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Crowded sound vs. spacious sound (mixing / mastering / arrangement) (pg. 2)
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| Richard Butler |
| I was thinking about Queen's 'another one bits the dust' - a fullsome sounding grove with hardly anything going on. I for one can learn from the old school. |
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| Beatflux |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
Three hat loops? Naw, you need at least ten. :p |
I could not believe that 7 skies actually layers 8-10 hihat patterns. Seems like overkill. |
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| Fledz |
| quote: | Originally posted by Richard Butler
I only know deadmaus 2007/8 stuff and I would say he is the exact opposite of the wall o sound noise menance I am fed up with. His tracks are pretty clean and don;t have oodles of synths layered up - in esscence just kick' bass and a lead synth (ok they may be layered for power but what I mean is there is little else going on). |
I agree with this. A lot his tracks really don't have all that much in them but people still lap them up. They just work. |
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| Mad for Brad |
I tend to orchestrate rather dense but it is always meant to sound rather simple. The added layers that double lets say the violins add colour but not necessarily something you would hear alone
ALl sorts of combinations for orchestra. Cell a oboe.Viola and horns. ! first violin and flute. Much like addictive synthesis. |
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| dj_alfi |
| quote: | Originally posted by Mad for Brad
addictive synthesis. |
:p |
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| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
...super bass-heavy, squashed, crowded sound of so much dance music. |
Bass-heavy, squashed, and crowded all refer to completely different aspects of a mix.
It's been demonstrated for some time that bass heaviness is a good thing. Obviously you want to stay out of the mud range (around 500 Hz) as much as possible, but loud bass and treble against a relatively soft mid-band is what most listeners perceive to be crisp and clean, which is a prerequisite for dance music and also very common in mainstream genres.
It's also fairly straightforward to squash a mix without crowding it. Hell, you can squash a mix with nothing but a kick drum playing if you want. And actually, a certain amount of compression tends to make people perceive the track as less crowded/muddy, because the increased gain makes individual elements easier to hear at the same master volume.
If a track really sounds "crowded" then it's probably a sign of poor or inadequate EQing and possibly too little compression. I would not classify the majority of dance music as sounding crowded. In all likelihood, if you're finding some track to sound just relentlessly headache-inducing noisy then it's probably overdoing the midrange, especially if it's trance we're talking about (those supersaws and the like tend to fill out the midrange a lot and can bring a lot of mud into the track if the producer isn't careful).
Or maybe you're just referring to tracks that have no dynamic range, but I think that tends to relate more to arrangement than the technical aspects of mixing and mastering. If you record a concert pianist and master it to have sharp EQ and high gain, the result is still going to sound very clear and spacious. Muddiness would be the result of bad compression or mastering, not necessarily too much of it.
It is possible, even likely, that you are experiencing this as a direct result of age. As people get older their tolerance for harsh sounds starts to decline, just like their tolerance for spicy foods or other types of mild pain. And as pain tolerance decreases then you start to notice it more; things that may once have been enjoyable become just painful or irritating. Sounds in a mix also become more difficult to distinguish from each other, which is why you always see the old fogeys turning their TVs up to preposterous volumes just to hear the voices.
Could also be the trend in music production, but I think the trend reversed a few years ago as producers started to gain better awareness of the effects of overcompression. If nothing else, they've at least gotten much better at it, developing the ability to eke out more gain without actually making the track sound squashed (typically due to better compressors and multiple stages of lighter compression).
Bottom line is I think your complaint is about 5 years late. Dance music definitely did go through a stage (several stages, if you consider the technology that was available at various times in history) where everything was just hideously squashed and ear-splitting. But eventually the producers wise up, and I think the pendulum's been swinging the other way for at least a few years now. |
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| Mad for Brad |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
Thriller (alegedly) doesn't have any compression on it, but that's not why it was good - again as per the examples you posted before, they are catchy, well written songs, and in the case of Thriller, performed by someone that was incredibly talented and one of the greatest performers(MJ), and produced by someone even more talented (QJ). It' not about the loudness war or compression.
