That definitely is a great article. Indie musicians who do their own home recordings are up against it, too. I've really struggled with mastering. My CD's are definitely not anywhere near as loud as commercial CD's - they're not in the same ballpark. Some of my friends have commented on this to me. It's hard to explain the "loudness war" to a non-musician when you're an indie - they think you're making excuses. I think you can crank my recordings up pretty loud and they still sound OK, but I wonder sometimes if I've gone too far myself in terms of compression.

It's not just compression, but multi-band compression. Multi-band compression allows you to bust the song up into four (or more or less) frequency ranges and compress each one separately. There is a great debate about this technique... it makes the mix more exciting, but perhaps a bit harder on the ears. On the other hand, if you don't hype your mix at least a little bit, it sounds pale and flat next to commercial music.

I know I've got a lot to learn about recording and mastering still. But it's great to see more and more people become aware of how bad records sound nowadays. I bought a track from the new Maroon 5 album and it sounds like absolute crap. There's no warmth to the thing, no soul. It's all slick and polished and pumped up to the max. I won't buy their new CD, even though I like the songs on it, because it just plain sounds like absolute crap.

GREAT topic.

I wonder how many other local JPFers are also into audio recording like me. Would love to get together with some other audio recording musicians over some beers and trade notes, stories, and ideas.



Richard MacLemale
Music = http://www.richardmac.com