let's talk about over-production/polished production

indie/rock and electronic/dance/ambient music in all their forms come in for a lot of criticism regarding this notion of 'overproduction' which could be a tad unfair considering how this is not really questioned or levelled at all the chart pop out there which is often very slick and complicated in production terms but regularly ends up as style over substance as much as anything else out there if not more so.

oops i mustve snipped a sentence there but you see my point i hope

meanwhile, i've just had the realisation that i am the Geir Hongro of dance music :(

Yeah, know exactly what you mean... but Royksopp are a bad example cos if you listen to something like Poor Leno, it's got a real walloping great bounce to it, which dirties it all up a bit. I'm not big on looking at stuff from that rockist "musical" almost Geir Hongro perspective and like stuff that's abit grubby normally, but I love Melody AM - it's a superb record and very well-balanced in my view, neither under nor over-produced, but just right...

Can I also say that I'm pissed off that Melody AM now seems to nestle in virtually everyone's CD collections - forchrissakes, the album's been out for 18 months - and people are only buying it NOW?! And also, how nasty the marketing has been for this record - now reissued with a free disc of remixes and videos. Bastards - it's about time the record companies allowed original purchasers a part exchange, the old disc for the revamped one, for committing the crime of buying an album soon after release.....

i wouldnt get too precious about Royksopp tho Russ, surely you're used to this by now - look at how 'Dummy' found its way into the most unlikely homesteads. its no big deal really if it ends up selling more after being used on an advert or documentary as incidental music etc. - of course Royksopp have recently overtaken Moby as the default option for that kind of thing it seems.

I dunno, i'd be pleased to see a record i love become successful, even if most people caught on late. i bought a hell of a lot of my favourite records a while after they come out, so it would be hypocritical of me to get snarky about other people not catching onto stuff the first time out.

i suppose over-production has to be taken on an artist-by-artist basis. while some records would benefit from minimal interference, something like Craig David demands to be as slick and crisp and smooth as possible.

Likewise, I think whether or not something is "overproduced" only becomes an issue if the music is shite. I mean, Andrew WK is great partly BECAUSE the whole thing sounds like a hundred plasticated guitars mashed together. Likewise, I think Siamese Dream by the Pumpkins works because it's so overproduced in that all the ugly clumsy bits of the Pumpkins (not to mention Billy Corgans voice) are crammed into this airy light grunge-Loveless blueprint.

I lose all interest in dance or electronic music when it becomes too slick though - give me clattering and distortion and DIRTY FUCKING BASSLINES over pristine grooves any day of the week, which is why I'll always prefer Laurent Garnier to Etienne de Crecy or Metro Area.

I have to disagree. In rnb and hip-hop, its the ruffness of the production that I'm appealed to. I guess that's why I don't care for much of the mainstream stuff in either of those genres. A slickly produced rnb/hiphop record just doesn't sound interesting to me. There's no surprises in the music, and the blue-collar aspects of the music is lost; the visceral impact,which IMO is what makes hiphop/rnb great, gets drowned out. In the words of that great philosopher, ODB, Ooh baby I like it raw.

Mighty strange thing to think... why are people who are not "blue-collar" so intent on exoticising being working-class and poor? It's shit, (that's why, religious orders aside, most people given the choice wouldn't elect to live in poverty). This is exactly the reason hip hop/R&B and plenty of other street music has a general tendency toward ostentation etc: bling-bling is an infinitely better lifestyle than flat-broke. Therefore, the music's aspirational tropes are actually far more "blue-collar" than the alternative... anyways, this is a whole nutha thread...

