When it comes to audio, there are two types of compression and both are widely misunderstood, sometimes even by audio engineers. To briefly sum it up:

Data compression is used to reduced the size of computer files. Sound compression is used to affect the apparent loudness, energy level, or impact of sounds.

This post is Part 1 of 2 from Data Compression vs. Sound Compression. Today I’ll be explaining data compression and its two different subcategories. To learn about sound compression, stay tuned for Part 2.

Two Types of Data Compression

As written above, data compression (also known as file compression) means the size of the original audio file gets reduced. Depending on the type of data compression, though, sound quality may also be reduced.

When sending final mixdowns of a Fix Your Mix project, clients receive a .zip file and an MP3. Both of these files utilize data compression, however .zip format is lossless (temporarily compressed) while .mp3 format is lossy (permanently compressed). Both are necessary for different applications.

Lossless Data Compression
(Common file format extensions include .zip, .rar, and .sit)

Lossless data compression is temporary, which means that sound quality is not reduced. Once the file is decompressed (“decoded”), it goes back to its original file format and file size. Popular lossless data compressors include WinRAR, WinZip, and Stuffit Expander, as well as good old fashioned operating systems including Windows XP and Mac OS X.

Pros:

• Highest sound quality possible.
• Allows you to compress multiple files into a single file. This can be useful for internet transfers since web browsers do not allow you to download entire folders at once.

Cons:

• Files cannot be played back directly by audio players: they must first be decompressed (“extracted”) to their original format by the operating system. This may take up to several minutes depending on the speed of your computer.
• File sizes usually not as small as lossy formats (e.g. MP3)

Common Uses:

• Sending to a CD replication plant.
• Sending  to a mastering engineer.
• Sending to a video production company for sync licensing to film or video.

Lossy Data Compression
(Common file format extensions include .mp3, .m4a, and .wma)

Lossy data compression is permanent, meaning sound quality is reduced. Popular lossy audio encoders include iTunes, which uses a proprietary codec, and LameBrain, which uses the LAME codec. Most DAW programs will export directly to lossy formats, however this option costs extra for ProTools.

Pros:

• Files can be played directly by audio players. (Files are decompressed by the audio player itself rather than the operating system.)
• Plays on iPods and other portable audio playback devices.
• Smaller file sizes than lossless formats.

Cons:

• Lower sound quality.

Common Uses:

• Posting to Myspace, Facebook, etc.
• Posting on a website or blog.
• Email attachments.
• Playback via iPods, cell phones and other portable audio playback devices.
  

The MP3 format consists of data compression and data compression only. I’ve heard several old school engineers mess this one up so allow me to reiterate:

Myth: MP3 encoders compress both the sound (like a compressor/limiter would do) and the data (to reduce file size).

Truth: The MP3 format is entirely, 100% data compression. No sound compression is involved.

In the future, I’ll be writing about sound compression in depth and the quality of MP3s.

Additional notes:

• WAV and AIF are both lossless file formats, however no data compression is involved so they are high in file size but may be played back instantaneously like an MP3.
• This section of this post regarding lossy data compression deals specifically with audio formats, but there are lossy compression formats for images and video as well, such as a .jpg file.
• The algorithms which comprise data compression formats are known as “codecs.” Some of these codecs excel in certain applications and not in others. Some have no advantages at all and were developed solely for branding purposes. For an example of the latter, there is no technical advantage to compressing audio to .wma format–it was developed so that Microsoft could force people to listen to music in their Windows Media Player.

Pop minimalism is one of the most interesting and distinct music trends of this decade. Particularly over the last four years, much of rap and Top 40 dance music has had no chord progression at all, only a repeating riff (“ostinato”) and/or a single note bass line.

The following club anthems are extreme examples of pop minimalism. They all are comprised almost entirely of rhythmic components, but all of them have at least some melodic content somewhere, including tuned 808s which usually will not be audible except in a night club or car stereo.

