We did it. With just months to go before the Boneslinky! release on October 8th, we decided to jump on the Kickstarter band-wagon.
If you’re unfamiliar with Kickstarter, it’s this cool site where artist-types connect with fans to raise money for cool projects. It’s worked tremendously well for friends of ours like Baltimore filmmaker Chris LaMartina.
If you’re even vaguely considering purchasing Boneslinky! this is a great way to do it. Not only do you help us complete the final phases of production, but we decided to offer some kick ass bonus items as our “thank you” for helping us before you’ve heard the final product.
At the lowest level of donation you recieve the full version of Boneslinky! and a full length bonus CD featuring all of the demos of songs included on the final album. At the highest or “pimp-status” level, you’ll get a trip to Disney World to see The Flute Squad play in Orlando. In-between donation levels include private shows and even an opportunity for Father Ryan to produce your album!
With his payment from The Flute Squad, Rick was able to buy some platinum fronts with a few bucks to spare!A few months ago we introduced our fans to The Flute Squad Affiliate Program. If you want to be compensated for introducing your friends to The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad, contact us and we’ll hook it up.
***
Why Paper Advertising Is Worthless
Every few months, I get an email from a salesperson at a semi-popular music magazine. She tells me a story about how luckily (for me) some knuckleheaded band dropped out on their purchased ad at the very last minute. She tells me that now she can offer a great deal: a quarter-page for $700, no wait…, a HALF-PAGE ad for $500(!)
She swears that I will gain a ton of exposure and promises that new fans will beat down my door to buy a copy of Die Humpin!. But, I have to act NOW because:
This deal is too good to be true. If I don’t act now some other savvier, and perhaps better-looking band will swoop it up!
Her manager will kill her if he finds out about this advertising snafu!
The magazine is going to press, TOMORROW!
I love this sales tactic. It involves two crucial elements of the quick sale: an unforeseen incident that opens up a mind-blowing opportunity and an immediate need for action.
As you can tell, I’ve never gone for this offer. Not only do I think paper ads are a waste of money, I can’t possibly ever know because their results just aren’t trackable. People who sell paper ads know this, but still stay in business (barely) because companies think that there are no other options. Bands will rationalize that if the big record companies are still buying ad space then somehow it has to be effective. Nonsense.
Pay-Per-Click Works But It’s Expensive
So what about another option that is trackable, like a Facebook ad?
Facebook ads are a viable option for creating a trackable advertisement, but how effective are they? We experimented with a Facebook ad, and were pretty underwhelmed with the results.
We set up an ad to get friends of current fans to become fans themselves. We set the bid at the recommended amount of about 50 cents-per-click. This click means they are taken to our page where they decide if they should become a fan or not.
We kept the ad up for a week. Facebook showed the ad to over 70,000 people. 20 people clicked. And of those 20, about 5 became a fan. Cost per conversion: About $2 per fan. Ouch.
Facebook stats are great. They give you a clear assessment of exactly what is going on with your ad. And I would even say that the results were about as an effective as an ad can get. If we left it up for several weeks we would probably gain alot of fans. We’d also spend a ton of money.
How To Only Pay For Results
So how do you effectively advertise without breaking the bank? Well, lets look at Amazon.com. Sure, they do a little bit of traditional advertising. But a big part of their advertising model is their affiliate program. They put the hard work of book reviewing in the hands of customers and bloggers. Then they enable these writers to get a piece of any book they sell.
Keeping this in mind, I asked one of our fans to make a call to action on his status. He could say whatever he wanted about us to drive people to our site and for anyone who became our fan I’d give him 25 cents (by the way, that’s half of our Facebook bid).
He chose the most honest approach:
Within 2 days we had 80 more fans. I gave him 20 bucks. Win-win.
The thing that concerned me most was the retention rate of these new fans. Would they simply drop off after they realized we paid for their fandom? It was a legitimate concern but it really hasn’t mattered much. In fact, we keep gaining fans. I guess its because we tend to give cool shit away all the time.
