Rock and pop producers have always used compression to balance the sounds of different instruments and to make music sound more exciting, and radio stations apply compression for technical reasons. In the days of vinyl rec- ords, there was a physical limit to how high the bass levels could go before the needle skipped a groove. CDs can handle higher levels of loudness, although they, too, have a limit that engineers call "digital zero dB," above which sounds begin to distort. Pop albums rarely got close to the zero-dB mark until the mid-1990s, when digital compressors and limiters, which cut off the peaks of sound waves, made it easier to manipulate loudness levels. Intensely compressed albums like Oasis' 1995 (What's the Story) Morning Glory? set a new bar for loudness; the songs were well-suited for bars, cars and other noisy environments. "In the Seventies and Eighties, you were expected to pay attention," says Matt Serletic, the former chief executive of Virgin Records USA, who also produced albums by Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul. "Modern music should be able to get your attention." Adds Rob Cavallo, who produced Green Day's American Idiot and My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, "It's a style that started post-grunge, to get that intensity. The idea was to slam someone's face against the wall. You can set your CD to stun."
It's not just new music that's too loud. Many remastered recordings suffer the same problem as engineers apply compression to bring them into line with modern tastes. The new Led Zeppelin collection, Mothership, is louder than the band's original albums, and Bendeth, who mixed Elvis Presley's 30 #1 Hits, says that the album was mastered too loud for his taste. "A lot of audiophiles hate that record," he says, "but people can play it in the car and it's competitive with the new Foo Fighters record."
Just as cds supplanted vinyl and cassettes, MP3 and other digital-music formats are quickly replacing CDs as the most popular way to listen to music. That means more conven- ience but worse sound. To create an MP3, a computer samples the music on a CD and compresses it into a smaller file by excluding the musical information that the human ear is less likely to notice. Much of the information left out is at the very high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat. Cavallo says that MP3s don't reproduce reverb well, and the lack of high-end detail makes them sound brittle. Without enough low end, he says, "you don't get the punch anymore. It decreases the punch of the kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitarist plays a power chord."
But not all digital-music files are created equal. Levitin says that most people find MP3s ripped at a rate above 224 kbps virtually indistinguishable from CDs. (iTunes sells music as either 128 or 256 kbps AAC files — AAC is slightly superior to MP3 at an equivalent bit rate. Amazon sells MP3s at 256 kbps.) Still, "it's like going to the Louvre and instead of the Mona Lisa there's a 10-megapixel image of it," he says. "I always want to listen to music the way the artists wanted me to hear it. I wouldn't look at a Kandinsky painting with sunglasses on.

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. "You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3," says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana's Never- mind. "Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things." Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.
As technological shifts have changed the way sounds are recorded, they have encouraged an artificial perfection in music itself. Analog tape has been replaced in most studios by Pro Tools, making edits that once required splicing tape together easily done with the click of a mouse. Programs like Auto-Tune can make weak singers sound pitch-perfect, and Beat Detective does the same thing for wobbly drummers.
"You can make anyone sound professional," says Mitchell Froom, a producer who's worked with Elvis Costello and Los Lobos, among others. "But the problem is that you have something that's professional, but it's not distinctive. I was talking to a session drummer, and I said, 'When's the last time you could tell who the drummer is?' You can tell Keith Moon or John Bonham, but now they all sound the same."
So is music doomed to keep sounding worse? Awareness of the problem is growing. The South by Southwest music festival recently featured a panel titled "Why Does Today's Music Sound Like Shit?" In August, a group of producers and engineers founded an organization called Turn Me Up!, which proposes to put stickers on CDs that meet high sonic standards.
But even most CD listeners have lost interest in high-end stereos as surround-sound home theater systems have become more popular, and superior-quality disc formats like DVD-Audio and SACD flopped. Bendeth and other producers worry that young listeners have grown so used to dynamically compressed music and the thin sound of MP3s that the battle has already been lost. "CDs sound better, but no one's buying them," he says. "The age of the audiophile is over."

Sounding Off on the Sound Wars: Top Producers and Artists Speak Out

Loudness War
Since the mid-1990s, engineers have used dynamic compression to make CDs louder and louder. These waveforms show how loud contemporary recordings have become:

Nirvana
"Smells Like Teen Spirit"
Back in 1991, even the loudest rock wasn't always loud: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has plenty of fluctuations in its volume — so when Kurt Cobain screams, you feel it.

