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AnOceanPearl

Okay Anton, You Were Right

By AnOceanPearl, in Matthew Good

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Guest Idioteque

Guest Idioteque

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No no I didn't read what you said as condescending! Everyone reads my replies like I'm an asshole haha.

I completely agree, I'm just saying people can't tell the difference if its software or real anymore. Which is good because from what I read in another post it costed Matt $30,000 to use the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

The trickery of studio engineering is becoming alot more fascinating. In one case my friend recorded his drum tracks off time and all it took was for the producer to click 1 button and his take matched the tempo. A guitar out of tune can be fixed during production or a bad vocal note.

I don't think every problem should be fixed to hide that you're a shitty musician but its beneficial for sure.

I'm sure any studio nut can school me about how studios have better audio interfaces and microphones and having a professional sound booth,studio monitors etc etc. I'm just curious on Matt's opinion.

Nevermind trying to attach a photo because like most photos, its "too big".

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/931365_530151200360673_1467981949_n.jpg?oh=653d5a3e41919136151df892a4c16ebe&oe=553C4CE4&__gda__=1426252805_bf7a99ab9e5a9030fa67bdeaea1e1bc2

Bottom left, im buying both of them off a friend next year because they have like 6 copies sitting around.


 

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Guest Idioteque

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To throw in some interesting articles about technology advancing in the music industry before we end up way off topic with the forum, 

This is an interesting article of an engineer who only uses analog tape for his clients.
 

He's concerned that as digital formats continue to evolve, today's digital recordings will be unplayable in the future. I loved the way Albini put it: "I feel it would be irresponsible to give my clients digital files as their permanent masters, knowing they would eventually disappear or become unusable, so I won't do it. Some of the bands I work with don't appreciate the difference, or take seriously the notion that music should outlive the people who make it, and I understand that." Still, Albini feels that analog tape offers the best chance for recordings to survive. I agree, and analog tape can be used to create great sounding high-definition digital masters. That's not true of the vast majority of recordings that are being made today; most are limited to 48-kHz/24-bit digital.

 

http://www.cnet.com/news/why-is-the-engineer-who-recorded-nirvana-still-using-analog-tape/

And also a well known thing that is happening called "The Loudness War" which is actually ruining the audio and really damaging people's ears. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSaP3EF-K5s<Video explaining it.

With the advent of the Compact Disc (CD), music is encoded to a digital format with a clearly defined maximum peak amplitude. Once the maximum amplitude of a CD is reached, loudness can be increased still further through signal processing techniques such as dynamic range compression and equalization. Engineers can apply an increasingly high ratio of compression to a recording until it more frequently peaks at the maximum amplitude. In extreme cases, efforts to increase loudness can result in clipping and other audible distortion. Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war."

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
 

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AnOceanPearl

AnOceanPearl

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The same goes for piano - while there are tens of thousands of samples, nothing touches how an actual grand or baby grand sounds. Nothing resembles how room microphones in a large room, compressed or gated, capture vocals, guitars, bass, piano, or drums. 

 

 

 

The piano sounds (and horn sounds... and well... all the sounds) on LoES are incredible. Just hearing some of that natural warble in the notes as they're decaying gives me chills every damn time.

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Moonlight_Graham

Moonlight_Graham

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It would be nice if some day you'd do something with the music to Homecoming and that demo you worked on during the Vancouver demos sessions:

. Musically speaking, those could have fit on Arrows as well.

 

I always thought that demo you just linked to that Matt posted on his blog years ago was fantastic.  You're right, it would have been perfect for Arrows.  I always wanted If I Was a Tidal Wave on a record release, it's a great song that deserved more exposure, though the verse lyrics would be lost on most people now.

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mackie1023

mackie1023

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Although I won't attempt to argue as eloquently, I completely agree with Matt. You simply can't produce the same sounds digitally that are available using real musicians/analog/high end mic/outboard gear.

 

I knew a lot of folks who preferred to work completely "in the box" and I could never figure out why. Some people don't think they have the chops to mix otherwise I suppose.

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Guest Idioteque

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Something that has always been noticeable for me was DI Amp Plugins. There is a staleness that comes with it.

It will never sound like a true marshall or VOX mic'd up. 

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Outtahere

Outtahere

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We live in a time when people can’t really tell the difference because of two things. The first happens during the mixing process, when many mixing engineers double drums with samples to make them pop, and so forth.

 

Matt, you've said not long ago that one of the things you dislike about Vancouver is that you actually tried to do that. But I was listening to Empty's Theme Park and was thinking that this must be a pretty tedious process trying to be on time with the real drums but with samples and drum machines.

 

 

I always thought that demo you just linked to that Matt posted on his blog years ago was fantastic.  You're right, it would have been perfect for Arrows.  I always wanted If I Was a Tidal Wave on a record release, it's a great song that deserved more exposure, though the verse lyrics would be lost on most people now.