CROSSOVER BREAKTHROUGH Keep this in mind the next time someone tries to get you to work or gig for free by promising “exposure”: In one week’s time our ad was shown to over 70,000 people. That’s literally asking a stadium full of people to do something very simple that requires no monetary transaction. Only 5 people actually did.
Our weirdly fated children’s band side-project, The Hilltop Hightops has been sitting tight all year as The Flute Squad finish our second album Boneslinky! and Wild Bonerz rip it up at Bourbon Festivals (and get kicked out of chain restaurants.)
The cool thing is that dormant good projects never die, they tend to just spread on their own. This phenomenon is demonstrated by this strange clip featuring the song “Davinci Jacks” spotted on YouTube just the other day:
This scene, from a film called Malice Manor Rock Concert directed by Baltimore no-budget film mainstay Jimmy Traynor and written by Marlene Zechman, has been described to me as:
“a comedy short about a retirement home where the residents really run the place and the staff only think they do. They get away with all kinds of antics and pranks. Malice Manor is not your ordinary retirement home.”
I especially like the dude rocking out in the wheelchair at about :28 seconds in.
No word yet on when Malice Manor Rock Concert will be released or who will see it. Either way it’s lovely to see our kidz music incorporated into such a delightfully twisted project.
When you hear the name Toontrack you might think of a low-budget, possibly pornographic Walt Disney rip-off animation company. But they are in fact a bunch of Scandinavian wunderkinds who produce massive VST virtual drum kits. They might also do porn on the side, but I think that’s pretty standard for Scandinavians (they love their scat vids!).
The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad found out about Toontrack years ago, during the mixing of Die Humpin! We were pretty committed to using the built-in sounds from our Roland TD-6v drum module, which at the time (when properly tweaked) sounded better than almost anything else out there. But then Toontrack came out with EZDrummer, and totally blew away the drum sample community (yes, there actually are people who obsess over drum samples). So we quickly bought EZDrummer and remixed many of the songs on Die Humpin! with their sample sets, with varying results.
Essentially Toontrack had done something revolutionary with EZDrummer by creating an ultra-realistic VST sample set with a minimal RAM footprint and an interface that was simple and easy to use. Plus, at the time it seemed cheap: around $150 for the basic EZDrummer program, which included their Rock kit, and then another $100 for each additional expansion kit, which now includes Nashville, Vintage, Electronic, and a host of others that can match just about any style you’re up for.
However, a few years later Toontrack one-upped themselves with a more advanced version of EZDrummer: Superior Drummer. The interface is a lot more complicated, but with that comes much greater control over the processing of each piece of the drum kit, as well as the ability to mix and match individual pieces from the various EZDrummer expansion kits. So, say for example you love the kick in the Vintage kit but the snare isn’t punchy enough. With EZDrummer you’d have to load up in an additional instance of another expansion pack just for the snare (i.e., another VSTi on a different track, with the snare midi split out and sent to the new track). But with Superior Drummer you can just load up a snare from the Nashville pack as an X-drum, and then load in a handclap from the Electronic pack, a single dry tom from the Twisted Kit, etc, all within the same VSTi.
Furthermore, you can now blend multiple kit pieces, so if you like the attack from a Drumkit From Hell metal kick, you can layer that over the warm low-end of a kick from the Funk pack. Another critical addition is the inclusion of built-in effects such as compression and EQ, so you’re no longer stuck with the pre-processed sounds of EZDrummer, but can shape the sounds to fit your song, all within the confines of the Superior Drummer interface.
Unfortunately, Superior Drummer isn’t as cheap as EZDrummer, so it’s going to cut some of you home studio folks out of the equation. We’re looking at $250 for the main program (although there are sales that pop up occasionally) and another $200 for each of the Superior-specific expansion packs. My advice is to skip EZDrummer altogether, spend the extra cash for Superior Drummer (which gets you two pretty great and versatile kits) and then wait for sales on the EZDrummer expansion packs, which can then be loaded into Superior Drummer for a wide range of sounds.
