The Loudness War

I came across a great video online which demonstrates how the use of compression is damaging the sound of major music releases today, compared to 1989. The video explains it all.


LoudnessWar & YouTube, 2006

Also, you can see examples of the album 'Stadium Arcadium' by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The top two samples are from the vinyl mastering, and the bottom two are the CD mastering.



ShowsOn & Hydrogen Audio, 2006

Music is being sacrificed because record companies want us to listen to their artists louder. This should be banned! If I want to listen to music loud, I will turn it up. Simple. No need to do it for me.

References

LoudnessWar, The Loudness War, available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ, YouTube 2006

ShowsOn, Hydrogenaudio Forums > Music Discussion > General Music Discussion: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Arcadium, available online at http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t42376.html, Hydrogen Audio 2006

Another Cool Blog

I found a rather cool blog online by a guy called Dave Rat. He is the front of house sound engineer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He controls and mixes the sound that the audience hears at a gig. He has been doing this job for 16 years, and the blog is pretty interesting. He talks about how he designed the speaker and system layout for the concerts, different spaces that he has to work with and difficulties that arise, and also just general stuff that he gets up to so that you can see what it is like to be a roadie for a big band. There are also some great tips on LOADS of different audio stuff, mainly about live sound, but some things could be applied in the studio. These bits are started with ****Sound Nerd Speak****

Check it out!

http://ratsound.com/blognav.htm

Rough Edit

Over the past few days, we have been working on putting together a preliminary rough edit. The attatched video is our first draft. It is not tight, too long and the audio has not been done properly yet.. but it is helpfull for us to get a feel for what the documentary will look like.

"The Making Of..."

Me and Oli were editing today when we thought, why not create a "making of" video for our blog, so that people can track the progress of our documentary... so we did! Enjoy.

Oh yeah, excuse the Brent impersonations.

Ghost Documentary Update

Well, we have shot both our interview and location footage, and are now into post production! The interviews ram pretty smoothly with relatively no problems. An annoying humming sound on location restricted us a little, but I felt that we got pleanty of great footage that really shows the characters of the group. The photographs are from the interview shoot. I will try and get hold of the photos from the location shoot to upload too. On the location shoot, we found it a challenge to keep organised, especially when the group found a girl in the woods and followed her home because her house was haunted. That tangent aside, we managed to get some great footage that fits well with the interview segments. The whole thing should give a good insight into the lives of these people.

Midi

I learned this week about midi instruments and how to setup and quantize. I learned about the different plugins that are available to use and how to change and manipulate midi information once recorded into pro tools. I will book out the studio on the near future to try out some midi sounds. I will try and upload a sample once I have given this a shot.

Recording Session

Today we recorded a session in the studio with another band. I was part of the floor crew, so I miked up the drums and singer. We set up a midi keyboard through a di box, and also a bass guitar through a di box. We had some trouble with the bass guitar. It sounded very distorted. We changed all the cables and input, but it still sounded bad. We found out that a member of the band had applied some amp farm effects to the track that we had bass on as they wanted to overdub some guitar. By this time we had already miked up the bass amp instead of going through a di box. The result was fine. We will mix the recording next week.