SteveR |
09-14-2008 10:42 PM |
LOL is that an actual waveform of the song? I got the cd today and listened to the first 5 songs so far. Its a lot better than St. Anger production wise, but does have a lot of problems. Just by listening to it I can tell what equipment they used, the ears of the mix engineer, and the volume they mixed it at. I can hear that they mixed it loud, and that the mix engineer has the onset of permanent hearing loss, as he overcompensated in the octave of 4-8khz, which is where your hearing will go first. The main problem with mixing loud, is that everything tends to sound better loud, but if you mix loud, you dont hear what you're actually doing. If that's the actual waveform, then they messed up big time. It's not supposed to look like that lol What they did was take the mix of the song, make it really loud, and run it through a limiter where they crushed the waveform so it doesnt go over the 0 db threshold for digital. Doing that changes the tonality of each octave and removes all of the nuances and volume changes in the songs. Thats audio engineering 101 not to do that. There are a lot of other mistakes, some small, some huge that were made in the mix as well. A good mix engineer will treat each song as a separate piece and approach it with a blank slate. That way your ballads dont sound like your hard metal songs and vice versa. That requires that you zero out all the gear and start fresh with each song. You can hear that they cut corners and just left everything the same for each song. What they probably did, and I've seen amateurs do this before, is pick one song and mix that the way they like it, then just play all the songs through that setup and record the output back into Pro Tools as the mix version. You can definitely hear that they did that as soon as you hear the drums and lead guitar come in on Unforgiven 3. You have that nice melodic quiet guitar piece, then loud ass in your face drums? C'mon, thats basic 'not to do' crap right there.
Next, you can definitely hear what gear they are using. This goes back to our talk about everything being 'loud' and 'in your face' from the other thread. Rick Rubin was always good at that, and it was absolutely perfected by Chris Lord Alge (he mixed such great albums as the last Green Day and Rise Against). What happened was during the birth of rap in NY, there werent too many instruments involved, usually just rappers and some cheesy ass beat. So traditional recording gear that was very popular at that time in the rock scene wasnt going to work as it tended to be more soft and rounded out the sounds more than sharpened them. So what Rick Rubin did was take the British recording and mixing consoles by SSL, which had a very harsh and in your face sound, and were used a lot in film post production, and use them for rap artists such as Run DMC, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys. The change in gear made the simplistic production of rap albums sound a bit more full and had more presence. Well, as the boom of rap became greater, and labels were throwing ridiculous amounts of money around to get rap albums made, recording studios responded by selling off their Neve consoles and replacing them with SSLs in the hopes to attract these artists and projects (and big ass wallets too). Meanwhile, Rick Rubin gets back into recording rock albums like Blood Sugar Sex Magic by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and recording the album in an old haunted house outside of LA (Rick would return to this house to record another album in 2006, Minutes To Midnight by Linkin Park). Other albums he recorded from '90 to '95 were Slayer, Danzig, and Mick Jagger. He then went on to record acts like U2, Green Day, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, AC/DC, and System of a Down. He's also noted as having produced the new Slayer that should be out in a few months and the new ZZ Top that should be out next spring. The big thing with Rubin is making everything in your face.
The problem with this album, is that his new approach to recording and influencing the mix is he wants everything to be 'stripped down'. The problem with that for this album is that now everything sounds too harsh. There is way too little reverb on the vocals and drums and they just sound too bare. The EQs are also off. There were a few places I heard where things walk all over each other and get muddy. With the money Metallica has, I have no idea why they seem to continue to use mix engineers that seem to not only not know how to mix a hard rock album, but dont even seem to have graduated from any form of audio engineering school. The mistakes made on here are elementary. I should give you a copy of some mixes I id for a friend a few years ago. Just basic rough mixes of an album came out light years better than this.
However, the writing and performance on this album is I think the best they've done since And Justice For All. Out of the first 5, there were 4 I liked. I'll give the rest of the album a listen tomorrow.
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