Another great old documentary about the recording of a classic album from YouTube – this time of Peter Gabriel’s fourth album.
I’ve written before about how much I love the sound of this great-sounding album, so finding this video and being able to see the songs actually being written – well, I got a bit over-excited, actually.
There are so many fascinating and enjoyable things here that it’s hard to know where to start, but one thing that jumped out at me straight away was – look at the studio ! If you can call it a studio. In fact, you can’t – it’s just a room with a load of gear in it – a far cry from the facilites at Real World today. And all the vocals were recorded on… a Shure SM57 !
Another is the inspirational use of early sampling technology – in this era of gigabyte-sized multi-sample sound libraries, it’s easy to forget that you (and should) build the sonic signature of an entire song around the sound of nothing more than someone blowing across a metal pipe…
And finally, who knew it was so hard to smash a telly ?
I’m signed up to the Facebook group “End the Loudness War“. Last week Harman Aaron Loučka posted a heads-up that an example of the vinyl release of the new Red Hot Chile Peppers album, “I’m With You”, had been posted on YouTube.
I headed over to check it out, since vinyl releases often show as having better dynamics (“crest factor”, to be strictly correct) than their CD equivalents in the Dynamic Range Database. I don’t have a record deck though, so hadn’t had a chance to check it out, until now.
The results were pretty clear, and I’ve made my own short YouTube clip to demonstrate the difference. Take a listen, and see if you can hear a difference, and which one you prefer.
This is not a vinyl versus CD thing
Whatever you decide, it’s important to know – what you’re hearing is NOT some inherent limitation of the quality of the CD format.
It’s about the great reaction I got to an album I mastered recently for one of the legendary Big Al Wagner‘s clients – you can listen to one of my favourite tracks using the Bandcamp widget on the right.
If you’ve had your music professionally mastered, did you get a great result ? How much impact did the mastering engineer have, and how much credit do you give for that contribution ?
- and there’s no need to repeat myself here. But this tip is about loudness – or rather, levels.
Specifically, gain structure.
Gain structure just means – how loud your audio is, at every point in the audio chain. Back in the days of analogue it was crucial to get the levels as high as possible at every point in the chain to get the best signal-to-noise ratio, but not so loud as to cause distortion.
These days, it’s not really an issue. With over 60 dB of signal to noise ratio in even a 16-bit signal, all we need to do to get clean audio is avoid clipping, and we’re good.
So far the tips in this series have all been about “less is more”.
From which you might conclude that my mixes and masters use minimal EQ, compression and effects.
This couldn’t be farther from the truth!
In fact, I find that as a mastering engineer I’m often more “hands-on” than many of my peers, and this may be one of the reasons I’ve been successful. In one case I remember adding 46 dB @ 42 Hz to a reggae master coming from analogue tape – and it sounded great !
The key is to process agressively – but selectively.
"Everything you have advised us on has been invaluable... We learnt a hell of a lot from those two emails. We will absolutely be in touch regarding future mixes"
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