It’s difficult to convey with words the excitement of listening to your new record 37 times in a row and deciding whether the break between the first and second tracks should be an eighth of a second longer. This picture will have to suffice.

We finished mastering the new CD tonight. Billy, Paul, and I worked with Mike Hagler to sequence the album and burn the master. The masters sound natural, not the headache-inducing square-wave distorted stuff that’s the norm nowadays. Must sleep now.

I stumbled across this last night while preparing to attend tonight’s mastering session for our 3rd CD, Most Folk Heroes Started as Criminals. We like Bob Weston a lot. He engineered our first CD, and has recently opened a mastering studio in Chicago. Bob’s engineering style eschews the slick and synthetic in favor of naturalistic sounds. The same sensibility informs his mastering work:

…[A]nother reason we wanted to open the place was to be part of the solution to the insane loudness war thing. We want to educate our clients and try to get CDs sounding good again. There are so many now that just sound loud, but not good. I think a lot of younger guys and girls in bands think that mastering simply means making it really loud.

Read the full article at bouncetodisk.com

…Most Folk Heroes Started Out as Criminals

We’re mastering it tomorrow (Thursday) night with Mike Hagler at King Size in Chicago. Unless something changes over the next 24 hours, here’s the track list and sequence:

Side 1:

1. Sandy River Belle
2. California
3. Short Life of Trouble
4. The Logjam
5. Mississippi Trashboat
6. Pick Poor Robin
7. British Army

Side 2:

1. Lay Down My Old Guitar
2. Takeup Reel / Cold Frosty / *Grey Eagle
3. Little Sadie
4. Pain in My Heart
5. Trishenku’s Heaven
6. Dead Flowers
7. Listen to the Mockingbird

*As a recovering Ohioan, I should point out that the correct spelling is ‘gray’.

Today’s Billboard has good news for Replacements fans: the band’s Twin/Tone-era output will be rereleased in remastered, expanded form on April 22:

Billboard.com

Each of the four CDs will be accompanied by rarities from that period in the band’s career. While some of the bonus cuts have been circulating among Replacements fans for over two decades, others have yet to see the light of day. The bonus cuts for their final Twin/Tone LP, Let It Be:

• “20th Century Boy”
• “Perfectly Lethal,” outtake*
• “Temptation Eyes,” outtake*
• “Answering Machine,” solo home demo*
• “Heartbeat — It’s a Lovebeat,” outtake - rough mix*
• “Sixteen Blue,” outtake - alternate vocal*

‘20th Century Boy’ was a b-side on the ‘I Will Dare EP’ (along with a hilarious Hank Williams cover). ‘Perfectly Lethal’, ‘Temptation Eyes’, and the alternate ‘Sixteen Blue’ have circulated for a long time (I think I got mine from a bootlegger in Columbus in about 1987), albeit in the form of 12th generation cassette copies and MP3s ripped from the aforementioned well-worn 12th generation cassettes. That said, they’re all excellent tracks, and fans should rejoice at the chance to hear them in a more pristine form.

‘Heartbeat — It’s a Lovebeat’ and the ‘Answering Machine’ demo are considerably rarer, and even diehard fans are likely to be hearing them for the first time. ‘Heartbeat’ doesn’t even appear on the excellent Sessionography at Foshay Tower.

There are a few outtakes from the Let It Be sessions that have been omitted from the reissue:

• Who’s Gonna Take Us Alive
• Street Girl (2 versions)
• Gary’s Got a Boner (alternate take)

Of the omitted tracks, ‘Who’s Gonna Take Us Alive’ is the strongest, with some fine Bob Stinson guitar riffs, and a very pretty acoustic 12-string bridge. ‘Street Girl’ (sometimes listed as ‘Sweet Girl’) is more of a fragment than a complete song, one take being a mere minute and a half, and both takes end in flubs before the song is complete.

Apropos to nothing, when Paul Westerberg sings ‘Temptation Eyes’, it sounds like he’s singing ‘F****ng rhubarb on my soul’, rather than ‘through my my my soul’. Also, a friend of mine swore he was singing ‘Ten cents a retard’ rather than ‘20th Century boy’ on the track of the same name.