5) “Wait (Whisper Song)” by Ying Yang Twins (NSFW video)

When top producers make music today, they are imagining how a crowd will react to it in a night club environment, but even more specifically they’re thinking about strip clubs. Getting your single in rotation at strip clubs is a right of passage in the rap world and “Wait” is a perfect example of a song written explicitly for that purpose.

Aside from lyrical content, there is something raw (and therefore sexual) about sparse rap arrangements. The deep drum sounds in “Wait” are a mix between kicks, 808s, and toms. They are tuned, but each hit slides downward in pitch (sometimes erroneously referred to by drum techs as “the doppler effect”), so it would be futile to try to establish a key signature for this song. The only other element which is not entirely percussive is an “oooo” yell.

The deep drums likely inspired the tuned kicks in the next song, which uses an identical rhythm figure.

Billboard Hip-Hop Ranking: #3
Billboard Hot 100: #15

4) “Drop It Like It’s Hot” by Snoop Dogg (feat. Pharrell)

Click here to watch the video.

While Snoop’s chorus vocals have pitch to them, they are not discernible notes per se. It is more reminiscent of a tonal language (such as Chinese) than a scale. Other non-melodic elements include tuned kicks, an “ooo” vocal line and a synth progression which plays intermittently.

Just a hunch, but I have a feeling the snare pattern which ends each verse phrase inspired the producer of my #3 pick.

Billboard Hip-Hop Ranking: #1
Billboard Hot 100 Ranking: #1

3) “A Milli” by Lil Wayne

One of the most astounding things about this song is that in spite of all the fuss we make over choruses in this industry, “A Milli” simply doesn’t have a chorus. In fact, I would argue that the real “hook” of this song is the dotted-8th note snare pattern. Highly unusual. You can hear this snare pattern in what seems like every hip-hop song released since Tha Carter III, perhaps most notably Beyonce’s “Diva.”

“A Milli” outlines the trend exactly as I described it: a single note 808 bassline and a (very, very repetitive) ostinato pattern. The effect is almost trance-like, casting a hypnotic spell which translates well on the dance floor.

Billboard Hip-Hop Ranking: #1
Billboard Hot 100 Ranking: #6

2) “Hollaback Girl” by Gwen Stefani

Click here to watch the video.

This mega-hit is a a prime example of hip-hop influencing Top 40. It is also one of the few songs in recent memory to crossover into hip-hop rather than from it.

Co-written by Pharrell, “Hollaback Girl” became an instant sensation. The verse and refrain have no melodic content at all except for Stefani’s vocal melody. While the chorus (“that’s my shit”) does have some harmonic content, it’s certainly nothing to write home about aside from being a reprieve from the musiclessness of the rest of the tune.

Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend,” the most viewed Youtube video of all time, echoes this pop song’s music-free sentiment during its introduction.

Billboard Top 40: #1
Billboard Pop 100: #1
Billboard Hot 100: #1
Billboard Hip-Hop Ranking: #8

1) “Lip Gloss” by Lil Mama

Click here to view the video.

Above all the other songs on this list, the sparseness of this song blows me away. As if she had this blog post in mind, in the video version of “Lip Gloss,” Lil Mama raps a verse where she chants “no music!”

It makes perfect sense when you’re in a club, but hearing “Lip Gloss” for the first time on Youtube was nothing short of surreal. It seemed like some kind of post-apocalyptic anthem, the kind of thing you’d imagine kids listening to in a George Orwell novel. The youthful energy with which Lil Mama raps is contrasted by the stark, cold isolation of the drums. For me, though, she officially goes over the top when she raps the slogan “L’Oreal, yep, cause I’m worth it”.

All this being said, I love the song. This debut single from the only mainstream female rapper out right now says a lot about the limitations (or lack thereof) of pop music. Not even the kicks are tuned. All we get is a (rather weak) melodic bridge thrown in near the end for good measure.

