Depending on your ear, modern metal isn't very "heavy"

[Neurosis]

12 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

In terms of pure sound quality there hasn't been anything recent that was able to surpass Helloween's "Keeper of the seven keys" albums

 

Nice try but no matter how good they are, I will never listen to a band called Helloween :P 

[[McD] James]

Helloween is a perfectly awesome name for a band, and even if it wasn't, they're still up there as being one of Germany's all time greatest power metal bands. As long as the music is good, a band's name shouldn't deter anyone from getting into them.

[Megalyth]

4 minutes ago, Ajora said:

Helloween is a perfectly awesome name for a band, and even if it wasn't, they're still up there as being one of Germany's all time greatest power metal bands. As long as the music is good, a band's name shouldn't deter anyone from getting into them.

Seriously. Quite a few great bands have hated their own band name and have wanted to change it. Picking a good band name can be difficult (I've been there), but it doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of the music.

 

"Neurosis" isn't the most clever or original band name either, and far worse bands have had better names. Let's not be so closed-minded.

[kb1]

18 hours ago, Albertoni said:

Can you get more compressed than that? Probably not.

Now give it a quick listen and tell me if that doesn't sounds powerful (I put it so the video starts a few seconds before the song hits that wall)

 

I'll admit the version on Youtube sounds extra tinny compared to my disk, but you can blame Youtube and people uploading mp3s at 128kbps for that.

Honestly, it fatigues my ears. See how it starts with all that "zzzzshzzshhshz" mess? And that perpetuates throughout it. Sure, it's a beefy chugg and all. I wish I could hear the uncompressed master. I think it would knock your socks off! Dead silence, or cymbal decay inbetween each chugg - now that would be powerful.

 

You know how you can be blinded by a camera flash, however it's no problem to walk outside on a sunny day? Or those jump scare videos, where a scary face pops up randomly, accompanied by a scream? Now imagine the face and the scream were constant through the video. Not only would it be awful and annoying, but it would not scare anyone. Same concept here. The silence is as important as the loudness. I wish you could hear the uncompressed version. Trust me, night and day difference. If you have sound editing software, load up a song whose waveform does not look saturated. Listen to it. Then apply tons of compression (and volume, cause the compression will probably reduce amplitude). Be careful not to over amplify and clip, which also sounds awful. Listen to the difference - I think you'll be convinced.

 

14 hours ago, Neurosis said:

Thanks for the responses @Woolie Wool and @kb1 I will consider what you guys said.

 

And not to hijack the thread, but I'm curious. I'm thinking about going to school to become an audio engineer. What exactly would I be up against here? I have experience in production but I want to take it a step further, especially now that I have to consider the loudness wars and over compression. Like what kind of math and science is needed here and how much of a challenge would it be?

Common sense will take you far. Also, music editing software that lets you see the waveform can educate you well. Buying an oscilloscope is even better. Your ears are, by far, the best equipment to learn from. Generating audible waveforms and studying their graph can tell you a lot. Everything I learned was done empirically (by playing around with sound and equipment), so I cannot tell you which specific studies you need. The math is not extremely complpicated for the vast majority of things. Sines/cosines, exponentiation including squares and square roots, and addition and multiplication will cover most all of it.

 

The 5-minute study:

                                          (f)
           + 12 V  ----------------------******----------------------------------------------  <- (speaker all the way out)
     ^                                  *      *        **         **         **
     |                 a         b    **       c*         *   d      *       *  *
     |             ** /           \  *          \      *   * /    *   *          *
 amplitude    0 V  . * . . . . . . ** . . . . . .*. . . . . . . .*. . .*. . * . . * . . . . .  <- (speaker at rest)  <- "zero-crossing"
     |                *           *                   *     *   *       *  *
     |                 *         *                *  *       ***         ** 
     v                  *      **                  **                     
           - 12 V  ------******---------------------------------------------------------------  <- (speaker all the way in)
                    <---   (e)                     Time                                   --->

This crude diagram shows the output of an oscilloscope measuring across a speaker playing an audio sample. This is a monaural sound (MONO). If it was a stereo sound, there'd be 2 graphs, left speaker and right speaker.