So, how does it sound, you ask? Well, it sounds great, but compared to Steven Slate Drums EX, you definitely need to put more effort into getting the kits to fit into a cluttered mix. EZDrummer is already pre-processed with compression and EQ like SSD, but for whatever reason the samples don’t have the punch of SSD. As a result, you need to add a lot more additional effects to the instruments to get them to work with your mix, which means you need to split out each channel to individual tracks in your multitrack program and use the included or 3rd party plugins to sculpt your sounds.
And what you’re getting with Superior Drummer are unprocessed drum sounds, just like you’d have if you recorded a real drum kit. It’s up to you to flex your mixing skills by using compression and EQ (which are included in the program), and to blend in the overheads and room mics to the appropriate levels. They do offer presets for various styles, but not many (although preset packs are apparently in the works, with the Allen Morgan presets being the first release).
That said, these kits fit places that the Steven Slate kits would stand out, such as in acoustic-based music, jazz, hip-hop, or basically any other style of music that doesn’t involve a lot of distorted guitars. For example, here are two clips from songs off our new album Boneslinky where the SSD kits just sounded completely out of place.
First is a clip from a new song from Boneslinky! called “You’re Special“.
We’re using a brush kit here, something not available with SSD, and one of Toontrack’s strong points. Obviously a regular rock or pop kit would simply not work with this song, but the Toontrack kit fits in just fine.
Notice we’re only using the overhead, kick, and room mics here, just like you might when mixing a real kit for this sort of song. Also notice that no internal processing is available on a per-channel basis in EZDrummer.Next up is another clip from Boneslinky! from the song“Country Robots”.
Notice that the snare is just barely able to punch through this section of the mix, even with EQ and compression. But the rest of the song is much more low-key and a punchier SSD-style snare would be inappropriate. So, the tambourine helps to reinforce the snare during this section of the song, which is an old Motown trick. The kick and toms, however, sound amazing throughout, and the hi-hat is very realistic.
The interface for Superior Drummer is much more complicated, and each channel allows for a multitude of built-in effects.Summary: Toontrack’s VSTi drums offer a few things not available with other sample packs. First, you can get as complicated or simple as you want by using either Superior Drummer or EZDrummer. Secondly, they have expansion packs dedicated to specific genres of music, so if you’re just into jazz you don’t have to blow a lot of cash on other kits that you’ll never use. And finally, they offer some of the most natural and responsive samples out there. The only downsides are that for heavier rock mixes you’re going to have to do a lot of work to get the sounds to punch through the mix (just like you would if mixing a real drum kit), and if you want to own the whole collection you’re going to have to shell out quite a bit of cash.
***
Electronic Drums in the Studio is written by Ryan Graham, producer for The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad. If you like this post check out:
Before the album art has been finished, a track listing has been created, and even before the pre-mastered version has been sent out to beta-testers (again contact me if you’re interested) The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad has locked down a location and date for the Boneslinky! album release party.
The party will happen at (a place we our pretty much calling our home these days) The Windup Space on October 8th 2010! Semi-confirmed acts include: ————————- The Rock n’ Roll Freakshow: A staple of our best shows. These guys perform a series of stunts involving fire-breathing, hanging heavy objects from testicles, and eating broken glass.
Bobby E. Lee & The Sympathizers: An insane hillbilly rock troupe that is sort of Flute Squad meets Wild Bonerz meets a crazy shit talking southern Baptist preacher.
The Go Pills: A quirky pop band side-project of our friend and Baltimore film maven Skizz Cyzyk! —————————-
Perhaps most exciting of all is that will be an official Baltimore Beer Week event, featuring specials on The Raven Lager all night.
This just came down the pipeline, so I hate to say it, but more details are to come. If you plan on coming or have an ideas, or even if you are a band that REALLY wants to play at this thing the best way to hit us up is to leave us a comment or hit us up on our Facebook!
As a reference for touring bands we are attempting to create a library of reviews of the venues we have played. Most of these venues are in and around the Baltimore area. We attempt to review the venues from the perspective of a performing band (sound, environment, staff, money situation, etc.) For more specific information, requests, or complaints feel free to CONTACT US
Pros: Great sound and legendary venue. Awesome green room and treatment of the bands.
Cons: Pricey cover makes it hard to get people in the door. Merch placement is remarkably terrible.
In Baltimore,The 8×10 has been a staple of the music scene for many years. Starting as a bare-bones venue that featured bands of all genres it soon grew into a place that hosted national touring acts. Some people who were in the midst of The 8×10’s hey-day fondly recall the fabulous drink specials, intimate shows, and great variety of music. Sometime in the early 00’s The 8×10 re-branded itself as The Funkbox and started featuring bands of the jammier variety. A few years later The Funkbox closed down and re-emerged as The 8×10 yet again.
The 8×10 is a bit of an anomaly these days. For example, while the venue doesn’t draw nearly as many national acts, it’s still tough for a local band to book a show. While it rests dead-center in the manically crowded Federal Hill bar scene, it still has a tough time getting people in the door. And while there are nearly 100 competing bars with no cover within walking distance, they still insist on charging something like $10 to $12 to see mostly unknown bands.
Playing at The 8×10 is a great experience if you can step up to the challenge of packing the place. Given the expensive cover (dictated by management) and lack of any real drink specials, it’s a tough sell. One thing that can be said to The 8×10’s legacy is that they care about how the music sounds. So if you play here, your band will be delighted by the sound system and supporting staff. Both on and offstage it’s one of the most technically legit places in the Baltimore region. And at the end of the evening the sound guy/girl will give you a CD of the board mix, which you can use to repeatedly revel in how (hopefully) great you were that night.
Another plus is that they are straight-up with the money. I can’t remember exactly how they paid the bands, but it seemed to be some sort of split of the door. It’s always nice when you don’t have to chase the manager down to get paid, so it’s to The 8×10’s credit that this process is streamlined. The band green-room (one of the best in town – it’s clean, there’s a shower, and the fridge is stocked with complimentary beer and bottled water!!!) is right next to the office. At the end of the night you simply walk over to the office and get your cut. Simple.
DMFS Plays Innocent Night @ The 8×10
Our only major beef with The 8×10 has nothing to do with the onstage experience. Rather, it’s that they insist that bands set up merch downstairs at a table right next to the bathrooms. This is a real debilitating thing for bands who depend on making some extra cash by selling merch. Not only is the established merch area out of eyesight of anyone watching the music, it is completely away from anywhere people hang out. So it’s really hard to convince some friends to staff the table, because they’ll be sitting alone by themselves all night next to a bathroom.
While the Flute Squad has only played The 8×10 twice, we can’t say it’s become one of our go-to venues to book a show. The reason for the fence-teetering is that while we love playing at venues with great sound and straight-up management, we really love playing at venues that have free or cheap cover charges and some decent drink specials so the crowd can get tipsy with us. Basically, our fans, like most people these days, aren’t exactly rolling in cash. So while they think we’re awesome and know they’ll have a good time at our shows, it’s tough to convince them to pay a $12 cover and $8/each for drinks (not to mention the hassle of finding parking in Federal Hill) at The 8×10 when there are three different venues at Station North with a cheaper cover charge, great line-ups, $1 Natty Bohs, and plenty of parking.
Here’s to hoping that that The 8×10 ups its game by developing a new business model similar to some of the newer happenin’ places around Baltimore.
*** If you like this post check out:
Venue Review: Fletchers – Where we openly bash one of the shittiest, now defunct, clubs Baltimore has ever known.
Venue Review: The Windup Space – Where we praise (and secretly wish to play again) one of Station North’s best multipurpose spaces.
About a week ago, Steve and I went to the yet-to-be-opened Dick’s for an audition. We had been invited by the chain’s National Entertainment Director after responding to an ad we found on Craigslist. Among about 8 other bands, which were of the full-band-cover-show-extravaganza style, we were an unlikely duo. But we killed!
So much so that they booked us for four weekday gigs and one weekend gig in a two week span.
Our first date was last Monday night; Dick’s first official night of business. As we strolled in well before our set time of 6:30pm, we found out that none of the gear from the audition was left on stage for us to use. In fact, they had nothing in-house besides a mixer and a house PA. I had to roll back up to Northeast Baltimore to get our own mics and mic-stands. We went on an hour late, but the management understood the miscommunication.
Our first set lasted 40 minutes (their policy is 40-on 20-off). I left the stage to go to the bar and received praise from some random folks. Then I received a text from Steve, who was only 30 feet away from me.
“We have been sacked!”
I went over to him to ask what that meant exactly. As it turns out, the restaurant manager felt that we were not a good fit. Furthermore, he explained that although he would still pay us for the night we were definitely not to go on stage anymore, that night or any following night.
“What happened?” I asked Steve.
“Something about the banjo not being a good fit in a place like this…”
I was confused. Then the manager approached, handed me a check, and apologized. I handed him a CD. He seemed kind of baffled by that.
Looking for some value in the experience we quickly got to work, taking advantage of our 1/2-priced band discount which, at a place like Dick’s, really gets the prices down to about where they should be ($4.75 Natty Bohs, just sayin…). From the bar, we got a good view of our replacement act, as management opened up the stage for little kids to jump around and throw balloons at one another.
After spending an hour or so in delightful drunken rejection we decided to milk a little bit more out of the night. We asked the bouncer, a dutiful fellow by the name of BooBee James, to throw us out on our untalented, podunk, and down-right disrespectful asses.
We left with fat pockets, full bellies, and a great press pic and we only had to play for 40 minutes!
At the beginning of the year I posed some pretty gawdy goals on this blog. The thing about goals is that they shift as situations change.
Let’s check in and see how we’re doing:
1. Obtain $10,000 in revenue for all three bands
The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad: Nothing’s really changed here. We played two shows at the front of the year, and don’t really plan on playing any more until Boneslinky! is released in October.At that point, we should be back to playing on a regular basis, setting the woods on fire and buying new yachts with our gig revenue! Wild Bonerz: WB has now managed to lock down about $3000 in gigs this year. This is a great, and it seems like we are certainly on a roll. If I did the math ($3000 * another 6 months) it looks like we might come up significantly short on the $10k mark that I set. But it’s never too late for certain opportunities to roll around and help the cause.
The Hilltop Hightops : HTHTis still on a brief hiatus. You can still buy our AWESOME album though. Super Galactic Space Banana will teach your kids a number of things about space, history, science, and math. But probably the best lesson it teaches is how to ROCK!(!!!!!!!!!!)
2. Finish and release The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad’s Boneslinky!
Last week I listened to the near-finished mix of the album and have to say that even I was blown away by Boneslinky!“Of course you fucking were!” you might say. But, let me tell you, it’s not particularly easy to just sit back and love ourselves. After hearing these songs for several years, then recording them in several back-to-back sessions, then hearing the rough mixes, then arguing about what’s cool and what’s not, and then realizing that you created a tracklist that ranges from funk to rock to olde-timey, with topics ranging from transportation, abortion, mythical creatures, violence, titties, and beer, well it’s really hard to tell what the fuck is going to come out of it all. I really do feel like it’s Die Humpin! on super-steroids.
I am happy that we enlisted the help of several people to make this happen (ranging from musicians who are way more talented then us, to a room full of girls screaming “Spend It! Spend It! Spend It!”[also more talented than us]). We’re continuing this collaboration by beta-testing the album with several volunteers before we get it pressed. (Contact me by leaving a comment if you want in)
3. Post every week NO MATTER WHAT!
If you remember this goal used to be : Create 30 posts related to goal-setting. I can’t imagine how boring this blog would be if I stuck with that goal. Sometimes goals shift and become better. By shifting from the “30 posts on one specific topic” to “Weekly posts no matter what” we greatly improved our content structure. And now our readers can rely on content being posted on the site at the same time every week.
