"can you hear me now?"
ok, two posts in just a few days. i'm on a roll or something like that. we've been talking about re-releasing the Late Nights & Early Mornings EP with a small twist but one i'm kinda in favor of. we would release the original masters.
i know, "what do you mean by that don?"
well what i mean is that when chris manning and i originally discussed this album, the idea was to do an intimate recording. maybe even just guitar or piano and vocal. somehow that got away from us. actually, it was the fault of the song "nothing". as we were doing we thought it was a shame not to fill that one out a bit. it seemed bigger than that. we stuck with no drumsticks or electric guitars, though. so we did and then the rest of the songs sat funny when listening back so we dressed them all up except the title track. i wanted that to be me and a guitar and that's it.
where was i with the reasoning again becasue that paragraph above isn't the reason......oh yeah.
so we sent the album in to a great mastering company and what they do is they give the songs that added punch and depth. and they are the reason some of your albums are louder than others. and if you notice, the new albums you're buying are WAY louder than anything else in your iPod, right?
there is a huge debate going on right now in the industry that louder isn't better. in fact it's compromising the quality of the recordings becasue the louder you make it the more you "crush" the mix, losing the dynamics- making the instrumentation indescernible. i hate it. i know that old recordings are lower but the SOUND of them is better. we're fooled becasue these recording seem "crisp".
man, this is a long explanation. chris and i were really happy with the initial mastering but when we put it on the iPod, the songs soulded flat. especially against other acoustic albums, so we kept pumping up the volume and mastering, which makes the song sound smaller in a weird way. it compresses and crunches it. i'm sure chris could explain this so much better than me, sorry.
in the end, i went against my heart and released the EP as highly compressed as we could. i love it but i feel like i've littered in some way, if that makes sense. or i've contributed to the dumbing down of music listeners and then my manager started reading about the backlash and she agreed with me and this idea came up to release the "producers cut" for us. and if some of you want it, even better. but be warned, it will not be a NEW album of material so don't waste your coin if you don't want to be frustrated when you put random on the iPod or CD shuffle. got it? good.
i'm going to make a commitment to myself that the next full album we release will NOT succumb to the trend of the day. we will master this album to sound full and rich but not just LOUD. see, the other kicker is that radio stations compress the songs for radio so they get an extra "mastering" and are even louder. this is why if you ever hear your fave song on the radio and then listen immediately to the CD, there is a difference.
man, that wasn't easy.
be the ball, danny...........
Labels: DVD, insomnia, late nights and early mornings, mastering, miggs, miggsband.com, mixes
