how important is the production/sonics of music to you?

very impt to me, increasingly with age

yes, esp. since i got a good record player i'm listening to mostly old stuff and find some new records very hard to listen to.

but - "you're living all over me" sounds like total shit! the production is super-thin and brittle. I listened to it for the first time in years a few months ago and had to stop after three or four songs, the sound was so grating.

anyway its super-important, probably THE most important element.

yeah it's important to me too...i have a vague, amorphous thing about the production/recording style being "appropriate" to the material, whatever the fuck that means. basically i think it's an excuse for me to talk shit about bands i don't like, but it does have some grounding in reality.

also wtf re: ylaom? all you gotta do is turn it way up and it sounds radical!

also, i think this largely depends on what music you listen to (id say most genres have specific production styles that people either associate with it or just prefer). its not that i dont like clear production, i like a lot of dubstep which has perfect clarity as well as some techno etc, but i find a lot of modern hip hop beats just too sterile and lacking in any sort of texture/colour as theyre flat/tinny/small. anything that might be even remotely rough has been ironed out. this relates to the actual musical content too i think as its like theyve been stripped of any musical 'body' and left with the most skeletal possible components and nothing else.

the new dino cd reissues sound way better than the old cds...i picked up bug on vinyl and it sounds great...or shitty in a great way.

i only really care about what the sound actually is, not so much how it's been processed. this means by and large i do not think 'too clean' or 'too dirty' about the sound of pop music i hear. if i like a sound or event on a track as an idea it's not too important to me how that's been rendered as opposed to how and where it's been used, and the progression of a track in turn. concept > execution.

well I was listening to my old cassette copy, fwiw

x-post

xp - yeah, that makes total sense. although don't you mean execution > concept?

I seem to care more as I get older, also since I listen more on headphones/iPod these days. I find it really hard to tolerate some of the lo-fi stuff that I used to love, and a lot of 80's indie (SST! Homestead!) w/the thin production just irritates me. Have also gotten much more forgiving of glossy 80's production (the drum sound, etc.) for reasons that I don't understand.

Still maintain that there's this period from like '68 or '69 to about '72 where *everything* sounded incredible.

although don't you mean execution > concept?

no! i guess i'm saying i value/notice the script more than the performance generally.

yeah that's cuz '69-'74 or so was the apex of analog recording technology budgets

x-post

Quite important, I think it's fair to say.

A lot of stuff these days = it's not that they've "ironed out" dirt, it's that they were constructed in the box in the first place, and so no dirt ever went in. It's kind of an issue if you're, say, knocking out rough-and-ready stuff on a computer -- you're suddenly in a position where you have to put in the kind of sonic detail and feel that you might once have gotten from just the sound of a room or accidents of production.

i don't think that should be done but i don't necessarily notice or mind when it is

i know, but even so, it just sounds shit to my ears. doesnt help that whoevers engineering half of modern mainstream hip hop seems to engineer like it was the backstreet boys. bass frequencies seem to have suffered most (although the lack of much prominent bass in the first place probably doesnt help).

Nabisco OTM

Music is pretty much all about production, producing sounds after all, so there's really no way to separate it from the music itself. I think for this reason I have recently started to get bored with a lot of live music, at least like smaller rock bands and stuff like that, since it often seems to express so little of what the music is supposed to sound like and their true ideas. Sounds pretentious maybe.

"since it often seems to express so little of what the music is supposed to sound like and their true ideas."

and sometiems is shows a different angle of the idea,or even an improved idea , (wilco,sonic youth live sets for example, who also have excellent sounds usually).

It can be done. But those bands have years of practice and their own engineers etc.

Sound and texture is really important. I don't know if that translates as what is understood by 'production'. I'm crazy about the sound on Xasthur recordings, but a lot of reviewers seem to regard them as so degraded as to be almost unlistenable. I find that quite incomprehensible.

basically i could really just chill, drink wine, and listen to steely dan on my nice record player and not give a fuck about other music.

