Beginning with the sinking feeling balancing out the gee-whizzery that came with my first iPod, and culminating with Nick Southall’s excellent Stylus piece from 2006, I’ve always looked down on compression. Whenever I make mix CDs, I try to use uncompressed files whenever I have them, and I make note of the fact on the mix artwork itself. Same when I copy whole albums for people: I re-rip the CD in an uncompressed form, then re-burn it and delete the files. By the same token, when people give me discs, I’m always wary of the source. Call it snobbery if you will, but in some listening configurations, it’s glaringly obvious when you’ve got a rip of a burn of a compressed rip (etc.).
Now when I record music, I take this suspicion with me. I even made an arch comment in the notes to my last CD, something about how the files have not been compressed, so “I leave that to you.” (Yep, like my version of Queen’s “no keyboards were used” disclaimers from the 70′s. What a nerd!) Still, I’ve recently been reminded that I’m actually conflating two different things here. There’s the compression of audio files, and all the gains HD space / loss in sound quality that comes with it. There’s a consumer level of this kind of compression, like when you rip a CD to ACC or MP3 format. There’s also the, erm, “producer” end of this, where, say, Metallica or Oasis compress holy hell out of their albums at mastering time in order for the end product to bore into your eardrums–oops, I mean grab your attention–upon first listen. It’s basically the same principle that makes television ads sound louder. They are in fact louder because they’re compressed.
Anyway, the articles linked above and below say way more than I could on that subject. Getting back to the conflation of compressions… Maybe a better way to put this would be to say that I have a blanket fear of compression that’s proven inappropriate and impractical in a recording scenario. I’m talking here about applying compression to individual tracks, like I did with Scott while he was here, and like I’ll probably do on my own projects going forward. In old bands, I’ve heard compression applied successfully before, and I was trying to do this to some of the wilder, dipping-and-cresting instruments Scott brought to the table (hello, accordion!). Only Garageband, in its consumer-level-ness, only has so many compression settings, and during my first mix, I couldn’t find any that sounded natural. “Natural” meaning without losing too much nuance.
(Parenthetical aside: All of this sound-talk is as squishy and subjective as wine-tasting, in my opinion. “Punchy,” “warm” and “wet” are just like “peppery,” “buttery” and “notes of peach,” each set of phrases having equal potential to describe as to elude…or infuriate. In fact, due to the high volume of wine I was drinking when my old band was mixing The Problem with Fun, I still sometimes think of tannin-rich reds as having “a lot of high end.” But anyway…)
When I went for a second pass at mixing Scott’s stuff, I found a compression setting (“basic vocal,” I think it was called) that, to my ears at least, did exactly what it was supposed to do. It took some of the jump-outy-ness (!!!) of Scott’s more dynamic vocal takes and smoothed them out without flattening them like a pancake. Ditto that pesky accordion and those unfortunate cases where we had to record the voice plus one instrument in a single go. These tracks, placed alongside closer-miked, UNcompressed ones (electric guitar, keyboards), maintained their character without getting lost, or riding obnoxiously over the top. A happy discovery.
Of course, when I listen back on my iPod, such distinctions aren’t exactly noticeable. So is it a fool’s game? Meh. All I know is that it’s fun, and on the off chance anyone wanted to blast the stuff through proper speakers, or some Bose headphones, I’d like to think it helps with the immersion. Now if someone could get that message to the Killers…that’d be great.
Meanwhile, here’s some further reading on the “loudness wars,” if you’re so inclined. Includes fascinating graphs that display just how compressed music has become in the last 20-odd years:
