Well, folks – slim pickings for humour over at Freeperville this week. They’re celebrating too hard over 16-year olds being forced to carry to term.
So – an observation piece, and a blast from the past that I never got around to mentioning below the fold.
On “Producers”
In my studio days, we had a lot of bands come in to do demos, and occasionally, albums.
A lot of these bands had no producer, which meant that the engineer (me) had to help them through the sessions.
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Now a real producer’s job is to tell the band what songs to record, and which ones to ditch – and to ride herd over the recording of the keepers. As an engineer, my job was just to point out the obvious flubs and missed notes, and punch them in to fix them.
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However, some bands did have an actual producer, and some of them were – um – more enthusiastic than knowledgeable.
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Case in point – the “producer” who came in and decided that his boys were going to record EVERYTHING without any compression at all. None. “I don’t want any of that shit on our music – I want it RAW!”
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His rationale? “They’re going to compress the hell out of it when it’s played on the radio.”
So – no compression. For anything. Gotcha. So – everything with any dynamic range at all was either going to be alternately pegging the meters, and more or less inaudible.
(Keep in mind that this was a 1″ 16-track studio – all analog)
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He stopped me during playback of the rhythm tracks to complain about the drum sound : “Where is the ride cymbal? I can’t hear it!”
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“Well, sir – the crash is just a lot louder, and with no compression on the overheads, the ride’s going to get wiped out every time the drummer hits the crash.”
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He spent the rest of the sessions complaining about the drowning out of everything by everything else.
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Mama Mia.
Continue reading “Today on Tommy T’s Obsession with Compression – “Everything louder then everything else” edition”