 

This sound starts out loud (because the wave is tall) and low-pitch (the wide cycle), and then becomes quieter (less tall), and higher pitch (less width between waves). The vertical axis truly represents the speaker position, as well as the voltage across the speaker at a given time. This voltage alternates between +12 and -12 volts, described as A/C voltage (like your power outlet in your home), vs. D/C (like the output of a battery). When you sing into a microphone, the sound waves push the mic's diaphragm which is connected to a permanent magnet. This magnet moves through a coil of wire,, and this generates an A/C voltage. If you were to record this sound, and play it back, the output speaker would move almost exactly the same way (or in reverse), to reproduce the sound. (Putting an A/C waveform across the coil in a speaker attracts or repels the speaker's permanent magnet, also connected to a diaphragm, which pushes and pulls air, making sound.

 

In the graph, I labeled some features:

a: The wave crosses 0, moving downward (negative).

b: The wave has reversed and crossed 0 again, going positive. This is a half waveform.

c: The wave comes full circle, hitting 0 again. This is a full single wave. Measuring the horizontal distance Tells you the exact frequency, or pitch of that wave.

d. Between c and d is another full wave, a higher frequency than the last wave. It also has less amplitude, making it quieter.

e. Negative clipping. The amplifier has reached it's maximum amplitude, and cannot faithfully reproduce the loudest peaks of the wave. This distorts the sound.

f. Positive clipping, similar to e.

 

Clipping

Clipping comes in many forms:

 

• Pre-amp clipping: Quality guitar/microphone pre-amps usually have a level adjustment. Exceeding their maximum input voltage causes clipping, which can be cool for, say, a guitar or keyboard, but not usually for the singer or drummer.
• Clipping when recording. The medium being recorded on typically dictates the maximum input voltage. For an LP, too much input voltage can cause the cutter to cut into previous or future grooves! For a tape recording, you can actually saturate to the other channel, or the opposite side of the tape (sounds backwards after flipping the tape). Record-time-clipping is never desirable.
• Power-amp clipping: Ever turn a boom box up too loud, past the point that the small amp can faithfully output the sound? Ugh!
• Speaker clipping: You can actually drive the speaker so hard that it either jumps out of the coil, damaging the coil, or it just deforms the coil. A speaker can only move in and out so far.

Compression can alleviate some forms of clipping, but that's not really an ideal application. Guitarists can use compression to provide some extra sustain to decaying strings. Compression cannot properly handle drums, which create immense peaks that decay almost immediately. Applying compression at the end has a detrimental effect on the entire composition. Just say no.

 

 

12 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

Ha ha. Actually, it's the atrocious compression in the original recording that makes the Youtube version sound like garbage. There's absolutely no dynamics left in the recording it's only loud, but as soon as you apply replay gain like any good computer based music player can do it will show its real colors and sound like crap compared to a song that plays at a lower volume with better dynamics.

 

And once you apply lossy compression to something without any headroom left to work with the compression artifacts will amplify the lack of quality even more.

 

In terms of pure sound quality there hasn't been anything recent that was able to surpass Helloween's "Keeper of the seven keys" albums, provided you get the original recordings of those and not some botched remasters. Every time I listen to them it's like hearing a fresh recording of pristine quality - and these albums are 30 and 29 years old, respectively. I cannot say the same about nearly everything from the late 90's or after.

Sad, isn't it?

 

Helloween's "Keeper of the seven keys" is awesome! Other great sounding favorites: Dream Theater (any album), Symphony (any album), and early Yngwie Malmsteen (Alcatrazz, first 3 solo albums). Of course, there are others (I imagine these date me, oh well). But, I'd thoroughly chuck them if they had been recorded with that compression garbage. I wouldn't have even had the chance to get to like them, which would have sucked.

 

7 hours ago, GoatLord said:

@kb1, you mentioned "Digital recordings suffer from aliasing noise at the lowest A-to-D stairstep. Normal incomprehensible noise in the 0-volt to the first positive or negative amplitude value in a digital smaple (sic) becomes amplified to high levels with compression, reproducing truly random, undesirable square wave noise in the output. Yuck." Could you go into a bit more detail? I understand the square wave noise being a result of the signal hitting the ceiling, but I'd like to hear more about this stairstep and 0-volt stuff. This is a great thread. I'm learning some really interesting stuff about audio science.

I can try: The difference between silence, and the quietest non-silent sound in an analog recording is miniscule - on the atomic level. But in a digital recording, the difference is 1 divided by 2 to the power of the bit rate minus 1:

1 / (2 ^ (bit rate-1)), so, for a 16-bit doom sound, the quietest non-silent sound is 1/(2^7), or 1/128th the loudest sound. So if you run this sound through a compression algorithm that quarters the loudest sounds, by definition, you make the quietest sounds 4 times as loud, making them 1/32 the loudest sound.

