains almost nothing but upper harmonics of treble instruments and room tone.  This helps solo instruments and vocals sound present and full, but also adds brightness and clarity to a mix

Most telephones cut off around 3.5 KHz yet you can still tell whose voice it is on the phone.  This tells you that practically everything needed to understand and distinguish any audio content pretty much lives below this range.

Pretty much only dog whistles operate in this range, so there is absolutely no need to worry about any more fundamentals or really any lower order harmonics getting in the way of any treatment you decide to apply.

Boosting in this range again helps with upper harmonics and upper harmonics are important to our brains in calculating proximity.  The closer we are to something, the more detail we can hear in the sound.  Similarly, the quieter an environment is when a sound is made, the more apparent that sound seems to us.  The upper harmonics of a sound are generally very soft and are the first things to go when we are either far away from a sound source or it is sounding in a noisy environment.  As such, the more upper frequency detail we can hear, the closer our mind perceives the sound source to be.  Furthermore, we perceive upper harmonic detail as clarity and salience.

Many mastering engineers, as a final polish job, will use a very hi-fi shelving EQ and boost the frequencies from roughly 16 or 18 KHz up about 3 or 4 dB.  The difference can be quite astonishing.

This range also gives you airiness and some pleasant room sounds.  But boosting this range can also have negative effects like hissing, piercing, and sibilance.

Sibilance, which is an overemphasis on frequencies ranging roughly from 6-8 KHz, is by far the most apparent and troublesome.  The beast way to deal with this is with a de-esser rather than an EQ so as not to sacrifice the harmonic content that you like that isn’t abrasive.  A de-esser is a frequency-dependent compressor, it only compresses a narrow bandwidth, usually between 4 and 9 KHz to tame sibilance.  It can be adjusted to work on cymbals or even hiss if it has the proper variables.

Next week, I’ll examine some of the commonly used terms associated with high frequency content and that will wrap up my series on the Audible Spectrum.  I hope you’ve enjoyed it so far!

Bright:  Emphasis on high-frequencies, specifically upper-mids with emphasis on harmonics.

Crunchy:  Exists between 2K and 4K, typically distortion based and generally pleasant.  Can lend rhythmic distinction to distorted rhythm parts.

Detailed:  Minutiae of the music are easily audible.  Present sounding, intimate and close with lots of articulation and transient response throughout the upper mid range.

Forward:  Present, in your face.  Detail present in transients and upper harmonics which lends a feeling of proximity.

Glassy:  Brittle sounding, too much upper-mid content especially with regard to harmonics in relation to fundamentals. 

Grungy:  Lots of distortion with emphasis on odd harmonics.

Hard:  Excellent transient response combined with an overemphasis on upper-midrange frequencies.

Harsh:  Peaking in the 2-6 KHz range.

Metallic:  Emphasis on upper-mid range frequencies, specifically those that deal with odd order harmonics in this range.

Pinched:  Narrow-bandwidth, often relegated to the upper-mid range frequencies.  Try boosting lower frequencies to balance.

Consisting of frequencies from 1.2 to 3.5 KHz, we once again have a nice range of frequencies to play with.  The high-mids contain lots of harmonics, especially the lower to mid order harmonics for the mid-range instruments.  The range of  2300 Hz gives you plenty of room to work with in carving out specific places for various instruments to sit.  Only the highest instruments can really play in this range:  the piccolo can sound in this band and it also accounts for the top octave or so of the piano, which most people know not a whole lot happens there.  So there are no new instruments sounding fundamentals to get in the way and cover up the harmonic content that you are treating in this band.

Additionally, this range is very important because it contains much of the sudden transient content.  Attack transients, sibilance, consonants and more all live in this register, so it is very important for understandability as well as punchiness, presence, and dynamics. 

The human voice is the most dynamic instrument on the planet.  When I work on TV and movies, I’m always amazed at how suddenly the voice changes dynamics.  Looking at the waveforms, the T, C, D, B and other consonant sounds are so short and quiet while the vowel sounds are exponentially louder and longer.  This can be a problem when mixing music because you might miss out on an initial or ultimate consonant sound that totally changes the meaning of a song without that consonant.  I remember working on a Christian rock album and the line was “We know that we can’t live with out you.”  When the mixing was done, they loved the track, but the “t” in “can’t” had disappeared.  Of course in a religious context you don’t want to be saying that you know you can live without God, so we had to spend a little extra time making sure that came across without being overbearing.

Just a crazy little factoid, almost all consonant sounds sound the same no matter who says them.  The majority of the time, you can fly in a t from one person, paste it in, and no one would know the difference.  You really only know from the vowel sounds what somebody sounds like.  Consonants are just air pushing against your lips, teeth, tongue, and mouth and we are all roughly equal to each other in body composition—at least enough that it isn’t imminently audible in most instances.

This is also the range where attack sounds live:  picks strumming strings, sticks striking cymbals, this is the range where you can hear all that.  Giving a boost to those sounds in this range can lead to a more present sound.  After all, your mind thinks your closer to something the more detail you can hear of it.  So if you can hear a stick tapping a drumhead, by god you must be close to it.  We’ll talk more about psychoacoustics and proximity in the next article.

Also, many big time producers believe that in this band lies the frequency that makes digital sound abrasive and therefore worse than tape, which centers around 2 KHz.  While this may or may not be the case, it certainly cannot be argued that harshness, edginess, and abrasiveness live in this frequency band.  Raucous and in your face sounds like screeching guitars and sailing synths need this range so that they can cut and make your ear drums bleed.

Next week, I’ll look at some common terms for upper-mid range problems and some common solutions