Recording 101 teaches us that the audio spectrum is 20-20,000 Hz and it is our job as recording engineers to manage those frequencies. For introductory level classes, that is a usable definition, but it often leads to misunderstandings. >Do we hear 20 Hz as much as 20,000 Hz? Do we hear those frequencies as well as 2,000 Hz? The answer to both is no. In fact, given contemporary technological limitations, it isn’t even possible to accomplish most of that.

 

For those of you who read Jay’s Primer on Audio Frequency Bands and made it all the way the bottom, you would have read some interesting things about broadcast standards and encoding algorithms.  Broadcast standards here in the US actually cut off frequencies above 15 kHz.  That is, radio and television broadcasts don’t even bother with the top 5000 Hz of the audible spectrum!  If there were such a thing as radio anymore, you’d know to laugh off any audio engineer who promises you “radio quality mixes.”  Also, cutoffs are employed in almost all digital encoding algorithms in order to prevent aliasing of upper frequencies.

 

On the other end of the spectrum, most playback systems are not designed to go below 30 Hz.  Currently, the lowest reproducible frequency by any JBL system is a live sound reinforcement loud speaker with woofer that goes down to 25 Hz.  They also have consumer and studio woofers with roughly the same specs.  You’ll notice that these are all woofer systems and not standard speakers for desktop and meter-bridge monitoring.  The standard studio monitors without a woofer falloff sharply at ~45 Hz.  With this in mind, you should know not to expect to hear anything below 40 Hz on a standard system without a woofer.  Furthermore, you should know that about 90% of your audience will not be able to physically reproduce anything below 50 Hz given the standard consumer set up.

 

This is not to downplay the psychological impact of low or high frequencies.  These play a very important role in psychoacoustics.  Low-lows, though inaudible, help us perceive lowness partially through feel rather than sound.  High-highs also help us perceive presence and therefore clarity by giving more emphasis to the minutiae of a sound that you’d only hear by being close to it in the real world.

 

Next week, I’ll clearly define the component regions of the audio spectrum and talk about the various ways to treat undesirable maladies afflicting them individually.

More from Phil’s Audible Spectrum series:

• The Audible Spectrum, Part 1: Introduction
• The Audible Spectrum, Part 3: Components
• The Audible Spectrum, Part 4: Sub-Bass Issues
• The Audible Spectrum, Part 5: Harmonics, Overtones, and Formants Primer

The blog has been on hiatus for the month but we will start writing again in the next 10 days or so. We will kick things back off with a bang, I promise.

(In the mean time, follow us on our shiny new Twitter page: @FixYourMix)

Over the course of hundreds of interactions with clients through Fix Your Mix, both in a mixing and mastering capacity, I have noticed that there is a great disagreement out there on the practical frequencies in audio.  This is strange to me because we have such a vague lexicon for our enterprise (boomy, boxy, tinny, etc.) that you’d think we’d all latch on to terms with such defined parameters as Low, Low-Mid, High, et al.

 

But nevertheless, every couple months I get a client who says “I love the mix, but I’d really like to hear more bass, can you boost 10 Hz by like 5 dB?”  So for all of you loyal readers out there and as a reference for future clients, I have composed a series of articles describing the portions of the frequency spectrum.

 

Here is an excellent primer for discussing frequency ranges. Jay works in post-production (television, film, etc.), so his end goals are different from those of us in the music business. He also neglects to emphasize the importance of upper frequencies for imbuing a recording with presence, clarity, and professional quality.  But other than that it is an excellent breakdown of the frequency bands.  For this week though, we’ll be talking about the audible frequency spectrum at large.

 

The audible frequency range is generally accepted to run from 20 to 20,000 Hz.  Some people hear more, most people hear less.  However, it is important to understand that this broad frequency range is supposed to include the frequencies that the average person is physically able to hear.  For the purposes of experimentation, frequencies outside of the range can be heard, but they have to be amplified to such an extreme that they are not worth measuring.

 

To the left is the Fletcher-Munson Equal Loudness Curve, established in 1937.  It is probably the most cited graph in psychoacoustics (although the Robinson-Dadson Equal Loudness Curve of 1956 has been shown to be more accurate, since Fletcher-Munson is the most widely used, the following commentary will focus on that).  This graph plots sound pressure level (SPL) in phons against frequency.  The lines indicate equal apparent loudness.  That is, if you were to follow each line, from 20 to 20k, you’d see the variation in amplitude necessary to make each frequency sound equal in loudness.  For example, on the top curve, take 1000 Hz sounding at 120 phons as the baseline.  In order to hear 20 Hz at the same apparent level, you’d have to amplify it to 130 phons.  The same goes for 20k.