 

In summary, quadrupling the noise in the analog signal still leaves those quiet sounds very quiet, but in digital, they become very significant.

 

4 hours ago, Marnetstapler said:

This isn't related to the loudness war issue, but I've found that by pushing the lowest frequencies up slightly and the high frequencies up a fair amount, I can get a munch more aggressive and punchy sound out of most music that I listen to.

The ears are most sensitive to mid-range, so boosting the lows and highs can make a song come alive.

 

1 hour ago, GoatLord said:

What I don't get is why so many of these metal musicians aren't bothered by the squashed sound. I think it ruins their performance. For instance, I've always enjoyed Cannibal Corpse, but the for the last 15 or so years (probably longer), their mixes have been increasingly compressed and maxed out, with their newer albums being essentially unlistenable to my ears because it's like this constant scratching sound that never really goes anywhere, even though I know there's a lot of interesting musical information buried underneath.

Yeah, it hurts my ears too, and I've always been a fan of loud music. I get that many musicians don't have much of a say how the final recording is cut. I imagine they're pissed off about it - I'd be.

[RUSH]

You know, there are plenty of metal/rock bands with albums recorded and released in the 70's and 80's that don't sound very loud either. A lot of second rate ones with cheap, thin and tinny sound. Despite their production and original CD releases having full dynamic range.

 

I think it boils down to epic names like Black Sabbath and Slayer (to name only a few examples) having a perfect storm of recording qualities. Good analog studio sound right from the get go... some dynamic range to keep a contrast between loud and quiet. Properly mixed instruments combined with a good producer who didn't make things too flashy or over-produced like every single Def Leppard record.

 

Yeah, it's a tough sound to get right and really nail down. And you can't pinpoint it to any one decision... it's a combination of smart decisions. I think we've definitely lost that magic touch over the years, which is a real shame. But hey, I'm a big metal fan so I think there's still some good music being made today. Even if much of it is over-compressed and not ideally recorded. Still, I can look past those things if the songs are of high quality.

Edited July 1, 2017 by RUSH

[Koko Ricky]

@fraggle, good point about the movie industry. I myself have noticed that, like music, certain production techniques designed to "enhance" the experience end up being overkill. About a decade ago, I was watching Conan O'Brien and the lead actor from "Shoot 'Em Up" was being interviewed. They show a clip from the movie and I decided to count how many cuts there were. It was something like 40, in the span of about one minute, and the resulting scene was so dizzying I had no idea what I was looking at. The prevailing belief is that this overload of information is somehow valuable to the viewer, when in actuality it's only digestible by the ADHD crowd.

 

As far as metal goes...I agree that a lot of emotion seems to be missing. The sterile production is only part of it. There's also the fact that

A) Metal is a self-limiting genre that is confined to a very particular pool of ideas, making it progressively more difficult over time to evolve the style.

B) Modern musicians are less likely to use pedal effects, such as rotary, tremolo, wah-wah, talkbox, etc., leading to an enormous amount of homogeny in the timbre of the guitars.

C) The incessant need for a wall of distortion in many cases means that, before you even run the guitar tracks through compressors, you're already dealing with a brickwalled signal with low dynamic range.

D) Drums—in particular the kick and snare—are usually excessively triggered, causing the instruments to sound as though they're being played on a drum machine. This eliminates the dynamics of the snare, causing rolls and ghost notes to sound artificial.

E) Metal's traditional focus on pushing the extremes via increased tempos, increased distortion, increased volume, increased musical density and down/drop tuning has been taken as far as it can go, and yet the mentality remains, leading to legions of bands that all sound exactly the same because they're all trying to be the most brutal.

F) The aesthetic enjoyment of music is disrupted by high tempos. When too much information is transpiring too quickly, the music loses much of its meaning, something that metal musicians who insist on playing in excess of 300bpm fail to realize.

G) The conventions of traditional songwriting and rock-and-roll structure is routinely ignored in favor of riff motifs that don't necessarily connect with satisfying coherency. Tempo, rhythm, key and melodic ideas frequently shift throughout a single song, creating a mess of chromatic, largely unrelated ideas that often lack cohesion.

[june gloom]

Metal is the anime of music. 

[Mr. Freeze]

3 hours ago, dethtoll said:

Metal is the anime of music. 