Anyway, what is it that's bad per se about 'over production'? And why is it a bad thing in 'indie' (all my examples above are of indie artists after all) and not dance or pop or electronica? And why is Loveless not something that suffers from 'over production' in the way Leisure Noise does, when it's even more precisely produced? Urban Hymns style over production makes the music sound very considered and measured, and that's anathema to the band's previoous image of being spontaneous and fluid and slightly messy, the whole idea of Storm In Heaven was that they only had ideas for songs when they recorded it, and that it was edited together from jams, as was Northern Soul (This Is Music was put together from a 2-hour tape, apparently). Indie music hates the idea of being considered and planned and target-marketed so music that has an aesthetic of consideration and cleanliness is something it automatically kick against; these albums are almost all from bands making a first major-label debut record (SFA) and/or making definite steps to move into a mainstream crossover audience (The Verve), or taking steps towards becoming mature (Oasis, Malkmus [in his case Terror Twilight could also be cited]), or else they are very very ambitious about their music being seen as being 'above' indie music (Gay Dad and Mansun being examples here), yet all the groups come from a defiant and definite 'indie' background/culture/genesis, no matter what their ambitions are. George Michael can make the most maximalist polished pop-maturation-crossover record ever and get away with it fine because it's seen as OK for him to do so given his 'pop' background. Indie is rockist and modernist and maintains the notion of the artist as staying true to beginnings and backgrounds, the romantic hero of lore, rising from working class roots but having to struggle to stay true to that aesthetic (are The Strokes the opposite of this, and is that why they understood so well that their first album must be muddy and dirty and anti-technologically-clean in terms of how it sounds, because they need to acquire that level of blue-collar romantic authenticity? [I've got lots of theories regarding authenticity but ther're wooly, hopefully if I get to do my MPhil it'll be something I look into, but I definitely err with Heidegger rather than yer common-or-garden Paul Weller notion of what 'authentic' is or isn't). Moving away from sonic 'dirt' as redolent of working-class-blue-collar authenticity and grime, and heading abck in the direction of the considered versus the spontaneous, Urban Hymns and Ashcroft's solo records are so lame to my ears is because when they are recorded so cleanly and expensively-sounding they reveal explicitly to the listener the adherence to the rulebook of the music, meaning that we get few or no surprises in the music and that the music has such little character because it is so clean and show-home and unlike an actual lived-in house. OK Computer can pull off the shininess of production because the music goes in such unexpected directions that it belies expectations; likewise Malkmus still had some semblance of quirkiness in his lyrics to surprise the listener, and some pleasant tunes to boot. But when The Verve, who's formative ghenius was based on a sense of what-will-they-do-next-? surprise and improvisation and non-adherence to rules of songwriting, switch to writing songs and following rules, they're simply not as good at it as other people and so their are few surprises structurally either (it's noticable that Catching The Butterfly is the tune other than BSS that I like most on UH, and that it's a band composition that sounds as if it was formed from a jam rather than from an Ashcroft chord-structure - Neon Wilderness was too self-consciously odd to quite work though, and too short to work itself into a hypnotic groove). And of course it's rare for songs from a guitar-based tradition that totally surprise and don't adhere to expectations of structure and form to be taken massively to the public consciousness these days, unless that's what we expect anyway from said artist (ie; Radiohead), or it's a definite novelty song (Vindaloo?). [Man, how big are the circles I'm talking in here?]

Plus guitar music (and this might be the most important point!) comes form an organic folk/blues/country tradition of people just picking up the instruments and playing together, and over-production in guitar music removes it from that tradition by making the instruments sound artificial and clean (pro-tools does this too I think, plus compress the sound further, look at Electric Soft Parade and the last Embrace album). Something like Mark Hollis' solo album is stark and clean but it's anti-technological, very simply recorded on 2 mics, the instruments aren't run through computers and circuits and stuff and aren't cleaned or altered in any way - they sound on the record as they sound in the room as they are played.

Argh. I don't feel as if I'm getting anywhere. And I feel as if I'm also talking complete crock and out of my depth, not being a music technologist. But there is definitely somethign about it that I can identify if not define; over-produced records are like very polished sports cars, they look really nice but I'd much rather drive VW Corrado that needs a wash, cos there's something unreal and alien and distasteful about a shiny red car covered in wax and polish. ARGH. Feel free to correct/mock/be confused by me.

Two more records to sit in the OP cat.; The Beta Band's Hot Shots II and The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi.

But back to production itself - fussy production is more obv in guitar-based music because in electronic music there's less of a distinction between *making* the music and *producing* it. Not having to hand it off to a third party to get finished cuts out the step where much damage is done to trad guitar bands. Often the best way to produce a song-based guitar recd is to concentrate on performance - get the band to bang it out quickly and make sure the record sounds like the band sounds. Minimize effects and get the job done. That's why, at high volume - You Really Got Me or My Generation sound totally wild and stuff like the Foo Fighters/Feeder etc just sound....erm, loud.