They Found Me, They Named Me - Ship As State (EP)
Record Label: Verse In Transit Records
Release Date: May 2008


Who?

Hailing from Batavia, IL, the experimental indie-rock quartet They Found Me, They Named Me have taken a versatile influential pallet to bring one of the year's most enduring EPs, Ship As State, to life. Dominated by Chris Geick's passionately-strained vocals and Andy Schroeder's unrelenting percussive fortitude, guitars take second-billing to flowing bass rhythms and electric piano melodies. They Found Me, They Named Me has not only created a lavish soundboard for themselves, but has crafted a five-track EP that leaves you hungry for more.


How is it?

Twelve minutes has never seemed quite as epic as it does on Ship As State, where no track goes over the three-minute mark, yet demonstrates an ample amount of versatility, weaving in and out of musical territories, remaining unpredictable and lush all at the same time. Geick sounds like he is singing into a Playskool recorder most of the time, emphasizing his incredibly fanatical vocals (“Chucole”) over the peppy Rhodes piano provided by Matt Lemke, who pushes his guitar-playing to the background for a majority of the time. “See It” follows a bouncy bass line, courtesy of Brandon Souba, and Schroeder presents a cascade of percussive elegance all under two-and-a-half minutes, as Geick viciously remarks, “You never see it the way I see it / To understand.” “Stroke Radio,” a vocally-charged number with an organ refrain that sounds like the distant cousin of Derrick & The Dominoes' classic “Layla,” is the record's longest cut, reaching barely under the three-minute mark. The perplexing thing is, these songs don't feel at all rushed - they are carefully punctuated to create depth and bloom from one another.

Ship As State is short of perfection, though, as Geick's domineering vocals sound almost too much like Graham Fink's (The Outline) as the record comes to a close, and when he gently hushes into the microphone, it's eerily similar to early Dustin Kensrue (Thrice). Nonetheless, it's forgivable - however, Geick's strikingly similar vocal pattern is what prevents the record from soaring as high as it should. While a plethora of bands relay this experimental sound, They Found Me, They Named Me is skillful and intelligent, providing lush orchestrations to distract listeners from the familiarity (for those who listen to The Outline, at least) of Geick's vocals.

All in all, the band masters the art of the perfect strategy for an EP: leaving your audience just unsatisfied enough to the point that they eagerly anticipate more.

Recommended if You LikeThe Outline, Cave In and At The Drive-In
Tracklisting1. Paintchips
2. See It
3. Stroke Radio
4. Interlude
5. Chucole
Additional InformationBand:
Chris Geick: vocals
Andy Schroeder: drums
Matt Lemke: guitar/electric piano
Brandon Souba: bass

Official MySpace; Official Facebook

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A Crisis Of Craft
By Steven Van Zandt
 

It is an interesting time in our business is it not?
 
Now you wish you listened to your parents and went to college, huh?
 
We are experiencing the biggest changes in forty years as the main revenue producing medium shifts from the album to...we don't know what? Keep in mind that up until the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion landed in 1964 the vinyl single ruled what was called the Business. It wasn't exactly a business to tell you the truth. It was more like the Wild West with a bunch of freaks, misfits, outcasts, outlaws, entrepreneurs, renegades, wiseguys, and hooligans running around making it all up as they went along. Finally in 1967 the Beatles made an album called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – ask your Grandfather if you can borrow his copy – and with that record the album became undeniably King. And the difference between 79 cents for a single and $4.98 for an album created a music business.
 
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we've now come full circle back to singles and if you were wondering what 1962 was like, well you're looking at it.
 
And, as if that wasn't enough to deal with, just to make it interesting, let's throw in a little worldwide economic holocaust shall we? You thought you were having problems a year ago?
 
Well the truth is, it might take a year or two, but those two things will eventually sort themselves out. There will be some new revenue model, be it the 360 or subscription or whatever, and frankly there's been enough boring discussions about the mechanics of our business already. Enough to last a lifetime.
 