Punk is superior tbqh fam

[Koko Ricky]

I think metal works best when it's not purely within its own context. There's a lot of metal/punk/hardcore crossover stuff that's interesting and the early days of metal were neat because the rules hadn't been strictly laid out. Metal can also be incredibly interesting in avant garde environments (Sunn 0))), Mr. Bungle, Darth Vegas, Primus and The Flying Luttenbachers come to mind). But purely on its own, you've gotta be really creative or it'll bore most people, I think.

[RUSH]

Or just listen to what you like and stop caring about what others think.

[[McD] James]

I find a lot of contemporary death metal to be overly produced and pristine sounding. I prefer death metal when it's more straight to the point, and doesn't overly emphasise itself on trying to sound br00tal and techy. Early 90s Swedish death metal best encapsulates what I look for in the subgenre. America also had no shortage of great death metal bands coming out around that time, and while a lot of it was fairly technical sounding, the songwriting and riffs were very memorable.

 

1 hour ago, GoatLord said:

I think metal works best when it's not purely within its own context. There's a lot of metal/punk/hardcore crossover stuff that's interesting and the early days of metal were neat because the rules hadn't been strictly laid out. Metal can also be incredibly interesting in avant garde environments (Sunn 0))), Mr. Bungle, Darth Vegas, Primus and The Flying Luttenbachers come to mind). But purely on its own, you've gotta be really creative or it'll bore most people, I think.

 

That's not really true. There's countless metal bands that try their best to sound like bands that have come before them, and have found no shortage of popularity. Well, popular as far as underground metal is concerned, anyways. Innovation isn't always everything.  

[june gloom]

18 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

Punk is superior tbqh fam

maybe if you like disaffected suburban white kids screaming rote anti-authoritarian slogan bingo while banging spoons on washbuckets

[Koko Ricky]

6 hours ago, dethtoll said:

maybe if you like disaffected suburban white kids screaming rote anti-authoritarian slogan bingo while banging spoons on washbuckets

Eh, you're talking mostly about anarcho-punk and hardcore punk. The umbrella is diverse and includes alternative, indie, emo, screamo, post-punk, shoegaze, pop-punk, noisecore, industrial, art punk, jazz punk, goth rock, death rock, new wave, new romantic, etc. In metal you have lots of subgenres but the techniques and aesthetic are largely similar.

[rehelekretep]

7 hours ago, dethtoll said:

screaming rote anti-authoritarian slogan bingo while banging spoons on washbuckets

my favourite genre!

[RUSH]

Ahh yes, such simple plebeian taste indeed. Remind me to never listen to this silly "anime of music" stuff ever again, lest I upset the presence of far superior intellectual beings. Whose taste in music is so outstanding, it transcends social norms and propels the mind towards immediate self-actualization.

Edited July 3, 2017 by RUSH

[[McD] James]

I'm trying to wrap my head around that comment (which I'm only just reading now), and I just can't. The only comparisons between anime and metal I can make is that they're both niche interests that swerve from the mainstream. 

[Mr. Freeze]

I'd liken it to the fact that both are ridiculously cookie-cutter, enjoyed primarily by teenagers, happily trade bombast for substance, and that their heyday was in the 1980s. 

[[McD] James]

I'm 33, and I'm usually younger than most of the other people attending metal shows. 

 

Anime is a lot more popular today than it was in the 80s, and moderately more popular than it was during the OVA boom of the early 90s. The genre is also generally a lot more varied and interesting today than it was in the 80s and 90s, but that's a whole different issue.

Edited July 3, 2017 by Ajora

[Megalyth]

2 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

I'd liken it to the fact that both are ridiculously cookie-cutter, enjoyed primarily by teenagers, happily trade bombast for substance, and that their heyday was in the 1980s. 

Sounds a lot like punk music.

[june gloom]

It's that too.

[kb1]

On 6/30/2017 at 7:00 PM, Neurosis said:

Nice try but no matter how good they are, I will never listen to a band called Helloween :P 

Hmmm. Your loss - they fuckin rip.

On 6/30/2017 at 9:41 PM, RUSH said:

You know, there are plenty of metal/rock bands with albums recorded and released in the 70's and 80's that don't sound very loud either. A lot of second rate ones with cheap, thin and tinny sound. Despite their production and original CD releases having full dynamic range.

 

I think it boils down to epic names like Black Sabbath and Slayer (to name only a few examples) having a perfect storm of recording qualities. Good analog studio sound right from the get go... some dynamic range to keep a contrast between loud and quiet. Properly mixed instruments combined with a good producer who didn't make things too flashy or over-produced like every single Def Leppard record.