(Also, call me crazy, but I think the movie Drumline paved the way for this song more than any of the other songs on this list.)

Billboard Hot 100: #10
Billboard Hip-Hop Ranking: #16

Pop minimalism seems to be on its way out with the emergence of Auto-Tune vocal hooks and rap moving in a more pop direction in general, but its influence will likely remain for decades to come and eventually reemerge in another form.

Submit your own examples and thoughts in the comments section.

Angus Young is a dangerous musician to talk about in this column—there is a wealth of knowledge out there on Angus’s setup and for no one else has so much been written about so little (check out this crazy little diagram of his standard set-up). SG, cable, Marshall stack with the output all the way up. Can it get any simpler? No pedals, no effects, no muss, no fuss. Still, the questions keep coming so clearly there is something else that people are missing when trying to replicate his sound.

Did you know that there are actually TWO guitar players in this picture??

Well the first thing we have to do is make sure that we separate the Brothers Young. AC/DC is a band known for its stark simplicity and so the casual listener who likes the face-melting loudness of the band and can name only one band member (and maybe that one guy who died) may not realize that a lot of the big ballsy hooks that we remember and associate with Angus, like the opening to “TNT,” are actually played by his brother Malcolm. Some of the hooks are a combination of both of them playing the same thing such as in “Back in Black.” Of course all these videos are from live performances and there is no real way to know who plays what in the studio. To me, the quintessential Angus Young sound is the opening of “Thunderstruck” that really captures the dryness, the raunchy nasal tone of the SG, and the surprisingly clear tone that he has.

I found this great website, which is really intended for guitar instruction, that attempts to separate the parts of various AC/DC tunes. The site invites you to pick a song and “pretend you’re Angus and play solos over Malcolm’s giant riffs!” Again, there is no real way of knowing if Angus didn’t record all the parts while Malcolm sat in the corner and self-flagellated. But given Mike Fraser’s comments after engineering Black Ice, the band is as no frills as they come—“They plug in, turn up… and there you go, you’ve got AC/DC comin’ atcha…” That would lead me to believe that most of the rhythm parts are handled by Malcolm with Angus chipping in where possible since they probably track live and Angus needs to do his soloing thang (using mostly pentatonic and hexatonic, I don’t want to waste too much space talking about his note selection since it is so simple).

So let’s face it—when people say that they want to sound like Angus Young, some of them probably just mean they want to sound like that guitar thingie from AC/DC, which in the end is a combination of at least two guitar sounds in many cases.

Sound like any artist just by purchasing this!

Furthermore, in AC/DC’s megahit, 1980’s Highway to Hell, it is likely that these simple punchy parts are the product of numerous guitars stacked on top of each other as a result of engineer/producer Mutt Lange’s “penchant” for “overdubs.” According to Alex Call of the band Clover, Mutt would often have them sing eight tracks of backgrounds going “oooooh” and then bounce them down to a single track, then do it again to make a stereo double. Just imagine the mountain of guitar tracks he probably had for a “guitar group.”

Regardless of production techniques though, it is clear that AC/DC are able to get pretty close to their signature sound that exists on tape when they perform live. So if that is the case, how can they get two guitars to sound so damn loud? I think a lot of it comes from the orchestration of the tune. As a “guitar rock” group, there truly isn’t much else to them. The drums are ridiculously simple, short, dry, and don’t take up much space in the mix while the bass in many songs is practically non-existent. The guitars are titanic in the mix compared to everything else.

With the drums and bass being so small, there isn’t much lower mid and low frequency content. I’m still working on this metaphor, so forgive me in advance: Think of a mix as a closed box filled with sports equipment, bassy sounds are like big Pilates balls whereas treble-y sounds are like ping pong balls. Think of loudness as filling the box as completely as possible. You can make something loud and bassy, but you won’t have much stuff in the mix. Or you can make something loud and treble-y and you can have a whole lot of stuff in the mix.