And as far as the economy…Obama's going to fix the economy so stop worrying about that!
 
No it's a third topic I want to look at. All we ever talk about is the delivery system of the product, the mechanics, the technology, the infrastructure; I want to spend just a minute on a topic that never ever gets discussed in the music business – the music.
 
The reason nobody wants to talk about it is because it mostly sucks! It blows! It is sucking major moose cock! Who are we kidding here? Nobody's buying records? Because they suck!
 
And I know why.
 
Nobody wants to deal with this but we have to.
 
Yes we are experiencing big changes in the business but much more importantly over these last thirty years or so we have been witness to a crisis of craft.
 
I started to notice the crisis around the time MTV appeared. Not that it's their fault, one must assume video was as inevitable as the combustion engine, food preservatives, the digital format, and all the other invented horrors of Commerce disguised as Progress.
 
You can fight it but you're better off adjusting and dealing with it. Save your energy because you're going to need it. And MTV may save us yet. When they put our TV show on!
 
Rock and Roll is the working class art form.
 
Real Rock and Roll, traditional Rock and Roll, the music you hear every week in the Underground Garage and every day on Sirius 25 & XM 59. Equal opportunity regardless of race, education, or money. Since the working class don't think too much about what is art and what isn't, mostly because they're too busy working, they spend their time on the craft. The practical, useful stuff.
 
So let's go back to basics.
 
What is our craft?
 
Rock and Roll had always been a two part craft, performance and record making, which turned into a three part craft for bands when songwriting was added after the Beatles changed the world.
 
But that self-contained archetype may have been a temporary blip in the big picture. Recent history is starting to suggest they may turn out to be the Exception rather than the New Rule. It was, after all our Renaissance. That approximate 20 year era, 1951 to 1971, will be studied for hundreds of years to come and still directly informs everything today that is Popular Music.
 
So as to our craft – performance, record making, songwriting-what happened exactly?
 
The crisis in performance is I believe based on one simple fact. When it started, Rock and Roll was dance music. One day we stopped dancing to it and started listening to it and it's been downhill ever since.
 
We had a purpose. We had a specific goal, an intention, a mandate. We made you dance or we did not work – we did not get paid – we were fired – we were homeless. That requires a different energy. It is a working class energy. Not an artistic intellectual waiting around for inspiration energy. It's a get up, go to work, and kill-energy. Rip it up or die trying.
 
The advent of the video was just the final nail in the performance coffin, a coffin that had already been constructed by years of excessive immersion in ganja, hashish, and all forms of water cooled bong therapy. You didn't have to make people dance anymore. They were too stoned to dance! You didn't even have to play your instrument anymore – all you had to do was act!
 
Act like a Rock Star and bada bing you were a Rock Star.
 
And now there's a new trend that's even more dangerous. And this affects songwriting as well as performance. Bands are starting to skip the bar band stage of their development. The club stage. Where, ideally you're still a dance band, but equally important, you get the opportunity to play other people's songs. Your favorite songs. All of a sudden I'm hearing it's not cool to play other people's songs. That's for the less gifted. The losers. The way we thought of the top 40 bar bands growing up has been extended to include any songs that didn’t come from your own personal genius.
 
This is a major problem.
 
Performance-wise the energy you discover, manufacture, and harness as a dance band stays with you for the rest of your life. You never lose it.
 
And as far as songwriting, the analysis you must do while learning to play classic songs is how you learn to write. This melody, with that chord change, produces this effect. It's how you learn to arrange. The verses go here, the bridge there. It's how you learn the specific job of each instrument.
 
You learn greatness from greatness.
 
Nobody is born a great performer. Nobody is born a great songwriter.
 
The Beatles were a club and bar band for five years. And then continued playing covers for five albums. Let me say that again. The Beatles were a club and bar band for five years. And then continued playing covers for five albums! Then the Rolling Stones were a bar band for three years and played covers for their first five albums. Do you think you're better than them?
 