 

Another interesting phenomenon about this curve is how exaggerated the differences become at lower amplitudes.  For instance, when you look at 1000 Hz at 20 phons (the third line from the bottom), you can see that it takes almost 80 phons to sound at the same apparent level.

 

Now bear in mind, this is not to say that you want to go and quadruple your bass content to get a booming mix.  On the contrary, this is to say that you really shouldn’t expect to hear anything beyond a certain points in the mix.  In almost all instances of music recording, there will be frequency content below easy audibility.  The point of mixing is not necessarily to make them audible.  Sometimes these frequencies are meant to be felt rather than heard.  Other times, these frequencies don’t really add much to the mix at all—eating up large portions of the usable power spectrum and overloading your mix with unnecessary content that either will hurt fidelity due to digital encoding or broadcast algorithms, or will be cast off anyway due to physical limitations of sound reproduction systems.

 

Here is a graph of all the frequency ranges for common instruments and their notes as shown on a piano.  What you’ll notice is that the range for a concert bass is from ~90 Hz to ~350 Hz.  The absolute lowest note on the piano is around ~28 Hz, and that is a note that you will likely never hit.  Practically all the action in musical instruments occurs between 60 and 5000 Hz.  Allowing for formants, harmonics, and other sonic phenomena outside of the fundamental frequency of the note, it is safe to say that practically all usable and desirable sounds fall within 20-20K and that range could even reasonably be made smaller.

 

In next week’s article I will examine these specific limitations and discuss why the low frequencies are the most problematic.

More from Phil’s Audible Spectrum series:

• The Audible Spectrum, Part 2: Capture and Reproduction Limitations
• The Audible Spectrum, Part 3: Components
• The Audible Spectrum, Part 4: Sub-Bass Issues
• The Audible Spectrum, Part 5: Harmonics, Overtones, and Formants Primer

In 1978 the Yamaha NS-10 first hit the home audio market. The speakers were originally designed for the consumer rather than the professional sphere. The only problem was that the speakers sounded terrible and no one wanted them for that purpose. They were often described as overly bright and harsh and the frequency response was abysmal in the low end (criticisms which are founded and still exist to this day). However, despite its audiophilic shortcomings, Fate found other uses for this Little-Speaker-That-Couldn’t.

As New Wave, punk, and other lo-fi genres began to take hold on the world, a DIY spirit took over and smaller, cheaper recording studios were created that catered to a clientele who didn’t necessarily place a premium on fidelity. Near-field monitoring became the fashionable choice for these studios because it minimized the effect of listening environment on the sound of a mix. This allowed bedrooms, basements, strip-malls and other ostensibly acoustically unsound venues to become mixing environments.

In these situations the NS-10s weaknesses became strengths. Their lack of low-end capability meant that room nodes (standing waves in a listening environment which cause certain frequencies to be accentuated because of the geometry of the room) weren’t much of an issue since these acoustic phenomena are largely confined to the lower frequencies. Furthermore, their use with cheaper, lower output amplifiers (as was common in these smaller studios) meant that the program output was lower. These volume levels are generally agreed to be the NS-10s’ most accurate operating range. And of course the price, as a previously undesirable commodity, was just right for small studios.

Over the course of the 1980s, the NS-10 became a mainstay of the recording studio and their ubiquity, coupled with the fact that their poor sonic characteristics generally do not incite the individual characteristics of a listening environment, meant that the NS-10 could become a fairly universal reference. By and large, NS-10s were thought to sound reasonably similar in every listening environment. Thus, most mixing decisions are themselves adequately portable.

However, the NS-10 is only as useful as you are familiar with its sonic characteristics. A +7 dB peak at around 1500 Hz contributes to the audibility of some mid-range sounds such as the human voice and acoustic guitar. Operating without this knowledge may result in a weak vocal or acoustic in the mix when you take your songs to other environs.

It is also very difficult to judge a mix’s low-lows on NS-10s. The speaker simply was not designed to reproduce those frequencies. If you aren’t aware of this, then you may find yourself pumping in a ton of low-end just so that the sub frequencies are audible, but if you took it to the club, you’d probably blow out the speakers with all that 808!

It is now agreed in most professional circles that NS-10s are an excellent reference at low volume levels and for gross judgments that do not invoke the sub-frequencies. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll have a better understanding of how to use this omnipresent piece of gear and knowing how to properly use a tool is the most important part of the audio world.