Moreover, the guitars are very nasal in timbre. Angus’s SG with nickel humbuckers is very treble-y without a whole lot of bass content until he gets that amp crunching with the big chords. Malcolm’s Gretsch Firebird Jet is of a similar tonality although he often plays different voicings to give thickness. He even took out his neck and middle pickups just to focus on that present lead tone. Ultimately, what this means is that there is a whole lot of upper-mid and high frequency content.

Contributing to presence, Young is known for using heavy picks and having a very strong pick attack. On the surface, this may not seem like much since Pete Townsend is also known for having a strong pick attack and they have different sounds. However, Angus’s SG uses low output humbuckers, which are clearer and have more note definition. This also allows him to drive the power tubes harder and the preamp tubes not so hard, whereas Pete Townsend uses high output pickups (like p90s) and drives the preamp tubes more.

Recording 101 tells us that putting reverb on a track has the effect of pushing things into the background. So the utter dryness of AC/DC’s guitar parts contributes to the presence of their sound. Many less professional players balk at hearing themselves play with nothing extending their sounds, whether it be compression, reverb, delay, or anything else. But that is how AC/DC rolls. No effects, the only compression that would come would be from the tubes in the Marshall stacks.

Since there is no reverb, the decay on the guitars is very short. And since the rest of the band is not really filling in the holes that much, especially on the intros that define the band’s most memorable moments, that leaves a whole lot of room to compare how loud the guitars are to total silence. With an album like My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, there is so much going on all at the same time that there is never any reference to silence to let you know just how loud everything is. Your ears adjust. Have you ever rocked out while driving down the highway, then parked, got out of the car, came back, turn the car on, and gotten blasted by how ungodly loud you were listening to that record? Well with the orchestration of AC/DC tunes, namely in the first 20 seconds where it is just big guitar hits over drumming, it’s the same effect, you start the record in silence, hear the big guitar hit, then go back to silence, then back to another hit, and so on. Your ears never adjust to a new baseline.

Lastly, looking at the gear list for Compass Point Recording Studios in the Bahamas, which is where Back In Black was recorded, I see a standard collection of solid-state gear, very high-fi with lots of head room. But another thing that I see that is somewhat uncommon is the Aphex Aural Exciter, which became very prominent in the 80s to give things presence and bite. I wonder how much of that was used in the tracking/mixing.

Well, so much for an article about an SG, a cable, and a Marshall amp. Even the simplest set ups can spawn a lot of academic items to ponder and perhaps with the emergence of home recording and hobbyist recording, we could stand to put a little more science and analytics into engineering.

Whether you’ve researched production and engineering in magazines (we recommend Tape Op) or on the web, you’re well aware of the ongoing debate between the virtues of analog and digital recording. Eventually, Phil and I will discuss the merits and limitations of both, but for now I will define the two terms in order to lay the foundation for future articles including next week’s Producer Speak: “Bit Depth, Bit Rate, and Sample Rate.”

Digital audio relies on a series of points (called samples) and works similarly to film. A reel of film is comprised of a series of still photos which, when projected at high speed, gives the illusion of fluid motion to the naked eye. Your brain “connects the dots” from one image to the next. Digital audio works like film in that sound is captured via a series of samples (which could be thought of as snapshots of sound pressure levels). These dots are then connected to form waveforms:

The scale is very different, however. Though film could theoretically run at an unlimited rate of frames (images) per second, we only need to capture and play back about 30 frames per second to give the appearance of realism. A CD, on the other hand, plays back at a rate of over 44 thousand samples per second.

Analog audio does not rely on samples at all. Analog is so called because when sound is captured to an analog medium, the waveform that is created is analogous with the sound wave being captured. This means that an analog audio signal has a higher potential for quality, although analog signal decreases in fidelity (quality of exactness) each time it is copied or transferred, whereas a digital signal will retain its quality no matter how many times it is copied.

Things that are analog: reel-to-reel tape, cassettes, microphones, preamps (not including built-in analog-to-digital converters).

