Thoughts on mastered mix trends in current hip hop/pop radio fare

[andonwego]

Hello,

I'm coming from a background of choosing the right electric guitar string alloy to affect note attack and timbre, and finding a bass that's either long or short scale to let the harmonics and attack speed blend more correctly.

So this modern pop hip hop thing is new to me but I have some thoughts. I've reviewed existing threads and would like to begin a new one.

My first thoughts:

There seems to be a surprising amount of total compression thrown down on the whole mix, with a pretty low threshold and not overly high ratio (around 2) but with a decent amount of gain, and then limiting. All obvious but that's in any event my read on the actual parameters of what we're talking about.

The Logic Channel EQ preset for Hip Hop mastering certainly moves us in the right direction. Thrown on the Master Out 1-2.

The bass and sub bass regions can start to bleed ridiculously over each other...almost like doing a live mix in a bad room of a metal band with two drummers and two bassists. And trying to make it work.

The same hyperagglutinated sonic clusterf***k applies to the high and high-high end. The Sonic Zone of Shrill Death and Immediate Overkill. Everything needs surgical high EQ boosts to get "that sound" which absolutely saturates the feeling of sonic separation in the high end. Inescapable. Which means surgical compression of high end, which means a narrow zone of critical high end that's virtually impossible to make "perfect" -- overtones from snares, little clickity clickity clicks, high end vocal EQ, it reminds me of the Is It Safe?" scene from Marathon Man. With Laurence Olivier with the high pitch dental drill coming to kill you.

THE MIDRANGE IS AN UNDEFINED MYSTERY SINCE THE BEGINNING OF 2010. Let's see. The Jay-Z stuff and new Eminem stuff with guest female vocals. Midrange? Hi. Not there. On the other hand -- Lady Gaga has midrange. But the hip hop stuff is Smiley Face EQ land.

I HEAR...distortion on everything. Probably from juicing the gain parameters on so many compression plugins.

I DON'T HEAR...purposeful subtle white noise.

Mostly dry lead vocals, with the verbs associated with the vocal double that's mixed lower.

I also hear...reverb plugins whose top cut parameter has been left at 20k and maybe should have been lowered or subsequently de-essed, the ultraviolet fizz twinges off the end of every percussive highly syllabic lyric.



So my friends, anyone want to join the fray on this one? I feel like a pediatrician being asked to do plastic surgery on a donkey. Yes I have a scalpel, sir, but no I'm not sure if... if the...

[Masterer]

Huh?

[Andy Krehm]

Originally Posted by Masterer

Huh?

Took the word right out of my mouth!

[Jesse Graffam]

Originally Posted by andonwego

I DON'T HEAR...purposeful subtle white noise or other such '80s and '90s Bruce Swedien-Michael Jackson style tricks.

I still get some stuff in from my clients and they've told me they use that trick. It's nice to know too since I made some of my own tools to accomplish the same thing (think psycho-acoustics and unmasking) without adding the noise.

Your topic is ... schizophrenic. Don't expect most of the responses to make any sense as a whole.

[William Bowden]

Originally Posted by andonwego

I DON'T HEAR...purposeful subtle white noise or other such '80s and '90s Bruce Swedien-Michael Jackson style tricks.

Within the random background-style white noise of your post I do hear a faint garbled signal. It appears to be saying: "I don't like modern hip hop mastering" but it could also be "I don't like modern hip hop production."

Of course with all the white noise contamination in your post it's difficult to get a clear signal. I'm not sure if you're saying that the 'purposeful white noise' you miss should be added in mastering, or in production, or is just an artifact of my own post-decoding software (I set the threshold to 11 for steady state removal) or a setting on a 90's discman that you can't get working anymore...

It's also possible the contamination is so bad, that what should have been a simple post on euclidian geometry braised with boolean undecidability and served on a bed of triple hamiltonions in a 6-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifold sauce has somehow entangled itself in a mastering forum.

I think your last line about the donkey and the scalpel is on the money however.

The King

[andonwego]

I think your last line about the donkey and the scalpel is on the money however.


Exactly. And I'm aware I'm talking in seven directions at once. Their overall thrust is that without a reference point of remembering what the musicians sounded like in the room, because there were no musicians and there was no room, there's no anchor.

So there's just trendiness in sound.

And I'm curious if anybody has any random disconnected thoughts on those trends.

By definition I'm not going to be able to pose the question, How Can We make XYZ sound better or more real, because it's synthetic to begin with.

So now that the anchor is officially pulled up and this thread is officially of no relation to reproducing real music made by humans, does anybody have anything unofficial to observe about recent trends in digital manipulation of pop fare?

LOL :-P

[Peakly]

Originally Posted by William Bowden

It's also possible the contamination is so bad, that what should have been a simple post on euclidian geometry braised with boolean undecidability and served on a bed of triple hamiltonions in a 6-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifold sauce has somehow entangled itself in a mastering forum.

because there were no musicians and there was no room

Did anyone notice at the end of the championship game of the World Cup, Bob Marley was being played over the stadium PA? Now that is impressive. A recording of a reggae band from Jamaica is still so hot, it is being played decades later at a world-wide soccer championship game in Johannesburg, South Africa. I wonder how much of the computer generated autotuned quantized junk being churned out today will have that kind of musical life?

Mychal

[UnderTow]

Originally Posted by andonwego

Their overall thrust is that without a reference point of remembering what the musicians sounded like in the room, because there were no musicians and there was no room, there's no anchor.

I don't listen to any hiphop but I do listen to alot of electronic music in general which in theory should suffer even more from a lack of "anchoring". Here is the way I see it:

Physical objects have physical properties. If you take something as simple as a bamboo stick and whack it against a tree trunk it will make a certain sound. Due to it's relatively low mass you can whack it quite fast. If you take a thick log and whack that against the tree trunk it will make a different sound. You also won't be ably to move it as fast as the bamboo stick.

My feeling has always been that the good producers/mix engineers etc have an inate feeling of what works physically. They have a sense of right and wrong. They understand sound and how it relates to the physical world and what will and won't sound right. The anchor isn't needed because the anchor is implied. It is in the mind of the producer/engineer.

Remember that understanding sound is a survival skill. This skill didn't evolve for our enjoyement of music. That is just a by-product. From a survival point of view, things really do have to be anchored in the physical world. Interpreting sounds correctly can be the difference between being alive or dead. In this sense, sound isn't arbitrary.

Of course understanding sound in this way doesn't mean that you are stuck with or limited to realistic sounds. Once you, instinctively, understand what does and does not work you can start playing around and twist things to impose your vision on the sounds while still somehow keeping an invisible tether to reality and thus a connection to your lis. Often it can be that twist, that rearranging of the rules that makes things most interesting.

Alistair