There are some instances when a limited amount of knowledge can do a great deal of harm. For instance, you might know that a bit of sun is good for you. If you are not fully versed in the effects of sun exposure to the skin, you might be wondering what those strange, asymmetrical spots are that keep popping up all over your body. Get those checked out; seriously I worry about you sometimes…

 

Other times, a basic understanding of something might be helpful the most of the time. Take Euclidean geometry for example. If you aren’t an astrophysicist or a nuclear scientist, pretty much everything you need to know falls into Euclidean space.

 

But there are also times when the common sense understanding of something gets you by enough so that you don’t realize all the other times that it is absolutely wrong and leads you astray. This is the case with our friend the decibel.

 

I was working on a record a while back with producer/engineer extraordinaire Paul Kolderie (Radiohead, Pixies, Mighty Mighty Bosstones) and he mentioned something in passing that really caught my attention. I can’t really recall what the situation was, but we were setting up a session and he said to me “I can’t stand it when people ask me to change something by half a dB. A dB is the lowest possible change you can perceive, so saying half a dB is meaningless.”

 

Many nights I woke abruptly from sleep in a cold sweat tormented by what he had said. Something sounded so right and yet so wrong about that. I mean, if I told you to change something by half a dB twice—both equally insignificant changes by his definition—I would get a change of full dB, and therefore a significant change. Using some simple extrapolation, you can’t keep considering fractional changes in decibels as insignificant, because surely enough they add up.

 

So what exactly is a dB and what change in dBs is significant to our ear and in our mix? Well, without getting overly scientific about it and also restricting the question to audio applications (sorry electrical engineers), a decibel is a convenient unit of measure that expresses very large changes in magnitude against a reference level in a concise manner. Concision was important back in the days of hand calculation.

 

When they were busy wiring up the world for telephone usage, Bell Laboratories thought it’d be really swell if they could measure the amount of degradation in audio level over a mile of telephone cable. They did the calculations but soon found that expressing the quantities in conventional terms meant using insanely large and unwieldy numbers. So they decided to use a logarithmic function to bring the numbers to more manageable figures for simple calculation. Logarithms of numbers are useful because they have some of the same arithmetic applications as regular integers (for example, you can add two logarithms with the same base just like adding to regular numbers). The unit they came up with became known as a Bell in honor of the company and Mr. Alexander Graham Bell. So a decibel is actually 1/10 of a Bell.

 

So why do we talk about tenths of something? After all we don’t regularly deal in decimeters or decigrams. Well in the mid 1800s, some very clever psychophysicists began studying something called Just Noticeable Differences (JND) in sensation. A JND is the smallest incremental change in a sensation that is perceptible to the average person. This could be the JND in touch as measured in PSI or the JND in sight as measured in lumens. Someone discovered that a tenth of a Bell roughly correlated to the smallest detectable change in a sound to the human ear. As such, the decibel became a very important measurement in audio because it was simple to express changes that actually meant something with regard to common perception.

It is important to note that JNDs relate to the AVERAGE person. As such, musicians and audio professionals are often able to detect much more minute changes in audio level.

When studying JNDs, another useful but perhaps counterintuitive aspect of the decibel arose—a doubling of volume roughly correlated in a change of +/- 10 dB. This is useful but strange in that the arithmetic is skewed—you ’d expect a doubling in the perceived volume of something that sounds at +2 dB to be +4 dB. But then again, what is a doubling of something that measures 0 dB? This exposes some of the fundamental limitations in the simple definition of the decibel—human perception complicates the simple calculations.

 

Such problems spurred further investigation into situational applications of JNDs and Signal Detection Theory was born. In basic terms, the object of Signal Detection Theory is to figure out what extra factors go in to our perception of a sound and how it compares against “noise” or unrelated signals. For instance, does a +1 dB change to a signal still sound like an increase of 1 JND if the sound is played over white noise? What about if the original signal is 100 Hz sine wave? What about 30 KHz?  What if the original signal is a voice played over a country band?  Or a metal band?

 

It was discovered that the JND of a signal changes based on frequency range and initial level. A JND is around 1 dB for soft sounds at frequencies in the low and mid range—the frequencies we perceive most readily. Really loud sounds can have a JND of 1/3 to 1/2 dB. Really soft sounds on the edge of audibility might have JNDs of a couple dB.

 

Furthermore, other things can color sounds in such a way that you can take the same sound, add something to it and suddenly the JND might be more or less than a dB. Perceptual Encoding Theorists look for factors outside the Critical Band of Frequency for a sound (the frequency or frequencies that define a sound) that would alter our perception of it. For instance, adding a slight reverb in some cases might cause the JND to rise (meaning you need to turn the signal up more to get a perceivable change) or adding a harmonic exciter in most cases would cause the JND to lower (meaning you wouldn’t need to turn the signal up as much to get a perceivable change). This is because new nerve endings are being excited and these cause our minds to perceive the sound in a different way than we had previously.

