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so how does one gain this objective ear for "production values"

what do "production values" sound like?
how do you spot "low quality" production?

I talk to people and they act like this isn't a subjective taste issue, that there is an absolute truth to what is "high quality" and what is "low quality". I am not trying to sound like a song that my firends and I like, I am trying to sound like objective high quality, and trying to figure out, what are the traits of this quality?

And for that matter, high quality in the musical elements seems to be something that people treat as an objective absolute truth as well. But I just don't know how to find it, I don't know where people are getting this objective sense of quality from. If it is really objective, then why is my taste not finding it? Maybe I have objectively poor taste. I usually just assume that composition really is a matter of taste and disregard the people who insist that there is an objective sense for quality composition.

This is what I would like to understand better, the objective sense of "quality" in music, more specifically the production side though, I'm a bit skeptical that an absolute truth for quality of composition exists at all.

This is getting a little meta physical but I'll take a stab at.

We spend a lot of time on here talking about the mechanics of acheiving something, but once you understand the mechanics you can move beyond that and into art.

Great music moves you emotionally, and high production values will only accentuate what's there. If there is no heart to it then no amount of production value will make it art.

A quick comparison is Jimi Hendrix Vs Stock Aikin and Waterman. They had very high production values, but were manufacturing product. You listen some Hendrix records and the production values ae not that high, but boy does it move you.

What's interesting about that is that a distorted electric guitar used to be something to be avoided. Think of the 50s records (Pre Elvis) Distortion si bad so you avoid it, if you have distortion you have low production value. WRONG!

Coming back to reality, listen to a bunch of stuff you really like, and maybe even a bunch of stuff that you don't and try to understand what it is that makes you like something and learn to copy. Once you can copy effetively you can start to get past the mechanics..

you seem to think production values are subjective, or at least rapidly changing and varying from one style to another.

So expressing "heart" is the essence of quality composition, and "production values" are the ways sound can be manipulated to magnify this "heart".

But then there is stuff like john cage, who made music purposely detached from his heart. And the more techy styles which pride themselves on being cold and heartless, forcing the audience to supply heart instead.

I've really tried this listening and copying thing alot, but my probelm is there doesn't seem to be any consistent traits in music that cause me to like it. The stuff I like is too diverse, it varies so widely that I can't pinpoint it. I heap them into "like" and "dont like" piles, I compare, and there aren't really consistent traits among them that separate the two piles.

I don't know how to copy every little thing that I like, because I like stuff that is too inconsistent, I do know how to copy some things though. Maybe I need to narrow my focus a bit.

Ok, let's look at this..

All music is highly subjective as to its emotional response. You can get somewhat objective when defining well trodden genres, or looking at the technicalities of how a particular piece is put together, or even comparing several pieces.

Look at it a diferent way even cold and heartless mechanical music can move you emotionally when done well. The emotion may not be a positive one (Boo says the uplifitng dutch crowd), but it still moves you. It becomes part of the music.

Now, on the otherhand, take a musical score of a Beethoven Piano Sonata and enter it into a sequencer exactly as written and play back on he best sounding piano patch/samples you can find. Hell, play it back on a MIDI'd seinway in a decent concert hall. What comes out is a cold and heartless performance that has no soul, it also has a seamingly high production value (Great sound).

Give the same piece of music to a great pianist and the performance will be sublime. Even if say the piano was not the greatest and possibly even slightly out of tune. The exact timings and manner in which notes are played have a huge bearing on the impact of the delivery. In this case it's the performance that overcomes the "Production value" of the ropey piano.

So which is better? Unfortunately it's not as obvious as at first sight. If you're just wanting some muszak for a resturant where the patrons don't know what they're listening to then the first scenario might actually be more useful to you (espicially if your pianist has bad gas and hasn't bather in 3 weeks), if you want to appreciate the human condition beter then the second will be of more use.

This is a very deep and age old arguement that underlies a lot of what's going on on this board. Personally I'd sooner hear someone show some amazing ideas and concepts with a shite mix than listen to a reasonable copy of . This isn't to say there isn't value in people doing the copy and posting it for feedback, because that is a learning process in and of itself, learning to get past the mechanics. Though the original ideas, they're something special..

The straight up copy is just that, a copy, with nothing new to say. The original ideas are what makes music interesting.

Now, coming back to having the latest collection of 1337 waReZ.

My 4 year old daughter does some amazing drawings with just a couple of felt tip pens, but give her 8 diferent colors of paint and all that comes out is this muddy brown color. I think you get where I'm going.. The tools don't help you if you don't know what you're doing, and if you know what you are doing you should buy the tools you use.

