The Master Of Mastering

One of the things that has all but disappeared from modern music is something called dynamics. Dynamics is the range that music has in its volume and speed. It used to be considered dramatic and exciting to have music that started softly, slowly built up in volume and then quiets down again only to peak once more at the crescendo at the end.

These days the "mastering engineer" will insist you should "equalize" all your tracks so that no part of a song is any louder than any other part of the song. Why is that? It's because radio puts everything it broadcasts through an compressor that evens out the volume and it's assumed that you want your music to sound like it's "on the radio". So everything gets evened out, all the highs and lows get squashed into the middle and all the drama and excitement goes away. Then it gets played on the radio and gets squished even more.

It's the same thing with tempos. Bands used to play a verse slowly then speed up to a rockin' chorus then slow down again (and get softer) in the verse in order to bring it all back up for the big finish. Then producers started using drum machines and click tracks to make digital recording easier and faster (cheaper) and playing different time signatures came to be considered "sloppy playing" and one constant beat became the only acceptable way to play.

This attitude in music is like telling a painter he or she can only use primary colors and anything else is "wrong". So what we have now in modern rock is no longer "Art" but "product", created by machines used by people who are now slaves to those machines.

There is NO WAY we are NOT going to have to FIGHT THE ROBOTS! NO WAY!

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