Depends on the quality of performance or the quality of song writing. I listen to old singles on Youtube from time to time just because I want to hear the tune at the moment. I woudn't pay to hear music like that.

I also wouldn't mind hearing a bad recording(bad digital/bad analogue, althought I have a harder time dealing with bad digital recordings) of a live performance if the performance is dynamite. I have an anonymous recording of a female gospel singer singing a solo in a chapel and she just goes off. It isn't a "great" recording, but her singing makes up for something that sound like a cheap DAT and a cheap mic in the early 90's.

That being said, I am a complete fidelity nazi when it comes to my dance records.

totally unimportant as a listener, completely paramount as an engineer/musician

I appreciate good production values, but I can think of more albums that are poorly produced yet still listenable because they contain good music than albums that have good music that is ruined by poor production.

I do wish that Rush's Vapor Trails had been mastered correctly. It has lots of good songs rendered absolutely unlistenable by horrible digital clipping.

As my old gear started dying off a couple years ago and I've been upgrading. I've been enjoying hearing details and range I've never heard before. However, I am worried that I'll get too nitpicky and and let it interfere with my enjoyment of my shitty sounding punk. I have found myself listening to proggy stuff like the new Oceansize and Porcupine Tree just for the sound.

I get my Wharfedale Opus 3s in soon, and hopefully I'll enjoy Husker Du on them just as much as on the ghettoblaster. A remaster of those albums wouldn't hurt though.

Melody and harmony is first, but production is not at all unimportant. A great album is considerably bettered by some great stereo effects, for instance.

Ass burgers reprzent reprazent.

Bump.

R U Gershy?

Who Gershy?

I've been in a meeting and now have stuff to do away from a comp so all these revived threads are gonna go uncommented upon (by me!) for a little while longer...

Listened to an amazingly expensive and scarily large hi-fi at the weekend. It was loud. I think I prefer mine at home. I don't think I'm an audiophile. Not in that sense. I don't know what a monoblock is. I think the best way to get a better sound out of your hi-fi is to play better music on it.

my phone is a monoblock

xpost

R U mentally ill?

Very. In terms of a trad. band set-up-- guitar, drum, bass, piano, etc.-- they knew everything there was to know by the 1970s and production has generally gone downhill since. Of course, there has been tons of amazing production with samples and electronic music in that time.

Not one shit. Honestly cannot think of a single time I've thought "wow this is badly produced", even in these overcompression and supposed aural fatigue. Cloth ears?

Have you ever thought you really liked a record and then realised, months later, that you never, ever play it anymore despite how much you liked it? Because that's what happened with me. I didn't suddenly think "wow, these records are all badly produced" - I often thought the production was good - but I did realise that records I ought to like more and listen to more frequently were... that I was put off listening to them. So I decided to find out what they had in common, and lo and behold, 95% of the time it was nasty sonics / hard limiting, etc.

Completely unimportant. Nothing matters less. Even the cover art is more important.

Why?

I mean, do people not care about the cinematography of a film or the focus and framing of a photograph?

Put it this way, it has to be REALLY bad to put me off, like Klaxons bad, MGMT bad, not just 'hmmm they should perhaps have mastered that kick drum a little less high in the mix' or whatever.

And bad production can be enjoyable on occasions, like bad rapping.

Also comparing production to cinematography or framing is a bad analogy.

Have you ever thought you really liked a record and then realised, months later, that you never, ever play it anymore despite how much you liked it?

Yeah, every album ever. But that's 'cause I'm addicted to novelty, and always reluctant to listen to something once I've become familiar with it. It's a very bad attitude and one I need to remedy, but it ain't to do with compression.

Why?

-- Scik Mouthy

Nick, speaking for myself, the reason that I don't care about production is that a piece of musical expression naturally manifests as a particular production style. It's all part of the one thing. There is no standard, as I see it, and no requirement to be clean, dirty, smooth, rough, or whatever. There are no objective production standards.

Also the other problem with this overvaluing of production = nowhere in this equation does live music exist.