So the objective sense for quality does not apply all across musc, but rather only when considering well trodden genres? If I deviate from all current genre's(assuming I do this in a tasteful way), do I approach the realm of the subjective?

Comparisons and technicalities of the piece are the objective measures? How does one objectively decide which piece is superior?

Please don't think of this as me being argumentative, I'm trying to learn stuff so I can pursue quality better. I realize these are really open-ended questions.

We have this compromise between performance and production, and how a person can add expression to Bethoven that a computer cannot capture, I liked this analogy. The context I am assuming, is the hunter of quality EDM, the kids with the dick measuring contests who praise their favored music and bash the epic trance. Say I want to capture this audience, who beleives in an objective sense for quality EDM. What are the elements of this sense of quality for the people who get on juno and listen to all the releases and pick out the "quality" then complain because there isn't any quality trance coming out any more.

I don't want to be one of these quantity musicians that "saturates the market" with poor music and makes it harder for people to dig for quality. I want to help make EDM better, not be yet another bedroom musician that releases crap and "kills the scene". But I don't know how to sense this "quality". I'm not trying to release a record or get signed, but I want to pursue "quality" in EDM. I was thinking at first that my bottleneck was budget, but it seems I could go alot further than I am now without spending very much money. The problem is, I don't know which aspects of my work need improvement(of course I am assuming all of them need improvement), but I dont know what "quality" means in the context of people hunting for good EDM music. I will select tunes I like and people will tell me they are "low quality", and it will be a consensus all across the board, not one person being a jerk. So I want to know what is "high quality", how do I find it, and how can I learn to make it.

quote:

Originally posted by Zombie0915 I will select tunes I like and people will tell me they are "low quality", and it will be a consensus all across the board, not one person being a jerk.

Low quality in aspects they have learned to appreciate on the musical side, but it's all subjective. Make whatever you think is musically high quality, others either like it or don't. If you really just want to have as much people as possible liking your music, then you should be making hip hop instead.

I think we can by now conclude that musical quality is subjective and production quality is somewhat objective.

EDIT: And if you want to help EDM, make something original!

Not so much as much people as possible liking it(beacuse then I wouldn't care about quality but rather about Suzy Creamcheese ), but the critics, the trainded ears, the experts, the people who know how to pick out what is quality, the people with informed opinions, those are the people I aim to please. But I have trouble understanding their judgement.

Quick one from me this time.. ;-)

Mozart emptied the concert hall more than once with what we would now hink of classics, as they were "Too radical" or "Vulgar".

Shows you what people can miss!!!

Just do what you can and don't overthink it. When you have something post it and we can talk about it.. :-)

Have to agree, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, some of my friends think I should quit sometimes when I produce something they dont like, do you think I will ?

quote:

[i][b]Mozart emptied the concert hall more than once with what we would now hink of classics, as they were "Too radical" or "Vulgar".

yeah, he was really radical, thought the film about him was pure class and hope its all true

you can look at your limitations as your teachers, find out ways to be smarter than them (as you seem to be doing with listening to your stuff on many sound systems, which is an excellent way to compensate for the lack of monitors - that's one 'teacher' you out-smarted).

limits force creativity in ones that desire results beyond the imposed limits.


i don't agree that sounds in and of themselves can be 'wrong' (though i may dislike them, but that one is down to taste, not quality), i agree that sounds can be 'wrong' just in referrence to other sounds; for example, i will call a sound "raw" if it overtakes other sounds around it, if it sounds like it's coming from the exact same source and competing with another sound for audible space; various solutions to this problem include filtering, equalizing, compressing, panning, reverberating certain parts of the spectrum and not others, narrowing the sound via ADSR, et cetera.

sometimes two 'raw' sound just have absolutely nothing in common and 'should' not be used in the same track unless HEAVILY modified.


a good excercise when trying to improve the quality of your music in general is to attempt to recreate a track you hold in high esteem for production values sound for sound, i wouldnt recommend saving patches from such excercises, because that would often lead to becoming a copy cat. the sole aim of this excercise is to show you that you can do it too (i'm not saying it will be easy, not at all )


on a more personal note: i spent the last.... i'm not sure, maybe 5 years working with reason, and i got to a level where i could see my tracks measuring up to the stuff i like, and as much fun as that was, it still took me a while to get each track to sound right; then after my computer was stolen and i settled in with a new one, i decided to give some other sequencers a shot, ones that are capable of working with vsti's (i was dying for a drum synth); i finally chose Orion Platinum because i liked the interface; i finished my first track on it on the first day i used it, i'm still debating whether to share it with TA or keep it till when i have enough material to send a demo CD to some labels; i can't tell you how overwhelming the difference was - the same sound quality that took me an hour to acheive with reason took half a minute to acheive with vsti's on orion.