Things that are digital: Protools, CDs, DAT, MP3s, WAVs, DVDs, anything on a computer.

Analog to Digital converters such as the Digidesign 192 bridge the two formats together. These are sometimes called A2D or simply “converters” when also referring to Digital to Analog conversion devices.

Next week’s Producer Speak: “Bit Depth, Bit Rate, and Sample Rate.”

Note: Though this article refers to live drum performances, all information below can be applied to MIDI sequencing and quantization.

The music blogosphere is abuzz this month with talk of an informal survey which compares tempo deviations on drum performances of popular rock groups. The following graph shows tempo deviations in the drum performance by John Bonham* on Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”:

The tempo graphs show little deviation for pop acts like Nickelback, Britney Spears, and late-era Green Day. Some say this exactness contributes to a rigid or lifeless quality of radio rock. On the other end of the spectrum, the tempos of iconic rock bands like the Beatles, Metallica, and Weezer deviate considerably within songs.

The above plays into the notion that the 60s and 70s were the golden age of music—the “what ever happened to all the great rock n’ roll bands???” mentality—the idea that musicianship has been replaced by convenience, the increasingly poor work ethic of each new generation and especially all that new fangled technology.

The article’s author must not be an engineer because he attributes this phenomenon to click tracks which is, to put it bluntly, just plain wrong. Nickelback couldn’t play this closely to a metronome if they wanted to; these tempo deviation graphs cannot tell us whether the band played to a click track or not. The real culprit is editing to The Grid a.k.a. a tempo map, either by hand or using a software add-on like Beat Detective or Elastic Audio. To take it one step further, you could attribute this sound to the advent of the computer. After all, editing work at this level of precision was simply not possible before Protools and other computer-based DAWs in the early 90s.

And yet the argument against technology still stands—it is often the human imperfections that make a record great.

One of my favorite examples of desirable “feel” is the performance by legendary bassist Pino Pallidino on D’Angelo’s Voodoo. He drags behind the rest of the band, almost as if the bass itself is hesitating, holding back great emotion or desire until just the right moment, much like people sometimes do in the throes of passion.

On the other hand, going completely au naturale can be dangerous. There are two factors working in favor of editing to a tempo map:

1) You’re not killing the magic if there was no magic there to begin with. Sometimes “feel” is just an optimistic way of saying poor chops.

2) As Phil once posited to me, our ears are so accustomed to music that is perfectly in tune and aligned that to leave out this step could make one’s music sound dated or unprofessional, even to the untrained ear.

As a mix engineer, these are the sorts of nuanced philosophical choices I must concern myself with when it comes time to take a project from good to great. Ethical implications aside, it is possible to quantize or edit live drum tracks in a way which does not kill all of the feel. Phil and I call this Musical Editing (on our Services page).

If the performer has a unique style or feel that I think is worth holding on to, I simply align each downbeat and leave breathing room for all the notes in between (as opposed to editing to every 8th or 16th note). I also depend on references: mention late-era Green Day in your Project Info Submission Form and you can expect your drums to be perfectly on the grid down to the sixteenth note. Mention the Pixies, on the other hand, and your drums may be left untouched.

Call it rigid, call it lifeless, I actually sometimes prefer the sound of aligned and sample-replaced drums. It is sometimes necessary to sacrifice the human element for the clarity and power of perfect drums. On the other hand I do think some bands could benefit from more organic, natural-sounding drum performances (Snow Patrol comes to mind).

What do you think? Are tempo grids killing music?

Source: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/02/in-search-of-the-click-track/

*From the look of things, I think we may have to make it a requirement to mention John Bonham in every single post from now on.

I hold no pretense of being a Led Zeppelin expert, however John Bonham’s drum sound is one that practically everybody wants to emulate.  Whether you actually want to play like him is another story, but it would seem like every drummer would love to be as bombastic and aggressive as Bonham.