That's not to say that every guitar band needs to sound this way - hyper-production worked for Joy Div, but I'd argue that they were a mechanised band more akin to today's electronica than 'feel and song-based' guitar bands.

My favourite producers are any of the BBC Sessions guys - say Dale Griffin, Tony Wilson or Bob Seargent. The time constraint of banging out 4 tracks in a few hours kills any arsing around and they seem to be able to get virtually anyone to sound powerful.

Cue heated discussion of the what is fun meme.

Record producers, this is aimed at YOU:

DYNAMIC RANGE COMPRESSION, LEARN TO USE IT PROPERLY.

Part of the problem is also the over use of compression on individual tracks.

Bass don't quite work in the mix, pop in another plug-in, never mind that you hit it witha bigass analog tube compressor before it hit the recorder/computer.

Also having the ability to use a bazillion tracks, doesn't mean that you need to use them all.

He's also made some really quite rough bouncy business, too, lately... but I know what you mean... people also put far too much store on him being a trained pianist...

Bump. Interesting reading this back.

i think overproduction is what happens when more time is spent making the songs "sound" good as opposed to writing the songs so that they "are" good. a good song will sound good whether it is produced in an extremely lo-fi manner or on the best equipment. something that is overproduced is just all audio ear candy. i guess there is something about it really being "over engineered", but the decision to go that route is a production decision.

this is a problem with so much dance music because the guys making it in 2008 are almost all engineers first, producers second, and song writers a distant third. thats why i like people who take it lo-fi, it basically means they spend their time being producers and artists first and foremost.

Two albums I can think of that are good case studies here: Mercury and San Francisco by American Music Club. Mercury was (over)produced by Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake; SF (over)produced by Joe Chicarelli. Mercury has a ton of assorted extra instrumentation thrown on it, weird EQ settings, bizarre mixing choices, but the whole thing works. SF has the same sort of thing, but the labor is in the mix rather than the engineering; you can practically hear him sweating over the mixing board, dumping more and more reverb onto things to fill up the sound. Now, I happen to like that album a LOT more these days than I used to, but I can hear what happened on it: it just sounds like the takes weren't to his ear and he overproduced and overmixed things to the point where they just sound kind of bland. Mercury sounds unique (or like every other Mitchell Froom album, but even that is a kind of 'unique').

but, producing means a lot of different things, really. more than just the mix, more than engineering, it boils down to arrangements and the concept behind presentation of a song. the Ezrin produced "here comes the flood" sounds the way it does (pompous and overblown with an orchestra and shit) because Ezrin produced it and chose the arrangement; the later Gabriel (or lanois and fripp or whoever) versions are more effective without that kind of interference.

There is still no such thing as overproduction, and using Mitchell Froom as an example is particularly wrong as he is one of the finest producers ever. The more details, the better, becuase it means there is always something new to discover, at least whenever you listen to it in headphones.

More is more!

I think, Geir, that the problem with polished / overproduction is that the more layers / tracks / instruments / etc you put in, if you're not careful, the more detail of each individual instrument / layer / track etc is LOST, because things crossover and obscure each other in frequency ranges; it's no good adding a third keyboard track if you can't hear it underneath the other eight guitar tracks and you can't hear any off them behind the over-prominant vocal.

Depends on whether you use stereo separation properly, which Mitchell Froom always does. Even in the late 80s, when a rather narrow stereo was the norm, Froom always produced in a very wide stereo, with an extreme separation between the left and right track. If you do that, and make sure to spread the instruments properly, you can put considerably more different layers into the mix without any of them drowning each other.

"There is still no such thing as overproduction, and using Mitchell Froom as an example is particularly wrong as he is one of the finest producers ever. The more details, the better, becuase it means there is always something new to discover, at least whenever you listen to it in headphones.

More is more!

-- Geir Hongro"

why does it matter if there is always something new to discover? why can't the music be enough?

Because it makes the experience fresh and worthwhile rather than stale and predictable each time you repeat it.

"Because it makes the experience fresh and worthwhile rather than stale and predictable each time you repeat it.