 

As you can see, the decibel is not quite as simple as its common sense understanding in the audio world. So when you need to make something appear twice as loud, you know what to do. When somebody tells you to make their vocals 20 dB louder, you know that that is laughably extreme (for the most part) and you should adjust your corrections appropriately. When someone asks you to turn something down by 1/3 of a dB, you know that it is really only going to be detectable if that sound is already pretty loud.

Thanks to all of you over at Reddit for voting up this article. If you are a self-taught musician, you may find it helpful to check out my Solfege To Intervals Translation Chart to follow the melodic analysis.

This week, I’m going to break down the music theory behind one of the most unusual pop songs to come out in years: Beyoncé’s  “Single Ladies.”

(Click here to open the music video in a new window.)

Tempo: 87 BPM*
Key Signature(s): E major, E minor
Special Songwriting Devices Used: No back beat, Polytonality (technically polymodality**), Resolution using a Minor 6 chord, Starting a melody on sol

Several months ago, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about whether or not this single would flop. Pop music has certainly gotten interesting over the past 5 years, but this song was, well, too interesting. To put it bluntly: “Single Ladies” is just downright bizarre. And yet as time went on, I began to see that it has what I call the Spice Girls Factor–designed to make groups of adolescent girls dance around in their bedrooms, sing into hairbrushes, and post videos of the whole ordeal on YouTube for their friends to watch.

To start, let’s take a look at the groove. In pop music, there is almost always some kind of clap, snap, or snare on beats 2 and 4, also known as a back beat (read my post on back beat options here). “Single Ladies” breaks the mold, especially for a pop song, with claps on every 8th note, which gives the song an uptempo-feel. In fact, to me these claps give the song more of a “1 feel” rather than strictly 4/4, which would mean every quarter note is an equally strong beat. Normally only beats 1 and, to a lesser extent, 3, are considered strong beats. Strong and weak beats become important when understanding how melodies and chord changes affect perceived key signature or tonality. This “1 feel” theory is reinforced by the dancing in the music video, in which the choreography consists largely of Beyoncé jolting around on every beat.

But it doesn’t stop there.

There is a snare drum in this song, and like virtually all hip-hop out right now, it’s not used as back beat. However, where normally hip-hop draws the line at syncopated southern-style fills or dotted 8th note patterns a la “A Milli“, there is a snare hit on the last 8th note of each measure (AKA the “and” of beat 4). This, combined with the 8th note claps, plays a big role in giving “Single Ladies” its memorable feel.

Now let’s move on to the harmony. During the song’s call-and-response section (“All the single ladies, all the single ladies”), she sings solfege syllable*** sol (as in do re mi fa sol) then riffs on mi, re, and do. Sol is a very common beginning note for a pop melody, adding strength (rather than color) to the harmony. Also note that she skips fa, which is common practice for melodies sung over a root chord because it forms a weak interval, a perfect fourth.

As I talked about in last week’s analysis, in traditional harmony and counterpoint, we only need a major or minor third interval to imply a chord. Beyoncé does exactly that during the verses: solidly establishing the key of E major by singing only an E and a G# with the occasional F#. The only “music” during the verses is a pitched noise, though the notes are indistinguishable, keeping in line with the current pop minimalism trend (see: 5 Pop Songs With No Music).

Pretty basic stuff so far. Now here’s where things get really interesting:

During the chorus, a bass synth comes in and goes from B to C, which is the bVI chord borrowed from the key of E minor. I will be talking a lot about borrowing chords from related keys and tonalities (aka modal interchange) in future Compositional Analysis posts, but what makes “Single Ladies” downright bizarre is that the melody doesn’t reflect this change in harmony at all, so what we’ve got is music in E minor and a melody in E major. This is called polytonality**, a technique normally reserved for highly esoteric jazz and classical music.

The result is a striking juxtaposition: a nursery rhyme-esque melody with a powerful, sinister bassline beaneath it, creating a bitter, almost shocking melancholy which underscores the “strong woman” image for which Beyoncé has become an archetype. The melody is distinctly feminine and “cute” while the bassline is aggressive and forceful (usually thought of as masculine traits). It is probably no coincidence that the bassline enters with the line, “if you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it.” Here, the woman asserts her control over a man.

All this being said, she could not have pulled this song off were it not for a sparse arrangement, an exceptionally catchy beat, and the clout of being a well-established, top female artist, not to mention a role model for a generation of young, ambitious women.

