The Loudness War

The loudness war is a phrase that describes a trend in recorded music over the last couple of decades. This trend is to make everything seem louder by reducing the level between the loudest part of a song and the quietest part. Now, this topic is a pretty heated one, so let me lay out some of the basics for you so you can study it with a better idea whats going on here.

Music is a series of waves moving through the air that make our eardrum move so we can hear it. Well, all sound is really, from your dads “pull my finger” explosion to the sound of a train in the distance, to your favorite band live on stage. These waves are recorded in a studio with electronic equipment so that other electronic equipment can reproduce it for you to listen to when ever you feel like it. Cause hauling a band around in the back of your geo metro is not the easy to do.

Ok, I could be off there... some music is recorded live, sure. Either with good equipment, or the tape deck you have taped to your butt. But lets just talk about studio music here for this post.

In a studio, the engineer, producer and band all work together to get that band's “sound” on record. Now days it's usually done with digital equipment, but it used to be all analog with the stuff recorded to a wide spool of magnetic tape. Magnetic tape allowed the engineer to do some tricks that cant be done with digital these days. If you push more sound onto tape than actually fits on the tape, you get distortion that sort of smears the sound. In small doses it actually sounds pretty good to us. That distortion is what makes analog sound “warm” to us. But when you do the same thing to digital, it makes a sound a lot like listening to your computer modem on dial up... it is friggin awful. Not only does it not sound “warm” it doesn't sound like anything pleasant at all. Its hissy, screechy noise. So engineers really try hard to not let that happen.

The problem is, producers and some bands want everything louder, pushed as close to that horrible screech without going over as they can get it. Sometimes they goof. Not only is it louder, sometimes its screechy too. Metallica's newest album, Death Magnetic, is a very good example of this. It's really loud, and in a lot of places, it is too loud. Some people don't seem to mind, but a lot of us do. Now if you rip it to mp3 and play it on your discount, knock off iPod, you might not be able to hear it. But on a good home system, its pretty awful. Which is a pity, there are some great songs on Death Magnetic.

Metallica is just another victim of the loudness war. It's hard to say who goofed here, and not the purpose of this blog to point fingers at all. It is just a good example of what can happen.

So why push everything so loud? Well, a lot of people seem to follow the theory that louder is better. Certainly, the quiet parts are a lot harder to hear in your car with the windows down in heavy traffic. So the thought was “if we make the quiet parts louder, people can hear them better”. It actually sort of works. The problem is that when you aren't in your car, there are far less dynamics from quiet to loud. The distance between quiet and all knobs on 11 is way less. So two things happen. The music comes out as a sort of solid stream, it doesn't build up and fade back to create tension. When the soft guitar jumps to the singer screaming all out it doesn't blow you back in your seat like it used to. The second thing is it makes our ears fatigue faster, so we don't feel like listening as long. And that sucks.

So making things louder over all isn't really like turning the volume knob all the way up. It's a lot more like putting your favorite song on Ritalin... no excitement. Just there. Boring.

Now, if you had the same song with more dynamics, it feels more alive, more energetic. If you have remasters of some old stuff and the original versions, you can probably compare for yourself. The remaster is probably a lot louder, but doesn't have as wide a space between loud and quiet. Not every remaster has been compressed like this though, so you might hit a freak that managed to not be a casualty of the loudness war. A good example might be the new Beatles box set... I have not heard it yet, but I am suspicious its been compressed and made louder.

Now that we have these basics covered, I will probably come back to this again in a few posts. More than likely, I will get all cheesed off when I hear one of my favorite songs remastered louder and come back here and post a heck of a rant again.

Til then, try to keep track of your marbles!

Music and the Man

Ok, so now that I have this internet thing kinda figured out, let's really get after it.

I was big into the local music scene a while back. I played in some pretty awful bands, and I promoted some other pretty awful bands. Since no one seems to have heard of them, I was probably not a great promoter (ha!). But it allowed me to learn a lot about what was going on at the time, and some of that still applies today.

The big dream of every band is to get signed to a major label deal. But if you read about it today, it sounds like an awful idea. There is so much crap on the internet about how labels are screwing bands and that sort of thing. To some extent, some labels do screw bands. But music is a business, and the labels know screwing their money making cash cow isn't going to make them rich.