We have maintained this weekly schedule. Posts go up on this site every Tuesday. One improvement we have been working toward is posting tactical articles on Tuesdays, and leaving band news and updates to Thursday posts.
4. Obtain an official endorsement from Party City
At the end of Q1 we had made no attempt to get an endorsement by Party City. In fact it seemed like it just wouldn’t get done. There wasn’t a whole lot motivation or reason for Party City to get involved with us. I’m thinking about changing this goal now. We’ve made several significant strides in the endorsement department, starting with our great endorsement by Raven Beer. I’d like to obtain more endorsements that range from music equipment, food, bars, whatever (as long as we think its cool.) But our goal in all of this is not to keep tacking on logos to this page, but instead to really do work to improve the brands that decide to invest in us.
So far I think we’ve done a good job with Raven and it’s just gonna get better. We will be participating in tandem with Baltimore-Washington Brew Works for Baltimore Beer Week (October 7th – 17th). We think this is a win-win for both Raven Beer and the Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad, as we plan to play our CD release show for Boneslinky! during this week.
5. Build our Facebook fanbase
This shifted last quarter from Build our mailing list to Build our Facebook fanbase So far I’m quite happy with the results of this goal but still feel like we could do better.
Some improvements we’ve made since the beginning of the year:
a. Always be active on Facebook.
We don’t just let our page float by and then stop in once a month to leave an update that says: “Wow, stay tuned guys, our new album is sounding AMAZING!” I hate bands that do that. Nobody cares about that. In fact I should say this now: If you are band who does what I just described, STOP IT! NO ONE GIVES A SHIT!
People do happen to give a shit about thoughtful posts. Or posting cool stuff that you found on the web or whatever. It’s funny, a Facebook fan page happens to work alot like an individual’s Facebook page. You wouldn’t just post “Hey guys, I’m at my job at the office, you should come by and check me out!” once every three months. You just wouldn’t have any friends if you were that brand of tool.
b. Give tons of shit away.
I give a ton of shit away through our Facebook page. Not just band stuff either. For example, after I was done reading David Cross’s book I Drink For A Reason, I wanted to sell it on Amazon. But I found out I could only get like 3 bucks for it. So I decided to just give it away on Facebook.
c. Leave no comment unanswered
This goes with the blog comments too. If you leave a comment on our Facebook or blog we’re gonna answer it, no matter how petty. I just really hate it when I dig someone’s post, decide to leave a comment and the author doesn’t have the appreciation to respond. What the hell is that? Do you think your blogger-ass is some sort of rock star or something!?!?!?!?!
So hmm, are we about half way there? It seems that way, but FluteSquad.com certainly has our work set out for us if we’re gonna see these goals through. We’ll check back in on these in 3 months!
In an act of pure name-luck Wild Bonerz, The Flute Squad’s old-timey cover barons, will be helping Grand Open Dick’s Last Resort in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor next week.
We went down to the Power Plant, to check out the joint earlier this week and are absolutely psyched to be playing and reminding tourists to “find your happy place.” (Baltimore’s current tourism slogan)
Confirmed dates:
Monday June 28th(6:30pm-10:30pm)
Thursday July 1st(6:30pm-10:30pm)
Monday July 5th(6:30pm-10:30pm)
Thursday July 8th(6:30pm-10:30pm)
It may be too soon to call it but it feels like a “regular gig” is a-brewing. We’ll see how long it takes for them to get tired of us. But judging by the amount of dick jokes that Wild Bonerz and Dick’s Last Resort rely on to support our respective brands, this seems like a perfect match. Come out and see us starting at 6:30 pm!
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).
***
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!