Some music scholars might take issue with my assessment, in fact some don’t believe in polytonality at all, saying our ear cannot perceive two tonalities at once. With an arrangement this sparse, though, their case holds little weight.

But just for the hell of it, I’m going to do a standard harmonic analysis of this tune anyway, as if it were all in one key. Things often get vague when it comes to analyzing modern pop music because the harmonies are so fragmented. You rarely hear a full triad or seventh chord in rap and dance-oriented R&B these days (though I believe this trend is about to change) and “Single Ladies” is no exception. The result is often some funky looking chords with half the notes missing. Perhaps these bizarre changes serve to support my theory that we are hearing two different things simultaneously rather than this harmony:

Hypothetical functional analysis
1st Measure: V (no3), IV-/b3, III+ (no #5)/3, bVI (no3)
2nd Measure: V (no3), IV (no3), IVmaj7 (no3), IV-6 (no3)

Chord chart
1st Measure: B (no3), A-/C, G#+/3 (no+5), C (no3)
2nd Measure: B (no3), A (no3), Amaj7 (no3), A-6 (no3)

Chords in laymen’s terms

1st Measure: B with no third, A minor first inversion, G# augmented first inversion with no (augmented) 5th, C with no third.
2nd Measure: B with no third, A with no third, Amaj7 with no third, A minor 6 with no third.

Here, the two chords to watch are III+/3 and IV-6. The third chord in the progression does sound like a III augmented in that it is especially dissonant, but it’s also not functioning in a way that augmented triads are supposed to function (such as leading to the IV chord). And unlike major and minor triads, you are technically supposed to have the fifth when it comes to augmented or diminished chords. Augmented and diminished fifths cannot be implied. This again leads me back to polytonality because we only have two notes from the chord.****

The very last chord in the chorus sounds like it’s implying an A minor 6 chord (minor triad with a major sixth–A C E F#), though only the sixth is present. I say this is minor six rather than a II-/3 because I hear a strong pull back to the I, something a IV-6 has and a II- does not.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this analysis. I realize that this song is not for everyone, but it’s very important for songwriters to think about songs like Single Ladies, the songs that stretch the boundaries and yet are still wildly successful. It can speak volumes about how people connect with music, the future potential of music, and the realm of what is “commercially viable” (if you care about that sort of thing).

Buy Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” on iTunes

*While I have the tempo listed at 87 BPM, you could certainly argue that “Single Ladies” is in the upper 160-200 BPM range, making the claps quarter notes and the kick drum pattern repeating every 2 bars. For the sake of discussion, though, I chose to analyze this song at a typical hip hop tempo. This makes the snare and kick drum patterns one instead of two bar phrases.

**As many readers have pointed out, it’s actually more accurate to call this polymodality because the ‘tonal center’ is still E even though the scale is different from E minor to E major.

***Maybe it’s because I’m a guitarist and singer, but I like to think of melodies in terms of solfege syllables because they are instantly transferrable from one key to the next.

****The third chord could also technically be a III/3 chord, but in every music course I’ve ever taken, teachers have advised against analyzing something as a major III chord, let alone an inversion of it. Such a chord does not exist in any mode, so it could not be borrowed. The only other real possibility would be if it had a flatted seventh, making it a V7/VI- chord, but there is no indication that this is the case nor is that possibility even within the scope of this post.

Artist: Noisettes
Album: What’s the Time Mr. Wolf?
Released: 2007
Sound: Indie Rock
For Fans Of: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Janelle Monae
Recommended Tracks: “Scratch Your Name,” “Don’t Give Up”

To get a feel for Noisettes, you have to start by watching frontwoman Shingai Soniwa’s electrifying performance in their music video for “Scratch Your Name.” This is classic case of a lead vocalist taking an act from good to great.

I saw them play a small Brooklyn night club a few summers ago. The show unexpectedly got combined with Battles at the last minute. (This was right around the time Mirrored came out, one of my favorite albums in the last 5 years.) The energy was unreal throughout the night. Since then, they’ve have toured with Bloc Party, TV on the Radio, and Muse.

While their sound is not “revolutionary” per se, Noisettes doesn’t particularly sound like anyone else. It would be a disservice to compare them to the decidedly darker and grimier Yeah Yeah Yeahs (though Shingai does list Karen O as an influence).

When Janelle Monae came out last year, I immediately thought “hey, she’s ripping off Shingai’s look,” (although she’s equal part Andre 3000). Musically, though, Janelle is a solid Motown-era soul singer while Shingai is an epic, class-of-her-own, wouldn’t-want-to-challenge-her-to-a-thumb-wrestling-match rock vocalist. Her signature is when her voice squeaks in just the right place at exactly the right time. You have to hear it to understand.