Sure, the labels using the RIAA to hunt down fans and sue them into the stone age looks like a dumb idea from the outside, but let's face it, they are actually trying to protect their bands and their revenue stream. Some labels may have been unwise when it came to digital downloads, and thought it was another flash in the pan fad, like 8-track tapes, cassettes and CD's. And yeah, some labels thought all those technologies were not worth investing in until it was damn near too late then as well. But not all.

Let's take a quick look at what the myth is vs the reality of it. Just know a lot of this is a sweeping generalization, and presented with my limited view of it, just like most of the other stuff you read on the net. It may or may not be the golden word on this. Ready? Let's do this;

The myth: the labels are money grubbing bastards out to screw bands.

The reality: the labels handle all the parts of the music business that the band doesn't have the time, tools or skills to do.

What that means is the label exists so the band has more time to do what they should be doing, and that is making music. This could be in the studio to create a new album, or on the road playing gigs from tiny bars to packed stadiums. The band just has to think about playing, not about things like who will pay the caterer for the tiny sandwiches backstage, who will clean the bathrooms, who will rent the bus, maintain it, hang the lights, print the tickets, push the broom and turn off the lights at the end of the night.

If you are in a small band playing bars, you probably do some of this yourself while the bar staff does the rest. It sucks having to load you own van don't it? Well, that's a hidden part of getting signed to a major. They make sure you have a couple of instrument techs, a cartage company and loaders to take your 20 foot tall blow up devil off the truck and get it set up behind the drum riser.

They also do a ton of crap tiny independent bands have to do for themselves. Things like calling radio networks to broker deals to get the bands music on air, setting up the bands website, making sure the CD art isn't printed upside down in pastels, and a ton of other suck job stuff you never hear about. There are dozens of other people working, and working hard, for every member of the band you see on stage once you have hit the big time.

Then there are the hidden costs the label swallows you almost never hear about. You know that local indie band you and your buddies liked that got signed to a label and went on a tour of every dive in 38 states? The band that so far hasn't sold more than about 12 CD's to their moms? The bigger bands are also paying for the little bands road crews and all the helpers to give them a shot at becoming a big band as well. Without the big band covering the cost through the label, and spreading the money and risk, lots of great bands would have never gotten a chance to get out and get seen.

Back in my day, Guns N Roses was that little band. They had a good following on the strip in LA, but no one in the middle of the country had any idea who they were, until they got signed as a tiny little band and were allowed to tour with the big boys like Areosmith. And then their album suddenly exploded through. You just about couldn't spin the FM dial without hearing Sweet Child 'O Mine on every station, from the rock stations to the tiny indie stations. Hell, I think I even heard it on the local country station, and that was back when country was country and we didn't have things like "hard country" or crossover players like Kidd Rock or Sheryl Crow. They went from a local act with a decent following, but small by national standards, to megastars in about 8 months. Not only did they pay back the label for the loan that allowed them to get started, they made money. A lot of money. And some of that money had to go to pay all the bus drivers, guitar techs, helper monkeys, top hat polishers and what ever else it took to get out and tour like maniacs for years on end. Sure, the label took that money off the top, but either way, someone was going to have to pay it out, or the tour would never have happened. And something else the "evil" label did with some of the money Guns N Roses made happened: they used that money to help other upcoming acts have a chance to be as big as Guns.

So is the label really evil here? Or are they more like a bank or savings and loan? A pain in the butt sometimes, but there to allow you to do what you want? I know a lot of the bands I was into were pretty small, and this "unfair" system allowed them to have a chance to hone their craft, and eventually release the album that would make them a major. And just to name drop a band that is the perfect example of where this post was designed to go in the first place:

Metallica

Yeah, that's right. The biggest hard rock/metal band ever was another tiny little band at one time, and someone at one of the majors took a chance on them. Their first album sold a pretty decent number of copies for an underground band, but without major label support they would never have been able to do the Black Album. Sure, they could have labored on as an indie band for as long as they have been out there, dozens of indie bands are still doing it today. But they would not have had the resources available to them to make that album that would make them a name your mom's hairdresser knows today. That's the "evil" labels doing their job.

So I will talk about this more later, with some more in depth examples. But up next I want to get into something that has been bugging the crap out of me and is part of the reason I decided to try this blogging thing in the first place. And that is... (insert scary music here)

The Loudness War

If you don't know what it is, you will after my next few posts.

Try to hold on to your Marbles until then.