The Desert of the Real comes to Nashville

These tracks have entirely modern compression and equalisation

Um, I’m sure they had to do a whole lot more than that. Even soloing a track you just recorded on old-fashioned gear five minutes ago would sound tinny and thin unless you made it jump through hoops (compression, saturation, delay, reverb, chorus, pseudo-doubling, etc.).

But something that’s been sitting around for decades? No, you’d have to do major surgery on the sound to make it sound like anything. You’d have to identify the waveform of the noise-floor and take it out digitally … for each of the tracks, tweak the overtone series (the kind of work that ‘aural exciters’ used to do), and compensate for weird drops in signal (there’s your compression), not to mention subtracting bleed-through images if the masters weren’t stored tail-out.

That’s not ironic, Daniel. It’s inevitable. Glad they did it, since no one else would have been able to command both the legal rights and the expertise. As for “the sound of 1964,” it’s probably a common pre-set on lots of gear that most engineers overwrite as soon as they get it home.

Forgot to mention: hard-pans on 45-year-old songs are more obvious for drums, etc., now than they were then for two reasons: because they were mixed for end-user gear with markedly inferior stereo separation than we get now (and at a time when there was a premium placed on gimmicky panning [look! the maracas are over HERE!]), and they didn’t care much for the superior bass response of a centered signal because those notes could make the stylus skip sideways, anyway.

How bad was home-stereo gear back then? Look at a common guitar cable today. High impedance, unbalanced, and unshielded? Yeah: that used to be a consumer audio electronics format. It didn’t last long, but practically every rock guitarist you’ve ever heard is still using it, like a fly trapped in amber ….

Lots of jazz records of the era sound strong and full without modern fiddling.

Yep, but they mostly dealt with different instruments. It’s harder to record a guitar than a sax or piano, and jazz guitarists roll off the tail pickups to produce a bass-dominated sound that records better. The problems of gain and power amp distortion are virtually unknown in jazz before jazz fusion [shudder]. Jazz drumming is mostly high-frequency snare and cymbol (quick way to piss off a jazz bassist: use your bass drum).

And they worked with a larger dynamic range. A jazz recording from 45 years ago might use a couple of condenser mikes that would run USD$ 5,000 apiece easy these days. Country recordings after the mid-sixties were carving up arrangements in isolation, splitting things up with cheaper dynamic mikes, so you also loose air-compression, natural reverb, all the things that make a jazz recording make you feel like you’re there in the club.

Come to think of it, that’s the only thing I like about jazz, but I digress.

In particular, it’s got the kind of heavy limiting that came into fashion in roughly the 1990s

That’s kinda unavoidable with digital recording. Digital clipping sounds like a thousand silicon insects are erupting out of your sternum. There is no saturation, there is only the edge of the abyss, and then the abyss. It’s telling that line-drive distortion found a place in the analog engineer’s bag of tricks (think guitar on the Beatles’ “Revolution”), but digital clipping never found a similar use even as a gimmick, except maybe as sound effects for Atari home video games.

I didn’t think the clips sounded like alt-country (as I understand it, which I’m not sure I do), but I guess I was distracted by the very dated singing styles and piano arrangements because I remember what they sounded like when they were current. To me, it’s an extremely dated sound, which I guess is what they’re going for. Willy’s nylon-string falls apart like old cobwebs in a few places.

I’ve just realised what the exact description of what I’m hearing is; per Walk the Line, this album has been engineered and mixed in order to sound like the soundtrack to a contemporary Willie Nelson biopic. Indeed, Joaquin Phoenix has been growing the beard in preparation for one, presumably.

I thoroughly agree with JM against RB on the subject of effects in recording (not always bad), although not on the necessary awfulness of jazz fusion. (I am also a bit of a closet fan of gated reverbs; I recently bought a copy of Reaper, and frankly think that is probably a bad idea for civilians to find it so easy to replicate the first five seconds of “Life’s What You Make It” by Talk Talk.

Well, dsquared, I’ve recently been listening to the first three Chicago albums in heavy rotation. Does that make me a hypocrite?

No. What happened is that it got “produced”.

Ah, well, the answer is simple then. Good. We can all stop worrying about how things actually work, which means I can devote a great deal more time to drinking. Thanks to your intercession, the economy of Milwaukee is saved.

I personally wouldn’t count anything less twiddly that “Elegant Gypsy” to be jazz fusion in the pejorative sense.

You may wish to include what precedes that quote:

Unlike any other engineer/record producer with his experience and prominence, Albini does not receive royalties for anything he records or mixes; rather he charges a flat daily fee when recording at his own facility, described by Azerrad (Azerrad, 2001) as among the most affordable for a world-class recording studio. In fact, Albini initially charged only for his time, allowing free use of his studio to friends or musicians he respected who were willing to engineer their own recording sessions and purchase their own magnetic tape (Azerrad, 2001). When recording elsewhere, Albini uses an admittedly arbitrary sliding scale:

“I charge whatever the hell I feel like at the moment…”

Come to think of it, there were loads of 50s jazz players who didn’t really use that tone, either.

Think of Johnny Smith’s sound, for example.

This thread is the sort of thing that makes Teh Interwebs so great. Who’da thunk I’d be learning so much about recording at CT?

which doesn’t change the significance of my quote in the slightest

It does if you read it, particularly the very first sentence, but you can stick with your interpretation if you prefer being wrong.

As for not being a producer, Albini’s two-mic technique on the lead vocals for “All Apologies” is not an example of a hands-off engineer.

It is: the band wanted it and he gave it to them. If they hadn’t wanted it, he wouldn’t have. Some of his other techniques Cobain seemed to like as he lifted them to record The Melvins later on. Anyway, better a guy who knows how to mic things – faster too! – than a guy who at the get go may want the sound to go through hoops (compression, saturation, delay, reverb, chorus, pseudo-doubling, etc.). That last guy is someone who will cost unnecessary money.

Albini, in any case, is just an example, which is why I put a little rollover text in the link that said “just an example”. I didn’t say he didn’t colour the sound – anyone who prefers X equipment in X environment does that.

“The Harder they Come” is pretty good too.

Also, the Rastafarian world view is wrongly maligned. The seas will be boiling and the rocks melting once Bush’s back-loaded crisis fully kicks in. Obama won’t be helping. What are your plans for that moment?

I thought Albini’s been pretty explicit about the fact that he’s charged some bands that he thought sucked and/or who had a buttload of money on their hands a whole lot, just so that he could turn around and record other bands that he thought didn’t suck and (not, and/or here) didn’t have a buttload of money for next to nothing. At least he claims this somewhere and some people who usually don’t let others “in the scene” get away with bullshit seem to generally agree.

But where does Peter Tosh’s “Equal Rights” stand in the production universe?

I dunno. Your not giving a shit about production values is largely my attitude – Daniel Johnston recorded great songs alone on two cassette machines that almost always sound worse when bands and technology intervene – but then I think about The Kinks. I’ve slowly been wending my way through their discography and songs that are obviously as good as any Beatles song often sound weak or lifeless or even out of tune because they weren’t given the proper care (largely by the songwriter himself). While I’m obviously suspicious of straying too far beyond bare-bones recording of bands that already have good things going for them, surely someone like JM could go back and make that Kinks stuff better. It would have been nicer if care was exercised in the first place, but there you go.

I thought Albini’s been pretty explicit about the fact that he’s charged some bands that he thought sucked and/or who had a buttload of money on their hands a whole lot

He has, but at his own studio he has a flat rate – except when he decides to be nice – and is a worker bee.