“Don’t Upset The Rhythm,” the second single from their yet-to-be-released sophomore album, has reached #2 on the UK Singles chart after being featured in a Mazda commercial. This track, along with the other single released from their upcoming sophomore album, ironically seem to indicate a directional shift for Noisettes towards a more processed, dance-y, Janelle Monae-esque sound. Guess indie rock wasn’t paying the bills. I will reserve judgment, however, until the new album drops.

Wild Young Hearts comes out April 20th on Universal.

Noisettes on Myspace

As mentioned earlier in the week, this tune would be a dream to mix.  It is not very compositionally dense consisting mostly monophonic synth lines.  The character of the song derives primarily from the compositional techniques—each instrumental track gets its own identifiable melodic line and discrete part of the sonic register such that nothing really muddles anything else.  This allows for easy distinction between instruments and a general air of spaciousness without the track sounding empty.

 

Panorama

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most striking to me is how static and simple the panorama and sonics are for a Dave Fridmann mix.  I’m used to hearing synthesizers leap across the sonic field and evolve throughout the tune from his landmark albums with The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev. There is none of that here as everything is quite stationary.

 

The song starts with a field recording of children playing, which is panned toward the right.  This creates a kind of imbalance waiting to be offset by the hook-synth 

panned out middle left.  There appears to be a higher doubling way down in the mix and way out to the right.  It might be played an octave up, or it might be harmonic ringing in a counter-panned reverb.  This helps the synth sound more encompassing than it really is.

 

When the band enters there is the normal cast in the center channel with a kick drum, snare drum, handclaps-doubling-the-snare, lead vocal, and bass synthesizer as per the natural laws of instrument panning.   There is also an answer synthesizer slightly lower in the mix and panned out middle right (this is a polyphonic synthesizer because it hits at least a couple diads throughout the tune).  This plays off the ostinato synth, but is clearly subordinate to it.  Across the stereo stage there is at least one, but probably several synthesizer pads that give thickness to the mix and tie together what might be an otherwise hollow and disjointed assemblage of disparate synths and samples.

 

In the choruses, the vocal harmonies are panned out a little farther than you’d normally expect and the sides isolate the harmonies—the low harmony is pretty wide left and the high harmony is pretty wide right.  This might have been done to try and give the impression of distinct singers without placing too much emphasis on giving each singer his turn.

 

Curiously there is no crash cymbal until the bridge and no hi-hat or toms whatsoever until the final choruses.  Also quite striking is that the hi-hat and cymbals are panned very narrowly.  Under the normal mixing paradigm, drum kits are distorted and stretched across the entire spectrum with hi-hats appearing middle left (or right depending on perspective) and cymbals out wide.  In this tune, all the drum parts appear to be well within 30 degrees of center.

 

In the final chorus, the drums start to get a bit busier and experiment with fills and syncopation.  The toms too are very shallow (both in panning and volume), but the handclaps do pan out wide for two hits in the middle of the last chorus for accent.  The lead vocal gets the same treatment from time to time as a reverbed delay with feedback spreads certain words out wide.  This is probably done more to fill lyrical holes than provide accent because I don’t see much reason to accentuate momentous lyrics like  “…picking insects off plants.”

 

Sonics

 

One of the main questions I came across while researching this article is how Fridmann was able to attain such a clear delineation between the bass and the kick drum.  It’d be pretty effortless to accomplish with this orchestration.  The bass is played by a synthesizer with some pretty serious upper frequency harmonics—at least a couple times in the tune it sounds like it is doubled by another synthesizer quieter and an octave up.  All this subconsciously contributes to presence.  You might accomplish the same thing at home by adding some fuzz or amp distortion.  It also helps that the bass is the only thing playing a regular 8^th note pattern, alternating between the root and an octave up.  Those upbeat 8ths really emphasize the bass part to the ear.

 

The kick drum seems to morph throughout the tune, though not overtly so.  In the opening when the drum kit is fully exposed, there is a big beautiful drum sound with only the slightest hint of that upper frequency paper *tick*.  When the band kicks in, it sounds like the EQ shifts wildly to place heavy emphasis on the upper frequencies of the drum.  This allows the synth bass to take up most of the bandwidth in the low end of the spectrum while the kick is audible in that Metallica-ticky-kick way.

 

As I mentioned previously, I believe the synthesizers are reamped or played through some sort of amp modeling plug-in to give them some edge, fuzz, and distortion.  It makes them much more ballsy in comparison to the naked and juvenile sound from the EP version and are a testament to how much a talented engineer/producer and professional treatments can positively affect a song. 