The truth of the matter is that if you want to sound like John Bonham, you really need to play like him. You probably shouldn’t be ripping off 32^nd note paradiddles at 140 BPM on your Iron Cobra. Moreover, your playing style, the orchestration of your tune, and your own nuances will directly inform the possibilities for your sound. This isn’t to say that you need to be on the same level as Bonham to sound like him, but there are songwriting elements that anyone can use to help accomplish a desired sound.

Listen to any Zeppelin record and you’ll notice that he is very, very simple with his beats in the vast majority of his tunes. Sometimes he only hits the kick drum twice in a measure. This leaves a ton of room for him to have that gigantic bass drum sound that we all know and love.

In most of his kits, John Bonham had a kick drum well over the standard 22” in most commercial kits these days. His bass drum was truly a bass drum often measuring 26 inches. His kick sound is very open lots with of ring and resonation without much dampening. This was pretty normal in a lot of records in the 60s to mid 70s.  In all likelihood it would’ve been similar in much earlier recordings if the technology existed to reproduce those low frequencies.

In the 70s, dance music reduced the kick drum to a very tight, short tick as opposed to the bass foundation for the tune. This kept mixing kick drums simple, the dance beats driving and easily distinguishable, and allowed tunes to be more lushly orchestrated (especially in the bass range which was great for diversity in the dancehall).  However, it put the idea of a big bassy bass drum on the back burner in favor of a more punchy kick sound.

Now to sound like Bonham, you don’t need a 26” monster of a kick drum. What I do is take out all of the dampening in the bass drum:  pillows, towels, everything. Put single ply heads on the kit so that they resonate more (single ply heads have longer sustain, multiple plys are used to make things more durable). Then, detune the kit as low as possible without it sounding like hitting loose paper (more on this in a later article on tuning drums for the studio). The aim is to achieve a deep, long, low sustain. Once you’ve achieved the maximal effect like this, you can tailor the decay by applying dishtowels or something light to the front heads to dampen slightly.

Look at the picture above.  You’ll notice two microphones on Bonham’s kit in the studio.  One is a U87 and the other looks like  a Unidyne 57.  You’ll also notice that he has no hole in the front head and doesn’t have a D112 shoved up in at and against the beater head.  This provides a barrier that reduces the tick of the beater and increases the boom of the resonations from the head and drum bodies.

If you are ripping off 32^nd note paradiddles at 140 BPM, there is simply no room for you to sound like John Bonham with this kick drum sound—it’ll end up being a gigantic bass wash. All that steady low-end will severely restrict the amount of loudness you can get out of your song since low frequencies take up such a huge portion of the power spectrum. Because of this, either your kick drum is loud and your tune is quiet, or your tune is louder and your kick drum is quiet. Let that kick drum resonate, give it space to be appreciated and you’ll start moving closer to that Bonham sound.

It is also crucial to understand that in a mix, no sound is an island. In order for something to be big, something else has to be small. So when you listen to a Zeppelin recording, you’ll notice that there is an awful lot of space in the other instruments that frame the drums very nicely. Jimmy Page doesn’t just machine-gun power chords through the Big Muff which would result in a gigantic square wave. He has a lot of single line melodic elements that are often in the higher register that juxtapose Bonham’s big boisterous drum sound (see “All of My Love”).

Try approaching your tunes with some prior planning—if you think you’d like a John Bonham type of drum sound, then orchestrate the part like it would be a Bonham tune. You’ll find that from the onset, your drummer will sound more like Bonham and your engineer should have an easy time getting the sound you want out of whatever mic set-up you have—no matter where you recorded it, no matter what gear you used.

Oh yah, and smack the shit out of the drums…Bonham would be proud.

You’ve probably heard someone say, “don’t buy [insert hard drive brand]… mine crashed on me and I lost everything.” You may have heard that LaCie drives do not fail.

But you’re still not sure, so you do a little research.

