in every dream home a friends band

we are officially back for RPM 2012!  we’re going to try some new tricks this year.  we’re going to record everything live.  no overdubs just tons and tons of takes until we get it ready.  check out what we’ve been up to so far ….

http://sgtwesman.net/audio/rpm2012

i found this sheet of paper recently – it’s got the lyrics to grey cat strut on one side and electro-war ballad in plain d on the other

OK – now that sticky whiskers is complete, I can comment on its loudness – first, let me take a moment to talk about my approach to this year’s mix

as many of you know, this is the first mono mix i’ve done for rpm challenge – it seems like a simple thing, but it did force me to get out of my comfort zone and it certainly presented new problems in terms of balancing instruments

since many of the tracks were partially mixed as we went along, I was mostly concerned with loudness – I reigned in all the tracks so that they never went past 0.0 on the master buss – this was really hard because some of them were at +6.0 (the highest that logic will go) – on a side note, it’s still not clear to me why mixing to 0.0 is desirable since the mixes typically sound fine to me even when they go over but i digress

pulling everything down caused me to re-evaluate a lot of things – in the end, i think that the results are favorable – drums are clearer and things seems pretty well balanced – during the mix, i ran the tt dynamic range meter plugin (from pleasurizemusic) – i noticed some discrepancies between logic’s meters and the ones in this plugin – in a few cases, the plugin would report that my peak level was “over” (meaning 0.0 or higher) while logic was a -0.2 or so but aside from that, it worked quite well

i didn’t alter my approach to using compression very much in light of all this loudness talk – the reason is that i took all the compression off of vultures and it still had a dynamic range of about 8dB so i realized that i most likely was not over compressing things in my mixes

after the final mixes were done, i ran the wav files through the tt dynamic range offline meter (available from the pleasurizemusic link above) – this differs from the realtime plugin in that it is a stand-alone (windows) application and gives a single number for the overall dynamic range unlike the plugin which is an AU plugin that shows how the dynamic range changes throughout the song

there was a three-way tie for least dynamic range between vultures, polaroid and red planet blues which all had a dynamic range of 10dB – the truth on brink hill, going nowhere and in the kitchen all had a dynamic range of 11dB – you love me too ranked in at 12dB and, as expected, the award for highest dynamic range on the album goes to cambridge, with 13dB

the average of those numbers puts the album at DR11 which is not too shabby.  i re-computed the tracks from cat sounds and tabby road using this meter for the sake of consistency – cat sounds, despite its quiet volume, is the least dynamic of the three records with a rating of DR10 while tabby road clocked in at DR14!

while we’re handing out awards, babe, you’re mine and hello, it’s me again are tied for most dynamic with ratings of DR18 – there’s also a tie for least dynamic between there are no others and aftermath (reprise) both of which have a DR9

so, now with all these interesting statistics, go back and listen to all the records and see if your ears confirm any of these findings!

i’ve been reading a lot today about a subject that interests me quite a bit:  loudness.  i’ve found a few great articles online from a variety of sources that talk about the loudness war.  for those unfamiliar with that term, the loudness war describes a modern trend in which producers and record company folk push for recordings to be louder.  i won’t go into details about why someone would do this – there are plenty of great articles out there with more information than i care to provide.

i’m here to talk about the SWLSFB albums in the context of loudness.  this article presents technical analysis of loudness in music via real-world examples.  it also ranks artists based on the average dynamic range found in their music.  for those un-interested in reading it, something called venetian snares has the most loudness (-1.25 dB) while my amigo brian eno has the least (-17.52 dB).  the author here also shows the tools used to compute these statistics and i have used them to perform similar analysis on cat sounds and tabby road.  i also intend to perform analysis on the in-progress mixes for sticky whiskers which, i hope, will help make this the best sounding record we’ve ever done

but first, let’s see how the other albums measure up….

Cat Sounds

as you can see, these songs are all pretty quiet with only two tracks louder than eno’s average!  now, this doesn’t indicate the quality of the mix, but i like to believe that each record gets better so let’s see how tabby road stacks up ….

Tabby Road

as you can see, this record is in a similar boat – we’ve got three tracks now that are louder than eno, though they are louder than the two loudest from cat sounds

so, what have we learned from this?  well, probably nothing your ears have already told you:  these records are pretty quiet.  perhaps i should consider myself fortunate that i’m not part of the loudness problem.  however, we need to inspect the dynamic range of the songs as well to get the full picture.  expect an update to that effect soon!