 

Continuing with synths, one of the pads has a phaser on it to give it some distinction while holding out those long notes and give it presence without overtaking the mix.  I personally abhor the sound of phasers, but they do the trick by creating subtle sonic intrigue for your ear to latch on to.

 

Also, note how much quieter the answer synth is in comparison to the main ostinato.  You’d think that the answer synth, providing some melodic interest, would be something worth highlighting in the mix, but it is barely audible and most people don’t even remember it as part of the song except in the verses.  This is an example of a mixer/artist realizing their priorities—in a pop tune like this it is more important to emphasize the hook than to emphasize the other stuff.  Always remember, in order for something to be big, something else has to be small.  As such, the ostinato is big, the answer is small (as are the pads, toms, crashes, hi hat, and BGVs)

 

The vocals are clearly doubled, tripled, quadrupled, compressed, drenched in AKG BX20 spring reverb, and delayed with feedback.  It also sounds like there might be a chorus and perhaps even a flanger at some points.  All were probably used to thicken the vocal tracks and cover-up some of the imperfections of youth like vocal cracks and noises.  One of the comments on the youtube video for the EP version asks “Is that even the same Andrew?” 

 

(For those of you following along at home, know that you can use these effects on your voice and they do help a lot, but you have to be prepared to sound totally different than you are used to.  People often ask for their vocals to be treated thusly, but they hate the results because they don’t sound like themselves anymore.  We should ask the boys from MGMT whether or not they think the vocals sound like them and which one they’d prefer to have captured on record…)

 

The background vocals are also turned very low in the mix.  If you don’t pay attention you may not even realize they are there and may only register as the vocal suddenly getting thicker. In most pop songs, background vocals are not intended to be heard blatantly but rather to blend in with the lead vocal for emphasis.

 

Mastering

 

The vocals are very sibilant but I would fault the mastering.  There isn’t really much need for the vocals to be altered in order to make them more present or perceptible.  Given the instrumentation of the tune and the mix, the vocals should stand out well enough on their own.  I also see some superb de-essers in the Tarbox gear list, so there is no reason why they would be sibilant in the mix. 

 

Chances are the tune was shipped off to Greg Calbi, who does almost exclusively unattended sessions, and he decided that the tune overall needed more top end.  Whether he accomplished this with EQ, harmonic excitation, or some combination of both, he achieved his end with the artifact of sibilance. 

 

The tune is also heavily compressed on the two-mix.  Most of the dynamics stem from orchestration changes as opposed to real contrast.  Some spots in the chorus have audible compression artifacts such as the brickwall wash that occurs when the vocals hold out words (ie “A family of treeeeeeeees”).  These “flaws” are not necessarily a bad thing, just a reality of what mastering is these days.  The are further evidence hat very big, very popular tunes have audible compression artifacts as part of their sonic character.  To the average listener, they would not even be detectable, but hey we notice because it’s our job to notice.

 

Thanks to the composition of this tune, the instruments get to be very busy without the mix being muddled.  We get a very clear distinction between the instruments and also get to enjoy a bunch of little ear candy along the way.  The subtle changes that are low in the mix are easy to hear once you know they are there, but if you don’t they just wash over you and sound like a full yet spacious professional mix.

A producer’s role is so nebulous that at times it’s hard to tell from the outside exactly which ideas came from the producer and which from the band. Part of why we chose “Kids” for this week’s Sonic Deconstruction is because it provides us with a unique opportunity to know exactly which decisions were made by Dave Fridmann and which were not: before Oracular Spectacular, MGMT recorded (and presumably self-produced) the We (Don’t) Care EP with a friend in Athens, GA, from which the only song to make it to the full length was “Kids.”

Listen to the pre-Fridmann version:

By comparing this to the final version we can deduce which decisions were probably Dave’s.

Apart from the mix, the most obvious dramatic between the two is the lead vocal. Interestingly, the vocal is actually higher and more childlike timbrally on Oracular Spectacular. In addition to that version’s weaker performance, the vocals are much less distinct here than on the full length, which could be the product of coaching and coaxing in the studio or switching which of the two member’s vocal was featured.

This is what separates the men from the boys. Think about all the successful 90s rock bands, love them or hate them: Nirvana, Green Day, Blink 182, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam. All have instantly recognizable singers. And it’s not just because you heard them over and over–after hearing “Walking On the Sun,” I knew from then on when I heard a new Smashmouth single. A distinctive vocalist is paramount to a band’s success, whether it be the tone of the voice itself, the style/accent, or commonly chosen notes and rhythmic motifs. (More on this in a later article.)