 

I'm sure the lyrics can be adapted. I asked Matt a couple of years ago to do a French version of it with new words but the same title (in Quebec) because that's basically how I felt with our provincial government at the time but I never got an answer (not complaining, he has other things to do :P)

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finboy

finboy

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You cannot, in a million years, reproduce a real vintage Neve board. Unless you have literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend, you cannot possibly own the sort of collection of microphones that are available at top end studios, or whatever array of analog outboard that they might have. Home studios rarely, if ever, have real reverb tanks. And unless you’re recording in a space that has a specific sound, acoustics enter into the equation as well.

There is no drum program on the planet that can recreate a live drummer. Further, while there are awesome string samples out there, they too are never as good as actual human beings playing strings in an ensemble. The same goes for piano - while there are tens of thousands of samples, nothing touches how an actual grand or baby grand sounds. Nothing resembles how room microphones in a large room, compressed or gated, capture vocals, guitars, bass, piano, or drums.

We live in a time when people can’t really tell the difference because of two things. The first happens during the mixing process, when many mixing engineers double drums with samples to make them pop, and so forth. The other is that, as the years go by, the number of records that don’t feature pure sounds has impacted the public’s perception of how things actually sound. “That’s a piano”, you say, “so what’s the difference?”

Can you imagine how Bitches Brew would sound were all of those instruments not real? Further, can you imaging how entirely underwhelming it would be to discover that Johnny Greenwood’s solo in Just was actually the result of some computer program and not him playing the guitar and using pedals to get that? Do you know how difficult it was back in the day to produce sounds that did things that seemed uncommon because people knew that that part was actually played? Today, the reverse reverb that Johnny Mar came up with for the main hook in How Soon Is Now is a joke to reproduce with a computer. But he didn’t have one in 1985 when he recorded that part. That’s what makes it outstanding. That’s one of the reasons that song is brilliant.

And, ultimately, in the end, that's what actually separates the men from the boys.

I think this is why I really appreciated the reasoning behind white light r&r review, knowing that everything, EVERYTHING on that was analog, and as much live floor recording made it a noticeable sonic experience from not only your previous work, but a majority of most other modern albums. I would LOVE to hear that on vinyl, as I bet warne went to huge lengths to get that sound to come through as it did.

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Guest Idioteque

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I wonder if they ever played together or bumped into each other. Given the chances of them sharing a bill in a festival at least once over 14 years.

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THE MAN

THE MAN

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I think this is why I really appreciated the reasoning behind white light r&r review, knowing that everything, EVERYTHING on that was analog, and as much live floor recording made it a noticeable sonic experience from not only your previous work, but a majority of most other modern albums. I would LOVE to hear that on vinyl, as I bet warne went to huge lengths to get that sound to come through as it did.

 

I don't think it was recorded on analog tape, was it? Either way, that album has a fantastic sound, I agree. Something I've found in all of the Warne Livesey productions is how much I love the snare and cymbal tones. You can't buy that in a plug-in hahaha.

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Moonlight_Graham

Moonlight_Graham

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I don't think it was recorded on analog tape, was it? Either way, that album has a fantastic sound, I agree. Something I've found in all of the Warne Livesey productions is how much I love the snare and cymbal tones. You can't buy that in a plug-in hahaha.

 

Matt:  Hey let's record everything in analog, it will sound like some amazing bombastic motherfuckerness.

Wayne:  Shit fucking right, let's do this!

 

6 months later...

Average Fan #1:  OMG new Matt Good album is out!

Average Fan #2:  Oh sweet, let's listen to it on YouTube in shitty digitially compressed 126 kbps (the max audio bitrate any Youtube video will play, even HD) on my shitty laptop speakers through my shitty soundcard by the user who ripped it through some shitty free video-editing software.

Average Fan #1:  OMG all analog, sounds so good!

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IamNick

IamNick

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Tiger By The Tail is an awesome name for an album!

 

edit: There's that image on matt's site that says Tiger By The Tail, buuuut if you click the arrow on the right, an image appears that says "Twenty Years/ Matthew Good" with a picture of a 20-sided die. a hint at something being released with the name Chaotic Neutral????

 

So is it Tiger By The Tail, or Chaotic Neutral for the new album!?

Edited by IamNick
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Gomo

Gomo

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I was flipping through my MG playlist in iTunes today and I was thinking about what Matt said about Bad Pennies not fitting with the sound of everything else he's been working on for the new album. Then it occurred to me that The Devil's In Your Details sounds totally different from most of the rest of Hospital Music, yet I feel like it's a good addition and offers kind of a needed upbeat shift in the middle of that album. I mean it is what it is, but I guess I'm just trying to point to something and say it's not unprecedented for Matt to switch up the tone in the middle of an album. I guess looking back at the rest of the albums it doesn't happen THAT often though.

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