The first CD issues of these records were absolutely horrible sounding — shrill, glassy, and sterile. Mastering is a contentious issue now (see my previous Loudness War posts), but I’m optimistic that the sound will be an improvement. Whatever the case, it’s a chance to wallow in latent adolescence and celebrate the band at their creative zenith.

H/T to Aaron Cohen for passing this along.

Mastering engineer Bob Katz has an interesting rant about unlistenably loud CDs. He asserts that contemporary CDs are ten decibels louder than those made 15 years ago.

Remember that decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale. A ten-decibel increase means that contemporary CDs are nearly four times as loud as older discs. (See this handy article on ProRec.com to learn more about why you’re going deaf). But the volume comes at a cost — There are a limited number of bits in each sample. Once all those zeros are flipped to ones, there’s nowhere else to put the data, and things start sounding bad. Really bad.

The war for loudness has only casualties and losers. Some CDs made in the year 2001 are 10 dB hotter than those made in 1990! But the system can’t take it…this is only obtained with horrendous amounts of compression and limiting. Can you take one of these CDs for more than 5 minutes? They sound fatiguing, overmodulated…..

Fact: Your CDs are hotter than anything made in 1990. They have reached the maximum level that they can and still maintain the sound quality. CDs cannot escalate because there is a limit. The waveforms of the top of the charts “hits” are shaped like 2 x 4s, sound fatiguing and unrelenting and have no relationship with the sound of a good album. No one is happy—-not the artists, not the producers… And on the radio? Still sound like crap, only worse.

Read the full post at DigitalDomain.

I may do a little post about binary mathematics and explain why it sounds like ass when CDs clip. I’ve become obsessed with this recently because I’ve been ripping a lot of my old vinyl LPs onto my computer. I watch the wave forms as they scroll by on the computer, and marvel at all the musical detail we’ve lost.

CDs are getting louder, and the increased volume is coming at the expense of dynamics and other musical details. The Loudness War isn’t the sole domain of major labels–indie labels are often just as guilty of creating unlistenable CDs due to poor mastering choices.

Same band, different year
The Buzzcocks are a band I admire enormously. I have all their early recordings on LP, and repurchased many of them on CD in the 1990s. This is one of their classic singles, Ever Fallen in Love, ripped from the Singles Going Steady CD. Here’s a short MP3 excerpt of the song :Ever Fallen in Love (excerpt). Even in loss-tastic MP3 form, it sounds pretty damn good.

The band’s 2003 self-titled release on indie darling Merge records was rightly hailed as a return to form. The songwriting and playing are quite good. But the record is unlistenable. Here’s an MP3 excerpt of a track from the CD: Stars (excerpt). What your ears don’t tell you, your eyes will. Take a gander at this wave form.

It’s a perfect rectangle. And it’s a perfect rectangle because there is almost no dynamic variation in the track. It’s scarcely different from a test pattern. The result is oppressive, fatiguing, and unmusical. I haven’t listened to it since I bought it in 2003.

We quickly become numb to the ubiquitous. We often don’t notice how bad fast food tastes, how ugly strip malls are, what an eyesore our highways are, or the omnipresence of advertising in our public spaces. And, after a few years of listening to oppresively loud MP3s through crappy earbuds, we forget what music used to sound like.

More on the Loudness war. This article from the Times of London, Why Music Really is Getting Louder, includes this insight from Abbey Road’s senior mastering engineer, Peter Mew. Using a hard limiter during CD mastering causes waves to get squared off when they hit 0db. This causes an unpleasant, unnatural buzzing sound. This sound can make listeners feel ill.

The brain is not geared to accept buzzing. The CDs induce a sense of fatigue in the listeners. It becomes psychologically tiring and almost impossible to listen to. This could be the reason why CD sales are in a slump.

I wholeheartedly agree. As a musical luddite, I tend to prefer naturalistic sounds. I find the sound of most contemporary CDs, even by performers I like, fatiguing and thoroughly unmusical. As a result, I’ve virtually stopped buying CDs.

Read the full article at TimesOnline.co.uk:

Why Music Really is Getting Louder