-- Scik Mouthy"

i don't get it. does being happy get stale and predictable? how about having an orgasm, is it just not enough for you?

You've never, ever, ever got bored of a song, then? Or gone back to a song you thought you knew inside out and noticed a little something new and that made you fall in love with the song again? You ever tried different positions, locations, times, etc when having sex / wanking? That's all it is. A little novelty everytime.

"You've never, ever, ever got bored of a song, then? Or gone back to a song you thought you knew inside out and noticed a little something new and that made you fall in love with the song again? You ever tried different positions, locations, times, etc when having sex / wanking? That's all it is. A little novelty everytime.

-- Scik Mouthy"

it's not unlike listening to music in different settings, the tune is still the same but the setting is different.

you two realize you're agreeing now, right?

he might be agreeing with me, but i am still disagree with geir.

i am still disagree. ha.

i used mitchell froom as an example of overproduction that works, fwiw. I don't think all the stuff he did was necessary, and the songs on that album would have been fine without some of it, but I also think it helped in some respects. A Froom production I'm not wild about: Suzanne VEga's 99.9.

Don't get me wrong; I fucking hate agreeing with geir...

Incidentally, Geir: I finally got around to listening to your own recordings, "Talking To A Computer" and "Change The World" and the others, and you can call me impressed! Solid songs, nice surprising tribute to George Harrison, and (just to keep this on topic) well-produced. Not the sort of thing I usually seek out for myself but very well done. Bravo!

Just one thing I should tell you: I've saved 'em all on my hard drive, and they're sharing a folder with James Brown, Captain Beefheart, Public Enemy and Schoenberg. HA!

A Froom production I'm not wild about: Suzanne VEga's 99.9.

I think the main problem about "99.9" is that some of the songs just don't work out. I absolutely love the production (well, maybe apart from the title track, where the rhythmic track becomes a bit too much), but the songs on that album are the weakest she has ever written. It seems almost like here husband came up with a lot of sonic ideas and she though "Fine, we have an album then", and then didn't really write any strong songs like she used to.

IMO "Nine Objects Of Desire" worked way better because it is more of a traditional Vega album, only with great production added.

Anyway, the Froom productions I find most underrated are the ones for Elvis Costello. Those two early 90s albums are generally viewed as overproduced. I can understand that in the case of "The Other Side Of Summer", which has a bit too much of a wall of sound without enough of the needed stereo neccessary for separating the instruments from each other. The rest is pretty solid though - and I particularly love his production on "London's Brilliant Parade" - all those layers in that slow verse towards the end: Wow!

Of course everyone acknowledges his work with Crowded House and Richard Thompson, which is very, very solid. But everyone knows that anyway.

And thanks to Myonga. I don't view myself as an extreme music genius, but it sounds like at least I am better than the ones I share a folder with on your computer then. Which is something at least ;)

Btw. if overproduction means there are so many layers that you can't hear them all because they are taking the attention away from each other, I would say "It's a Sin" by Pet Shop Boys is a good example of that. Would have helped with a bit more stereo separation though, but wide stereo was not "in" in 1987.

http://i55.tinypic.com/2zojdvp.png

^ opening track on new Cold Cave album. yes, the whole album is like this; yes, it is the worst production/mastering job i've heard in years; no, the songs would not be very good even with better production :/

damn, I think I'd be hitting the off button before I was 30 seconds into that.

as much as people complain about the Sleigh Bells album, it really isn't that awful or remarkable in terms of loudness. there are plenty of quiet bits in between the noisy squalls of fuzz, and other than "Crown on the Ground" and "A/B Machines", none of the songs are maxed out from start to finish (and even those two songs aren't 100% over the line, though they come close). their distinctive "blown out" sound has less to do with clipping/digital distortion (although that's definitely part of it) than with the musicians overdriving their amps during recording.

by comparison, that Cold Cave album was mastered by a madman, and I don't understand why anyone would consider that a job well done.

fwiw, this is a 1-minute snippet of the first track on Sleigh Bells' Treats, and it's pretty typical of the album as a whole.

http://i55.tinypic.com/2enqpzq.jpg

...and a minute of "Crown on the Ground":

http://i56.tinypic.com/9tiyxs.jpg