You check out some reviews online, do a search on Gearslutz.com… maybe you’ll go to Guitar Center and have Joe Shred* tell you what he likes to use, next thing you know you’re leaving confused, half-naked with a bunch of $3,000 Monster cables…

Or you ask me and I’ll tell you to pick whatever has cool-looking lights on the front. And I’ll insist that you buy three of them.

But we’ll get back to that in a minute. As far as deliverables** go, LaCie is the industry standard. Like Apple and Pro Tools, many people won’t take you seriously if you’re using anything but LaCie. While I was working for Avatar in NYC, we used exclusively LaCie drives for data storage and deliverables (unless requested otherwise).

So I used to believe they didn’t crash too. That is, until my D2 Quadra crashed after 3 weeks for no apparent reason. At that point I decided to do some research of my own:

That’s right, the hard disk itself isn’t made by LaCie at all. Turns out, this is true for most external hard drive manufacturers.

You can get flashy. Avastor and Glyph drives use more expensive components and are often considered the best by those in the know. Personally, I put spinners on my Glyph 050Q:

But even Glyph uses Seagate disks*** (they have found Seagate to be the most reliable). In other words:

No matter how much money you spend, your drive will fail. You will lose data. And you will be pissed.

So what does all of this mean? Buy anything and pray?

Yes! …well no, but when you’re picking out an external hard drive you can pretty much remove reliability from the equation (barring any widely-reported glitches). I went with Glyph for three reasons:

1. Excellent warranty and replacement policy
2. High-quality components, including the bridging chip (bridging is supposedly the second most common source of external hard drive failures , although I could find no official study to confirm this)
3. Good tech support

The moral of the story is this: the only real way to be safe is to have at least three copies of everything, one of which should be in another location to account for physical damage or theft. I back up sessions to several hard drives as well as data DVDs, which I mail out of state bi-weekly. That means even if Fix Your Mix HQ gets nuked, your session is in Atlanta somewhere…

To be fair:

• LaCie customer service was very good to me and tech support was moderately prompt. I would not hesitate to use a LaCie in the future. I’m just saying that I also wouldn’t hesitate to use anything else.
• My Glyph 050Q fan was clicking and whirring within a week, but tech support told me a temporary fix (stick a paper clip in between the fan blades during boot up) and sent me a replacement fan, free of charge.

Have your own hard drive horror story? Share it in the comments section.

*Okay, okay. Not all Guitar Center sales reps are evil, soul-sucking capitalist pigs. But you know who you are.

**A deliverable is exactly what it sounds like: an item, product or artifact which must be created and then delivered as part of an obligation. In the audio industry that may mean hard drives, data DVDs, CD masters, session recall notes, et al.

***(Source)

Now listening to:

“Living Without” by Slim Thug Presents Boss Hogg Outlawz

Whether you’ve had experience in a “real” studio or not, it may seem intuitively easier to sit in the control room and tap your engineer on the shoulder when you think something needs changing. Quick yes, but this exercise has several intrinsic deficiencies.

The most important deficiency is the environment. Coming out of your natural setting to listen to your songs on someone else’s system presents a steep learning curve in terms of getting your ears tuned to the room and monitors. But it is vitally important that you do in order for the decisions you make in the heat of the moment and under the duress of the clock to translate to the outside world. If you’ve been in this business long enough, then you know the pride-swallowing experience of leaving one venue thinking you have a spectacular mix, then taking it home, playing it for friends and family, and finding out that the bass has mysteriously disappeared or the highs don’t quite sing the way they did in the control room.

With our methodology, you can take our professional mixes from our studio to all the environments that you know: your home studio, your car, your entertainment system. You can even put them on shuffle with your favorite record in your iPod and see if they blend in. You can take your time on these decisions and make sure that you are happy with your product in every situation.