The other nefarious infection regarding modern songwriting is the auteur theory which became dominant as Rock and Roll became the art form of Rock beginning in 1965. That was the year the Beatles, Stones, Byrds, and Bob Dylan influenced each other right into a new art form. Suddenly Rock was personal, it was important, and an industry of journalists sprang up to explain it us. And that was, and is great, except an inaccurate balance was created between the post-art form Rock and pre-art form Rock and Roll. Keeping in mind the art form part of Rock was only the last quarter of the Renaissance. It was born in the Folk-Rock era of 1965, continued through Psychedelic, Country-Rock, Hard-Rock, and into the Singer/Songwriter era of the early '70's.
 
An inaccurate emphasis on the importance of the self-contained artist has led to the ocean of mediocrity we're all drowning in today. Journalists work in words. They love words. They are words. So it is perfectly natural for them to labor under the misconception that lyrics are the most important part of a song.
 
And lets keep in mind, there are of course major journalist exceptions, the two best Rock and Roll books after all – Nick Tosches’ Hellfire – the Jerry Lee Lewis story, and Dave Marsh’s Louie Louie both celebrate pre-art form Rock.
 
Don't get me wrong, great lyrics make a song better, I made five political albums and spent months on the lyrics. Just don't start thinking that is why people are coming to see your band because that is not enough reason.
 
And don’t start thinking your grammar school poetry makes you a great songwriter. Bob Dylan is the greatest lyric writer that will ever live, if he wasn't a great singer and able to write (or in the early days steal) great melodies, he'd still be in Greenwich Village at the Cafe Wha. The problem with this imbalance is singers that don't write or don't write about the correct subjects, aren't taken as seriously. Believe me it's true.
 
In spite of Elvis and Sinatra!
 
The 15 years of pre-art form lyrics may not seem as important or meaningful in a social or political way, but as a 13 year old hearing super sexy Judy Craig and the Chiffons singing Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry’s “I Have a Boyfriend” you couldn’t have told me that wasn’t important! More than anything else in the world I wanted to be that boyfriend! And still do! That was my “Blowin in the Wind,” my “Day In The Life,” my “Sympathy For The Devil,” absolutely.  
 
If you want to write then you’ve got to learn how to do it. This is why the great song publishers like Lance Freed are always encouraging the young writers to co-write with the older ones.
 
Just as it’s important to perform with a purpose, it is equally important to write with a purpose. Whether that purpose is to express your most personal anguish or to simply have a hit record. If you’re going to do it, do it right.
 
The third part of our craft is record making and that discipline has been almost completely abandoned.
 
A record is four things – Composition, Arrangement, Performance, and Sound. Four different crafts overseen by a Producer that understands, to some extent all four elements plus the Big Picture of the Industry, plus the psychological stuff of being the artist’s psychiatrist, plus the liaison with the business people, etc. etc.
     
Where are the Producers? Where are the Arrangers? The point being once upon a time it took an army of very talented people to make great records. Writers, singers, musicians, producers, arrangers, engineers and now you have to do it yourself? No wonder everything sucks!
 
Well when the major record companies abandon development yes, DIY is born. Do it yourself. And the auteur theory works well with DIY anyway so why not? Ok there's one reason why not. Everybody isn't a star. Isn't a songwriter. Isn't a singer. Isn't a performer. Isn't a record producer. But who's there to tell them? To help? To suggest a different direction? To teach?
 
To impose discipline? To be honest?
 
Even the Majors are starting to adjust and I hope they succeed because they’re almost useless to us as banks in this new paradigm shift. It was very encouraging and impressive that Sony stuck with MGMC for 18  months before it broke. Maybe they looked back and learned from Steve Popovich who stuck with Meatloaf for over a year when no one was interested.
 
The Majors have largely passed the creative stuff off to the production companies. There's nobody home artistically. They can still find a record and occasionally break one. But there ain't gonna be a second one. Because nobody knows how they made the first one! There's no development. There's no long term thinking.
 
So it's up to the Indies isn't it? But whether it’s the Indies or the Majors, whoever it is better establish a new work ethic, better find some new patience, get back to the basics, and better be qualified to go the distance.
 
The standards have been set by Sam Phillips, Leonard Chess, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, by Berry Gordy. They all had one thing in common – the instinct for that unbeatable combination of art and commerce. You want to be in the record business? These are the standards we must live up to.
 
We must reintroduce a new dedication to the Craft.
 
And worry about the new technology, and the Art, later.
 
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