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Old 25th May 2006   #7
Darius van H
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ironklad Audio
unfortunately, there aren't many rap albums out there that don't get crushed, and it's for 2 obvious reasons:

1)everybody wants their bass to hit. HARD.

2)a lot of rap doesn't have much of a dynamic range...there's the bass hits, the drumbeat, vocals, and whatever funny noises are in the background, most of which play at the same level all the way through the song. it's not like a classical piece that is dependent on crescendos and thematic changes - not usually, at least
The ironic thing is, the bass suffers badly when a hiphop tracks is hard limited or clipped...the bass would hit a lot harder if there were a bit more dynamics and the track was just turned up a bit!

But hey, i know i'm preaching to the converted here!

I think one of the main problems (and this goes for any genre) is people trying to push their music beyond its loudness potential. With an album like Fabolous's (Chris A could weigh in here with the details), i expect that achieving the loudness was pretty easy because the arrangments, production and mixing is "loud". So despite the high apparent volume, the music is not really suffering much.

But the trouble starts when people try to push different, lesser productions to that same apparent loudness.......everything suffers in order to achieve this.....bass, punch, high distortion.
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