Time is the second limitation of the attended session paradigm. For example, in order to get acclimated to a new room you could bring in a sampling of your favorite songs and listen to them on the monitors for reference, but then you have to ask yourself if it is worthwhile to pay the studio and engineer for you to listen to your record collection when you can do it in your own space for free or better yet–not even have to spend the time because you already know what your rooms sound like. In commercial studios, the longer you thoughtfully consider your mixing decisions, the lighter your wallet gets. But your music is your art and your decisions should be weighed thoroughly. Don’t you think you’d make better decisions by your own schedule and not sweating the clock and the budget?

Studios have an inherent incentive to keep you going as long as possible to maximize their profits (disclaimer: this is not to imply that all studios want to shake down their clientele, but the impetus is always there regardless of how magnanimous an owner may be). I once knew a studio owner that would come in and regale his clients with literally hours of anecdotes and small talk, all of which were on the clock. With our flat-rate policies, you never have to worry about time, money, or any of that. $80 for a mix, take as long as you need on your decisions—it’s that simple.

Our prices are an extraordinary bargain when you consider some of the working environments we are privy to. With the democratization of audio technology, it has become relatively inexpensive and easy to start up a “recording studio.” In all candor however, the vast majority of studios out there are not worth your time.

Let me just briefly describe the primary studio I work out of. It is a $2.5 million dollar room built in the ‘80s designed by acoustics legend Russ Berger. We have full spectrum studio mains as well as near-field monitors and several networked listening rooms. Compare that to most local recording studios and you are likely to see the value.

At Fix Your Mix, we offer you world-class mixes by professionals in a truly professional environment at a price-point that is simply unbeatable. More importantly, we give you the freedom to take your mixes out of our world and in to yours so that you can make sure your record is something you are proud to put your name on.

So is internet mixing right for you? The answer is a resounding “it depends.” If you have access to a multi-million dollar facility that you are familiar with or maybe have an open ledger, then more power to you. For those of you who don’t, it might be time to give us a try. Send us your tunes and we’ll do a free proof for you. Then you can tell us if our business model is right for you.

When Nirvana’s Nevermind came out, it was touted as one of the loudest albums ever released. Today, if that album came onto your iTunes playlist after Death Magnetic, you’d have to turn your speakers up considerably to hear it.*

Psychological studies have shown that a recording’s loudness dramatically affects how much people like a song and how likely it is that a person will stop on a certain radio station. The solution? Limiting: a process which effectively turns up the quietest parts of a recording, automatically raising its overall loudness. A limiter is one of the last pieces in the mastering signal chain and arguably the most important.

Done properly, limiting can add energy to a song. Taking it too far a la Death Magnetic, however, may cause ear fatigue, a subconscious phenomenon akin to reading under dim light, straining the listener’s ears and making him or her want to turn off the music after extended listening periods.

Metallica‘s latest has received a flood of criticism and media attention regarding the presence of over-limiting and digital clipping, an unpleasant-sounding distortion that occurs when a sound medium is overloaded beyond its volume limit.

The audio community has been debating the so-called “loudness war” for years but never before have consumers been able to hear the difference for themselves. Enter Guitar Hero: World Tour, which allows users to access an unmastered version of Death Magnetic – and it sounds a lot better.

Mastering engineer Ted Jensen defends himself:

“In this case the mixes were already [over-limited] before they arrived at my place […] I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume [being seen as the most important thing].”

It is hard to say who is responsible. The engineers who worked on the album have otherwise stellar track records. In any case, Death Magnetic may represent a new kind of revolution: one that gets quieter.

Personally, I find that clipping can benefit some recordings, but this new Metallica record took it too far. Add to this the fake-sounding drums and we’re left with one of the worst sound major recordings in recent years. What do you think? And to those of you who aren’t audio engineers: did you notice?

Also note: Another result of the loudness war is that many record labels have released “digitally remastered” versions of classic albums in order to compete with today’s recordings. If you want to compare Nevermind to Death Magnetic, use the original release for full effect.

*Soundcheck notwithstanding.

Sources: Tape Op (Nov/Dec ’08), AllMusic.com