I'm not sure that it's possible to say what 'production' really is on lots of records. What you hear is the cululative effect of everything from choice of tone/timbre of instruments, arrangement, recording choices/engineering, mixing, production, mastering, and the root cause of what you like/don't like is hard to pinpoint. You might like a particular guitar tone because the guitarist chose, say, a nicely reverbed clean sound and it was reorded like that. Or the mic placement may have been spot on, or the room may have been well-chosen for great acoustics and natural reverb, or some reverb may have been added to the dry signal afterwards, or it may have been placed in the mix just so....etc, etc
To me, a phrase like 'over-production' is pretty meaningless.

I am pretty tolerant of a wide range of sounds, and I can't think of many records where I like the songs/music, but not the way they sound. One example, probably old hat - sorry, is Husker Du. Great songs, but terrible tinny sound - the major label stuff sounds just as bad as the recorded in a shed sound of the SST stuff. (Zen Arcade is an honourable exception). But why is it tinny? It's not 'production' so much as bad source sound - Mould's guitar tone is thin and Hart's drumming very splashy and cymbal-heavy. Interestingly, they sounded pretty much the same live when I saw them.

There is no standard, as I see it, and no requirement to be clean, dirty, smooth, rough, or whatever. There are no objective production standards.

I agree with that, but I also think there are some decisions (or accidents or whatever) regarding sound that simply do not work, that put me off listening to a piece of music. "Wrong" production can be brilliant, mistakes can make a piece terrific, etc etc.

Double x-post; production can be about recreating a live sound, though.

I also think that live music often sucks sonically, generally due to bad rooms and overloud PAs; musicians on stage with in ear monitors and perfectly balanced outputs often have no idea what it sounds like out front.

I always regard melody/harmony as more important than anything else, but production is obviously another important element. Obviously, the sound is kind of the first thing you notice about a record, and particularly a bad song may gain a lot from a great production.

particularly a bad song may gain a lot from a great production

and vice versa!

Interestingly, they [Husker Du] sounded pretty much the same live when I saw them.

That's funny to hear. The production on those albums, even Zen Arcade, is bad enough to prevent me from putting them on very often. I always figured live would be a completely different story. Did they just have shitty equipment?

Also the other problem with this overvaluing of production = nowhere in this equation does live music exist.

-- Matt DC, Thursday, 24 April 2008 10:22 (Yesterday)

yeabbut live music generally sounds shit at home, it's more about the experience surely?

"Sounding good" can be and is part of that experience though.

and vice versa!

A good song works in any context. A good song surely also gains from a great production, but if it is great it is great nevertheless, regardless of production. At least unless the production drowns the good song by putting the vocals way too low in the mix.

"Sounding good" can be and is part of that experience though.

honestly, i'd argue that most live stuff sounds crap outside of the context of being there.

I agree entirely; most gigs I've been to have sounded absolutely shit. BUT I have also been to a handful - Patrick Wolf, Lambchop, an old soul covers band, live acoustic jazz - where it's sounded absolutely phenomenal.

maybe cos you were there? if you got hold of a recording of one of those gigs it'd prob sully it for you.

Possibly, but given how anal I am about these things, and how much I normally bitch and put earplugs in at gigs, I do genuinely think they sounded very good. The Patrick Wolf gig in question, for example, was in a very nice room acoustically and was just him, largely unamplified, with a piano, a violin, a ukulele and an un-mic'd drummer. He carried the gig on his voice and it was astonishing.

i have heard some genuinely great live recordings - always a surprise particularly because they are usually awful.

It's ridiculous to expect live to always sound inferior. Orchestras are an obvious example where the live experience can't be adequately recreated on a recording, but there's no reason that the same can't apply to any performance given the right circumstances.

Kraftwerk is better live dudes

The time I saw Lambchop they was way better live, too.

Not for me, but I missed the Royal Albert Hall gig even though I had tickets (had to go on a trip to Costa Rica instead, bummerz)