one more note: art is abstract, but that doesnt go on to say that no rules can be had in it, on the other hand, these rules are not absolute, they can also be seemed as limits - teachers that you can (should?) out-smart. but just to make sure i'm being clear: dont get ahead of yourself, you can't be smarter than the 'teacher' if you don't even know what he's teaching. mistakes can also be beautiful, but relying on mistakes for the creation of music won't get you very far (even with no aim to sell your music or stuff like that). i say again: there are absolute rules, but those rules can be bypassed, which - barring mistakes, can only be done with a positive result if you understand the rules themselves.

one example of an 'absolute' rule you will surely agree with is harmony, another example would be quality. (if you can't make out the 'rules' of quality from this post i'll write another one trying to clearly define it, i'm not sure i can put it in to words, but i can try )

It sounds like a comparison thing, higher quality meaning just something else somewhat similar that the person likes better. People form these standards and comapre things against them, people who choose similar standards ally themselves together, quality seems to be very much a social construction.

From a hardware aspect

you didn't say what kind of sound card you were using-if it is just the stock laptop soundcard it is crap. Buy a 24 bit PCMCIA sound card and max out the ram on your laptop. Those are 2 cheap upgrades you could do hardware wise and then just download all the freeware/trial ware out there

Re: From a hardware aspect

quote:

Originally posted by timmyboy2 you didn't say what kind of sound card you were using-if it is just the stock laptop soundcard it is crap. Buy a 24 bit PCMCIA sound card and max out the ram on your laptop. Those are 2 cheap upgrades you could do hardware wise and then just download all the freeware/trial ware out there

Definately. RAM for the win. Nothing else gives you the noticable performance upgrade feeling that RAM can give.

quote:

Originally posted by Zombie0915 It sounds like a comparison thing, higher quality meaning just something else somewhat similar that the person likes better. People form these standards and comapre things against them, people who choose similar standards ally themselves together, quality seems to be very much a social construction.

not really, other tracks can be used as measuring bars, and are often used so, but that's not to say the quality of a track can not be measured without referring to other tracks.

one example: mostly (if not always), when a track has two colliding elements, it will suffer as a result.

it's really not that complex.

another example, this one really simple: overdrive an entire track and it will result in a serious quality loss.

it can't get much simpler than that, you overdrive a track, it gets distorted.

So things must sound like they were used on purpose and not the result of technical faults, lazyness, or lack of skill, that much is obvious to me.

But what I fail to understand is how this can be objective, what if the musician used distortion on purpose, how does one know when a musician is doing something as creative expression and when something is just an error that a lazy musician left in the piece? It still remains a social construction, you think there should be more bass because you are used to hearing more bass, you think there should not be distortion because you are used to hearing it clear.

In the context of EDM, of course high quality EDM is going to have the elements that EDM fans expect, some rhythms they can count, some sound the get stuck in their heads, some bass so that they can feel the shaking, but there is something to be said for challenging those assumptions. I feel this logic used for an objective standard for quality music, could just as easily be used to assert that trance songs are "low quality" without supersaws, because they are present in the "best" trance tunes, surely you would never use logic like that.

quote:

Originally posted by Zombie0915 I feel this logic used for an objective standard for quality music, could just as easily be used to assert that trance songs are "low quality" without supersaws, because they are present in the "best" trance tunes, surely you would never use logic like that.

that would be yet again using the measuring bars as the be-all end-all of measurment, when they are just tools to help you.

as for distortion, it is by definition 'bad'; not to say you can't ignore that fact, but when trying to asses something objectively, you may use the arbitrariness of that. it doesn't even require you to do some big step of denial, unless you factor in society, it's undesireable by nature.

...and even using distortion as a creative tool does not make it 'legit' or 'good'... if it's used improperly, it is by nature, 'bad', not by consensus.


so how do you use distortion properly? by not abusing other sounds, inadvertantly or advertantly. if you do abuse other sounds in the process regardless of your intentions, your music will be "low quality" by definition - thus, objectively; whether it transcends that fact to become 'great art' is down to listeners, tastes, marketing, and consensus.

You know what? I downloaded Reason because I didn't had enough money to buy it long time ago. And now recently, I bought it. If I didn't download Reason I would never be able to make music at all. I'm just a kid, I started making music when I was 9. Now I'm 15

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