SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the some-art,-some-science,-and-a-whole-lotta-black-magic dept.
According to many Metallica devotees, the official version of the band's 2008 record Death Magnetic is not the one worth listening to. Upon the album's release, fan forums exploded in disgust, choked with complaints that the songs sounded shrill, distorted, ear-splitting. These listeners liked the music and the songwriting, but everything was so loud they couldn't really hear anything. There was no nuance. Their ears hurt. And these are Metallica fans—people ostensibly undeterred by extremity. But this was too much.
The consensus seemed to be that Death Magnetic was a good record that sounded like shit. That the whole thing was drastically over-compressed, eliminating any sort of dynamic range. That it had been ruined in mastering. Eventually, more than 12,000 fans signed a petition in protest of the "unlistenable" product, and a mass mail-back-a-thon of CDs commenced. The whole episode provoked a series of questions, not just about what had gone wrong with Death Magnetic but about the craft in question: What is mastering, exactly? How does it work? Beyond the engineers themselves, almost no one seems to know.
An article on sound engineering, but the real question is, people listened to Metallica after 2000?
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Wednesday May 25 2016, @05:40PM
When a composer is emulating electronics (or replacing the live electronics used in an earlier version of the piece with purely acoustic forces) by distributing the individual frequencies among strings playing harmonics, every single string articulation is vital to achieving the intended harmony. See Saariaho's Nymphéa Reflection for string orchestra and how it relates to her earlier Nymphéa for string quartet and electronics for a good example of this, or e.g. Claude Vivier’s works where he used “les couleurs” like Lonely Child or Prologue pour un Marco Polo. In fact, I'd think that you'd find with the spectralist composer that this need for fidelity is the rule more than the exception.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @06:50PM
Not to mention there is the composer and the performer, and while the composer might want perfect execution as if descended from the heavens, the performer is free to fuck that right off and add in touches to make it their own.
This "I'm a musician therefore I should know" is smug patronizing bullshit, as if there aren't billions of approaches other musicians employ, from low-fi to the most pristine recordings and everything in between.
In fact, it was idiot musicians who wanted their albums to be louder than everyone else's that started this decline in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:48PM
I would explain it to you, but I'm an idiot musician too. We're the people who were too stupid to become actors, because we couldn't remember the spiel restaurants wanted us giving their customers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @08:54PM
That's okay, I'm just happy you cared enough to get someone else help you to post the reply.
Don't trip over your own drool on the way out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:44PM
Yes, you're right.
You can find lots of similar cases in choral harmonies as well, where you have a large number of parts.
But that's not what I was talking about. Different parts having separate articulations is not what the second violin section's individual members of the Greater Flyover Symphonic Ensemble is about. The second violin section is, in a sense, a single instrument, with a single staff on the score (as a rule, I know some people play around with the definitions) and the fact that one violin exited the initial attack thirteen milliseconds before another is not compositionally relevant. The interpretation is up to the musicians and conductor, and that's fair enough, but it does not mean that the composer intended that, or cares about that, or even listens for it at all.
So do you see the difference? On one hand, compositional intent. On the other hand, compositional irrelevance. Provided that the mastering doesn't bury what was revealed in the mix, and works within the limitations of intended equipment and context and media, you're not far wrong. If you're desperately trying to provide for resolution beyond relevance, you're wasting everyone's time and money.