Watch out! CD Baby has partnered up with Landr bringing instant mastering to the masses and this is bad news

For those of you who don't follow my blog, I already wrote an article about Landr and why it's a potentially dangerous addition to the audio industry. Well things got worse. Late last night I got an email from CD Baby telling me how they've partnered up with Landr to make mastering easier and more accessible/affordable than ever.

This means that anybody who's ever used CD Baby or signed up for their mailing list now know about this service. I've personally lost a lot of respect now for CD Baby. As if 16 bit audio upload requirements wasn't enough (read here), it seems as though the company is almost asking for albums to become a thing of the past by embracing unnecessarily bad sound to be the standard. However, maybe this whole post is moot. Albums are already a thing of the past - therefore making CD Baby mostly irrelevant at this point. Maybe all of this angst is over nothing. Who knows?

Use Your Limitations to be Creative!

I was giving some young students a lesson on music production (more specifically using Logic Pro), and given the studio space's limitations, I had to show them how they can record things with only one microphone. At first upset about the lack of equipment, I thought about how I first started out. All I had was a Zoom H4n portable mic and a student version of Logic and I was able to be creative and craft my own songs, which is what it's all about.

Of course over time I've slowly accumulated gear and it gives me more options - which is good - but it doesn't take away from what I did with less gear. Now that I own a dozen microphones I could be upset that I don't have a 64 channel mixing console or any vintage Neumanns, but I don't worry about it, I use what I have to create the best product I can. Heck, Sufjan Stevens supposedly recorded his (arguably) best albums Michigan and Illinois with a Shure SM 57 and a couple of AKG C1000s (dirt cheap workhorses). They don't sound like the Steely Dan records, but they also doesn't have to because it's Sufjan and it's a different sort of magic. Not better or worse, just different. That's Art!

They say that it's not about what you have, it's how you use it - and this is especially true in the arts. With today's technology, you can do so much with so little. So use what you have to make great stuff. No complaining, just create!

LANDR, is Automated Mastering the future of Audio?

If you are reading this, you have no doubt heard of the a new automated mastering service called LANDR, which claims to master your audio in mere seconds by computers for hardly any money. If you haven't yet, check out Mastering Engineer Ian Shepherd's deep look into the service and what it does to your audio.

The point I've taken from all of this is that no cookie-cutter formula works for all music. Although it's cool that technology allows for such things, and the results are Ok (I'd say the lower intensity version is passable), I think it's important to be wary and not forget the human element in art. No art should ever be treated exactly the same.

Why are my ears tired?

I was driving to a wedding the other day (a gig, not a friend's, or my own for that matter, which was recently ;)) and my friend (the drummer) decided to put on a new artist who has been getting a lot of hype. We plugged my phone into my car's stereo and loaded up the tracks on Google Play Music and we proceeded to listen. The musicianship was incredible and the sound was huge but somehow we both felt emotionally unmoved by the music. Also another thing happened, our ears hurt.

We live in an age of over-production. Everything sounds big because we have the tools to do so. It seems to me that when mixing in the past people tried to find a balance, whereas today it's all about having everything stand out loud and the amount of compression (aka dynamics processing or limiting) that goes in to doing this can be just downright painful to listen to.

Let me take a quick pause to explain to the layman reader what compression is. In order to control the relative volume of an instrument or a group of instruments, one can use signal processing to contain the output of the signal and lower the decibel level by a certain ratio once the incoming signal passes the threshold. Used properly, compression can help contain audio and even "glue" the music together and can also create a very cool sounding effect. This tool can also be used to make music appear louder to a listener by chopping off the transient peaks and basically squishing the audio. When used too much, we get what is called "hyper-compression" by the industry pros. This method, to many people's great distress, is used all too often these days and you get instances like the story I just relayed to you.

All this makes me think that nobody is going to be listening to the music coming out today in years to come because I find it physically difficult to listen to it now. Let's compare this current music with the open sounding music of 70s (for example). After listening to several tracks off of this artist's record, we put on some old-school Elton John (again using Google Play music streaming), and the sound felt like a warm bed you could sink into. Everything sounded open and round and full. Yes, we had to crank the volume knob a bit more, but who cares? Our ears were happy and so were we.

I think that digital audio can sound great, but I also think that we producers push the limits of what you can do with it too far. Don't get me wrong, I love what compression can do to bring out a vocal or make a snare drum crack, but at a certain point, slamming the tracks too hard makes it very difficult to listen to something for more than a snippet at a time. Who knows, maybe that's why people don't listen to records anymore and we've slipped back to the age of the single? The point is that my ears are tired and I'm tired of them being tired. How about you?

24 Bit and the age of Awesome

When I hear the way music sounds coming out of smartphones, I can't help but ask myself how can it be that in a world with technology has come so far is it possible for developers to allow for such poor results in the audio world?  I was talking to a well known music publishing lawyer the other day and we started talking about some of the issues in the business industry. One thing that I brought up is that I really feel that even Mp3s that are sourced out of 24 bit files sound significantly better to my ears than even WAV files at 16 bit. In Bob Katz's book "Mastering Audio" he briefly mentions the fact that if someone has to convert files to Mp3, she's much better off doing so from 24 bit audio source than 16 bit. The obvious reasoning here is lack of floor noise, which is pretty audible to my ears in 16 bit files even after dithering.

In my mind, there's really no excuse to cut corners anymore, especially considering how affordable hard-drive space is these days. With Neil Young's new Hi-Fi digital music system PONO out and about, let's hope that people start making use of the technology we have for music to sound great. This will improve the value of music in the long run and maybe keep the doors of the industry open.