One thing that helps the vocal’s strength is a background doubling on the verse vocal. The background vocal sounds tightly Vocaligned to me while the chorus does not, retaining verse-chorus dynamics and gives the chorus its singalong quality. Vocaligning is one of the many highly useful advanced editing services we offer at Fix Your Mix- we perfectly align background vocals with the lead vocal, allowing you to layer vocals many times over without making the arrangement messy or giving it a gang-vocal feel. The result is a kind of thickness that you can’t get with a chorus or doubler.

When producing a song, the very first things I think about are tempo and key signature, both of which are also generally dictated by the vocal. Exactly what makes a tempo “right” is often intangible, but I will say that one usually cannot change a song’s tempo very much before the vocals begin to drag or sound rushed (unless you change the vocal part to fit the new tempo).

Apparently MGMT were on the money tempo-wise, because Fridmann did not change the BPM of “Kids” from the EP version. He did, however, change the key. Pay attention vocalists: the key was moved down from Bb major to A major. For a male tenor, the high F which is sung repeatedly in the demo melody could very well be the “break” in their voices (these are hard-to-hit notes within a vocal range that comprise the transition from the chest to the head voice). Changing the key to A, thereby making that high note an E, strengthened the vocal drastically and improved the vibe of the song. The vibe of a key signature is even more nebulous than tempo, but out of pure conjecture I will say that Bb major is not a particularly common key for pop music, while A major is more familiar to the ear, which may play a role in creating the song’s “comforting” feeling, one of the things that most characterizes the song for me.

Ultimately, these decisions, centering around the vocal, made a world of difference in making the listener take MGMT seriously, elevating them to hipster cult status.

In our first time at bat on these Sonic Deconstruction articles, the song choice appears to be a swing and a miss on the recording techniques day. A calamitous choice for one simple reason: almost everything is a sample, loop, or synth! As a result, recording methods aren’t immediately intuitive in the way that King of Leon or Foo Fighters would be. It also doesn’t help that the one track that undoubtedly existed at one point in the real acoustic world (as opposed to tracks that could have been DI’ed or midi triggered) is the vocal track and frankly it doesn’t sound very good. But this is our dishwashing liquid and dammit, we’re going to soak in it.

Recorded at Dave Fridmann’s residential studio in upstate New York, MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular is probably the ideal album to record there. In his September 2000 article in Sound on Sound Magazine, Dave intimated that the design of Tarbox Road Studios is somewhat less than ideal:

The design work required to turn the house into a studio was taken on by Dave himself, who felt that the recommendations of a professional studio designer would in any case be beyond his means…

‘When people are normally doing acoustical design they’re worried about a lot of isolation, and worried about floating floors and cement structures to isolate you from each other. And I was worried about it, but I really couldn’t do anything about it, so I didn’t worry too much, just did what I could.’

Like many residential type facilities—professional, pro-sumer, or hobbyist—isolation is a concern. So when big bands come in wanting to track everything live you often get so much bleed that you lose flexibility in your tracks. Your guitars are in your drums, your drums are in your vocals, you can’t change one without leaving some ghostly artifact somewhere else. Well with a band like MGMT that consists exclusively of two musicians playing instruments that could very well exist entirely in the box, those issues are no longer a concern.

It is my belief that at least a few of the synthesizers were amped or re-amped for mixing. There is a lot of dirt and grit on the synthesizers, especially when compared with the infantile clarity of the sounds in the EP version, which makes me think that amp gain, color, and distortion are part of the sound. There is an audible grime on the melody synth that is evident when the keyboardist lands on that C# that holds for a measure. It almost sounds like that kind of battered old Leslie cabinet.

The vocals are an interesting beast—they are exceedingly sibilant to my ear, which could very well be a combination of mixing and mastering (provided by Greg Calbi). This assaulting high frequency presence might indicate that Fridmann used a hi-fi mic on a less-than-hi-fi singer. I know that his favorite mic is his tube U-47 (one of my personal favorites as well), so he might’ve used that old standby. On a singer with an unpolished and young voice like in MGMT, I likely would’ve opted for a dynamic microphone with a bigger, heavier diaphragm to compensate for the vocal character like the SM7. These mics have the effect of covering up the less audible imperfections that might otherwise be present when a tube mic is used. Either way, the vocals are heavily processed with filters, fuzz, compressors, and fx so the original character of the vocal as interpreted through the microphone is likely lost except on the multitrack file.

By and large, the greatest assets to the sounds on the record would be the mixing techniques. Check back on Friday for some in-depth speculation. Dave, if you’re reading, feel free to set us straight!