No doubt, Andy. The hardest part is having a really good song and then having a really good performance! There's two different things at play with mastering - how hot the hottest peak is and how compressed the song is. Obviously the more compression, the louder the song can be. Compression is a necessary tool but music today sounds like one of those 500 watt plastic boom box stereos with all the lights and gizmos on it - it's loud and obnoxious and not very musical.

Audio recording was originally conceived to try to imitate real sound events, and as it got better, the goal became to try to reproduce the event as faithfully as possible, and that morphed into being able to sound more hyped than the original event... ie, a voice could be compressed and equalized and you could add reverb to it. No one sings with an automatic grand canyon reverb. And now we've reached an extreme where everything is hyped and it's turned into sonic mush.

But this is the iPod generation and no one wants to hear music that's half the volume of what's coming out right now. We don't have to worry so much about how things sound on the radio as much as how it will sound on someone's iPod or car stereo. I feel like I mix pretty hot but my tracks are still quite a bit softer than today's overhyped tracks. It's just frustrating is all.


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