It’s been well-documented on this site that The Flute Squad is no fan of pointless high volume onstage. But did you also know that we have a major beef with loudness in recorded music?!?!
I can see the first comment now: “Hey fuck you guys on your high-horse! I’ll play my music as loud as I want until you make something of yourselves just keep being pussies!” or some other equally incoherent rant. But calm down, buddy, we’re not talking about the actual playback volume here. If you want to turn your speakers up to 11 and blow your eardrums out, then you’re only harming yourself, which is pretty hilarious.
What we’re talking about here, however, affects EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO LISTENS TO RECORDED MUSIC! This insidious phenomena has come to be know as “The Loudness Wars”, and it is destroying the music that all of us listen to on the radio, on CDs, or online. And not only new music, but through the <sarcasm>magic of remastering</sarcasm> it is also destroying all of the old music we’ve known and loved for years. And that, incoherently raving commenter, is much more annoying than your loud amp or expensive guitar.
The Basics: First a band records an album, tweaking the mix of each song so that everything sounds as good as possible. Then they send the entire album off to a Mastering Engineer (ME) whose basic job, at least in the past, was to ensure a good flow to the album by making sure each song has similar spectral balance (i.e., equal amounts of treble and bass), similar volume levels (so you don’t have to turn your stereo up and down for each song), and appropriate fade-outs and spacing between tracks. Actually, in the distant past their main job was to make sure the bass in a vinyl record didn’t cause the needle to jump out of the groove. But luckily everyone except for hipsters have stopped using vinyl so most ME’s don’t have to deal with that problem anymore.
However, in recent years the ME has been tasked with another job: making the album as loud as all fuck through processes such as compression, limiting, and clipping, referred to altogether as loudness maximizing. The theory being that when people are listening to the radio, the loudest song is going to jump out from the rest and as a result will be a bigger hit. There is also some very conclusive evidence that when presented with two similar audio samples, people instinctively prefer the louder one, at least initially.
The problem is that this fight to have the loudest album has gotten so out of control that it is starting to make the actual music sound like complete and utter shit. Distortion galore (and not the good tape/tube kind), snare drums that are almost inaudible, no difference between quiet and loud parts of songs, and a general harshness result in an incredibly fatiguing and unpleasant listening experience.
This all came to a head in 2008 when Metallica released Death Magnetic. People who listened to it admitted the songs were pretty good, so they couldn’t figure out why they felt compelled to shut it off after about 10 minutes. But then the same tracks were released for Guitar Hero, and they sounded much, much better, and people began to realize that the Guitar Hero tracks had not been loudness maximized! There was a general uproar, calls for Metallica to re-release an un-maximized version of the album, and the whole issue actually hit the mainstream media and became a widely talked about hot-button issue.
Watch this video to hear (and see) the very clear differences between the loudness maximized and un-maximized versions of Death Magnetic:
So you’d think after all of that backlash people would have stopped mastering their albums so loudly. And for a while, that actually happened. Axl Rose released Chinese Democracy with little to no loudness maximizing, and Judas Priest actually released a completely non-mastered album.
But now it seems people have already forgotten about the Metallica debacle, and the loudness wars are actually getting worse than before! Bands are now having their albums mastered to -4.5dB RMS (average loudness), which even in the hands of the best ME results in music that simply sounds terrible. For comparison, albums just 10 years ago songs were mastered at around -14dB RMS at most, and that was mostly done by hitting tape really hard, which produces a more natural compressed sound.
The worst part is that now everyone, including indie bands, want their albums to be as loud as the pros, so every mom-and-pop low-budget studio is getting into the mastering business and trying to replicate this loudness without having any idea what they’re doing. As a result we’re hearing more and more local and indie music that is loud as fuck but sounds absolutely horrid. The scary thing is that bands actually release these turds to their fans, instead of smacking their faux-ME on the back of the head or at the very least sending it off to a proper mastering facility to get it butchered by a pro.
The first clip is our lightly-maximized version of “Show Us Your Boobs (Buy Me A Beer)”, coming in at -12.4dB average RMS. The second is what you’d likely get back from a low-budget studio if you asked them to master it as loud as the most recent Green Day album (this example is actually -5.96dB compared to Green Day’s -4.6dB). Sure it’s loud, but it sounds like shit.
DMFS promises not to punish our fans by ruining our music in the mastering phase (we do just fine ruining it in the songwriting stage). For our new album, Boneslinky, we’ll keep average RMS levels at -12dB or lower. We also won’t just slap a limiter on the final mix and call it a day, but will use multiple high-end “Pro ME Secrets” to assure a minimal amount of distortion, a wide stereo field, punchy dynamics, and an overall exciting and non-fatiguing listening experience.
Summary: To help DMFS fight the “Loudness Wars” against the evil infiltrating the music world, all you have to do is buy a shitload of copies of our new album and tell everyone you know how great it sounds, which will snowball until we get massive radio play with multiple hit singles and Grammys. In return we promise not to stop caring about “The Loudness Wars” just because we’re busy spending our cash on hookers and blow (it’s actually the booze and fast cars that will make us stop caring).
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Your Loud Music Is Annoying is written by Ryan Graham, producer for The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad. If you like this post check out:
Your Expensive Guitars Are Annoying Too!: A comparison of name brand guitars with their much more affordable knock-offs and why you should save your money and go cheap!