Good engineering is giving elements the space to breath and stand out as individual sounds and as composite. Good arrangement is the same but in a musically creative way. Good mixing is making the most of those two previous statement and good mastering it just accentuating those previous three things. |
Back then , musicians sort of did compression on their own in that they mimicked the sort of consistency you get when using compression. You didn't need to put a limiter on every channel input because players where that good. I remember practicing drums spending hours just hitting the drum to get a consistent loudness and be able to control it. You would also hit things with velocities that sort of mirrored the pumping action of a compressor for example the hihat Also whem you really wack a drum or guitar or bass, you get that boost in transients that compression also does for you. And add someone that knows how to mc things and you really don't need that much compression. I 'm sure the tape process and the tube saturation provided enough crunch to make the final product great.
It really was an era where musicians could just be musicians and make a great living doing just one thing. Even drummers and bass players made money. |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
Bass-heavy, squashed, and crowded all refer to completely different aspects of a mix.
It's been demonstrated for some time that bass heaviness is a good thing. Obviously you want to stay out of the mud range (around 500 Hz) as much as possible, but loud bass and treble against a relatively soft mid-band is what most listeners perceive to be crisp and clean, which is a prerequisite for dance music and also very common in mainstream genres.
It's also fairly straightforward to squash a mix without crowding it. Hell, you can squash a mix with nothing but a kick drum playing if you want. And actually, a certain amount of compression tends to make people perceive the track as less crowded/muddy, because the increased gain makes individual elements easier to hear at the same master volume.
If a track really sounds "crowded" then it's probably a sign of poor or inadequate EQing and possibly too little compression. I would not classify the majority of dance music as sounding crowded. In all likelihood, if you're finding some track to sound just relentlessly headache-inducing noisy then it's probably overdoing the midrange, especially if it's trance we're talking about (those supersaws and the like tend to fill out the midrange a lot and can bring a lot of mud into the track if the producer isn't careful).
Or maybe you're just referring to tracks that have no dynamic range, but I think that tends to relate more to arrangement than the technical aspects of mixing and mastering. If you record a concert pianist and master it to have sharp EQ and high gain, the result is still going to sound very clear and spacious. Muddiness would be the result of bad compression or mastering, not necessarily too much of it.
It is possible, even likely, that you are experiencing this as a direct result of age. As people get older their tolerance for harsh sounds starts to decline, just like their tolerance for spicy foods or other types of mild pain. And as pain tolerance decreases then you start to notice it more; things that may once have been enjoyable become just painful or irritating. Sounds in a mix also become more difficult to distinguish from each other, which is why you always see the old fogeys turning their TVs up to preposterous volumes just to hear the voices.
Could also be the trend in music production, but I think the trend reversed a few years ago as producers started to gain better awareness of the effects of overcompression. If nothing else, they've at least gotten much better at it, developing the ability to eke out more gain without actually making the track sound squashed (typically due to better compressors and multiple stages of lighter compression).
Bottom line is I think your complaint is about 5 years late. Dance music definitely did go through a stage (several stages, if you consider the technology that was available at various times in history) where everything was just hideously squashed and ear-splitting. But eventually the producers wise up, and I think the pendulum's been swinging the other way for at least a few years now. |
Thanks, Diginut. This had me take a look of a mix from a bit of a different perspective in conjunction with some feedback it's been getting. Maybe it's not the panacea the mix needs but I think it just made things a lot clearer for me and the mix.
The rub is that it's essentially a simplicity which eluded me that was right under my nose the whole time. :toothless |
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| Beatflux |
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
Bass-heavy, squashed, and crowded all refer to completely different aspects of a mix.
It's been demonstrated for some time that bass heaviness is a good thing. Obviously you want to stay out of the mud range (around 500 Hz) as much as possible, but loud bass and treble against a relatively soft mid-band is what most listeners perceive to be crisp and clean, which is a prerequisite for dance music and also very common in mainstream genres.
It's also fairly straightforward to squash a mix without crowding it. Hell, you can squash a mix with nothing but a kick drum playing if you want. And actually, a certain amount of compression tends to make people perceive the track as less crowded/muddy, because the increased gain makes individual elements easier to hear at the same master volume.
If a track really sounds "crowded" then it's probably a sign of poor or inadequate EQing and possibly too little compression. I would not classify the majority of dance music as sounding crowded. In all likelihood, if you're finding some track to sound just relentlessly headache-inducing noisy then it's probably overdoing the midrange, especially if it's trance we're talking about (those supersaws and the like tend to fill out the midrange a lot and can bring a lot of mud into the track if the producer isn't careful).
Or maybe you're just referring to tracks that have no dynamic range, but I think that tends to relate more to arrangement than the technical aspects of mixing and mastering. If you record a concert pianist and master it to have sharp EQ and high gain, the result is still going to sound very clear and spacious. Muddiness would be the result of bad compression or mastering, not necessarily too much of it.
It is possible, even likely, that you are experiencing this as a direct result of age. As people get older their tolerance for harsh sounds starts to decline, just like their tolerance for spicy foods or other types of mild pain. And as pain tolerance decreases then you start to notice it more; things that may once have been enjoyable become just painful or irritating. Sounds in a mix also become more difficult to distinguish from each other, which is why you always see the old fogeys turning their TVs up to preposterous volumes just to hear the voices.
Could also be the trend in music production, but I think the trend reversed a few years ago as producers started to gain better awareness of the effects of overcompression. If nothing else, they've at least gotten much better at it, developing the ability to eke out more gain without actually making the track sound squashed (typically due to better compressors and multiple stages of lighter compression).
Bottom line is I think your complaint is about 5 years late. Dance music definitely did go through a stage (several stages, if you consider the technology that was available at various times in history) where everything was just hideously squashed and ear-splitting. But eventually the producers wise up, and I think the pendulum's been swinging the other way for at least a few years now. |
panning X frequency X depth X TIME
THERE IS A FOURTH DIMENSION!!!!
Depending on how is arranged and how things are close together, there is the effect of pre/post masking.
Compression can make the release stage of a sound longer, and that will have a bigger masking effect. |
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| evo8 |
| I think while bass is obviously important in dance music, i think it can be overdone to the point where its just a constant boominess and no therefore no punch or groove - ive heard this a lot in clubs this past few years (clubs with very good soundsystems) |
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| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by Beatflux
panning X frequency X depth X TIME
THERE IS A FOURTH DIMENSION!!!!
Depending on how is arranged and how things are close together, there is the effect of pre/post masking.
Compression can make the release stage of a sound longer, and that will have a bigger masking effect. |
There are many more than four aspects to the mixing and arrangement of a track; I was simply referring to the three under discussion.
There's also timing of individual instrument/sample tracks - imperceptible delays in the attack/release can significantly affect the perceived tempo vs. actual tempo. And swings or other "grooves" can significantly alter the perceived mood, turning a harsh, somber track into a playful one.
And then of course there are all sorts of tricks you can play with the stereo field besides panning - stereo imaging, special types of reverb, M-S compression, yadda yadda.
Compression itself is not one-dimensional. At a basic minimum you're trying to balance RMS gain with peak gain. As a simplification you can imagine it as a reverse-asymptotic X-Y chart; eventually you hit diminishing returns and further compression is just squashing more low transients without netting any significant gain. And then you have limiting or hard compression which is only concerned with peak removal, not gain.
Anyway. I'm just saying all this to highlight the fact that my previous post was not intended to be a complete dissertation on all of the interdependent variables in a mix, it was only intended to address the specific question being asked here. |
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| Blake_Jarrell |
mixdowns are definitely getting more crowded and masters are definitely slammed to the point of lunacy but heres some things i think about when im in the studio:
i feel like the loudness war is important in the DJing sense that you are mixing tracks into each other and they have to be cohesive. when i mix a really old track (when compression wasn't so abused) into a newer slammed-beyond-all-reason track, the life just falls out of the mix and the dancefloor. it all of a sudden just sounds like something is missing.
dance music is supposed to be somewhat overwhelming, especially on a big system. but i find alot of the really intricate things in really crowded tracks get lost when they are played so loud and they are already slammed through a limiter in the studio and then again at a club. this leads me to question alot of the extra layers in my tracks...are they really going to get heard? or could i take this out of the mix and my mixdown would be alot easier to compress, eq, etc since its not as much stuff fighting each other for space.
i think the real "dynamics" in dance music are in the arrangement. of course its good to make sure each sound has its own space and is full of dynamic and character, but i think the easiest way to counter act this is to be really careful about how you arrange things when you have so many possible tracks/sounds in your mix.
just my way of looking at things when i write tracks. some other really good points in this thread as well. |
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