 

Yeah, it's a tough sound to get right and really nail down. And you can't pinpoint it to any one decision... it's a combination of smart decisions. I think we've definitely lost that magic touch over the years, which is a real shame. But hey, I'm a big metal fan so I think there's still some good music being made today. Even if much of it is over-compressed and not ideally recorded. Still, I can look past those things if the songs are of high quality.

But it really isn't that hard to mix a song right: Start out low, and bring each instrument up to about 1/2 maximum recording level. Then slowly adjust each until you can hear each instrument/channel, to taste. Then bring the master volume up, being careful to stop before any sound starts clipping. For that, you need to watch the record level meter. An osiclloscope is better, cause it'll show you the peaks dynamically. Voila! A nice recording. Be very careful of the drums: By their very nature, they can clip fast, but also decay so fast that record meters might not respond fast enough to show you. Watch the scope for best results. It's not that difficult.

 

However, if you are competing for the loudest radio play, you might be compelled to saturate the recording. Just say "no". If you want it to be louder, turn up your volume. If it's already at 10, buy an amp and some speakers. If it's still not loud enough, buy more. If it's still not enough, you might be going deaf...lay your head on the speaker. (really, don't).

 

On 7/3/2017 at 6:21 PM, Mr. Freeze said:

I'd liken it to the fact that both are ridiculously cookie-cutter, enjoyed primarily by teenagers, happily trade bombast for substance, and that their heyday was in the 1980s. 

Kinda depends on your cookie cutter, which cookies you've been cutting, and what cookies you like, doesn't it?

Edited July 13, 2017 by kb1

[DeathevokatioN]

On 7/1/2017 at 1:00 AM, Neurosis said:

Nice try but no matter how good they are, I will never listen to a band called Helloween :P 

This is the best way to miss out on a lot of great records, they deserve to have shrines built in their names for just these two songs alone. I still get chills running down my spine whenever I listen to their self titled song. :)

 

 

 

 

I used to listen to a lot of punk but got seriously burned out on it... if metal has a problem with cookie cutter middle of the road bands sounding similar and not going out of their comfort zone then punk has a rampant epidemic of conformity and bands that fail to distinguish themselves from one another, right down to the lyrics.

 

I AM grateful for punk music though, but only because Swedish death metal bands like Nihilist and God Macabre took d-beat drumming and made better music with it. ;))))))))))

[kb1]

Now that's loud!

[DesecratorJ]

What's bother me the most on modern metal music is not the riffs, some bands can still come with killer-riffs. My problem is with the over polished and clean sound done on the records. I look up at few bands and lots of them sounds all the same. It's quite boring and unappealing to my ears... Even if the riffs are good, this sort of production ruin it all for me.

[june gloom]

It's not the production why they all sound the same.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

On 7/3/2017 at 5:37 PM, RUSH said:

Ahh yes, such simple plebeian taste indeed. Remind me to never listen to this silly "anime of music" stuff ever again, lest I upset the presence of far superior intellectual beings. Whose taste in music is so outstanding, it transcends social norms and propels the mind towards immediate self-actualization.

Reminds me of "classic' music fans calling metal fans brain dead, Metal fans doing the same to pop fans and pop fans doing it to both the other ones haha. Hating other genres for no reason beside "it is inferior" never made sense to me, Especially if it like hating pop because of justin Beaver and miley or metal because of some song with nothing but non stop screaming. 

[kb1]

You've got to admit that the Justin "Beaver" thing is pretty compelling evidence, though...

[june gloom]

I listened to metal almost exclusively throughout my teens and twenties. Towards the end I got incredibly frustrated with how stagnant the genre was and how backwards the fans were, which only fed into the genre's stagnation because the majority of bands are gonna play what their stupid fans want because it brings in the money. Eventually I realized that you could play me 20 different death metal albums from 1995-2010 and I wouldn't be able to tell the ones without Chuck Schuldiner on them apart. (Him dying might have contributed to this problem...)

Eventually I got frustrated enough that I drifted away almost entirely from what I used to listen to, pivoting to post-rock and the like almost overnight. (Post-rock's influence was the best thing to happen to metal and the proof is in how much the average headbanging douchebag tries to pretend it doesn't exist.) After a couple years gone, I tried listening to my old albums again, and I was faced with an ugly question: am I just older, or has this always been a load of juvenile bullshit, creatively stagnant and forever trapped in the six months after Korn's Follow the Leader came out, doomed to an eternity of repeating the same old shit in the name of being tr00 metal and making money hand over fist playing down-tuned chuggery for a bunch of emotionally stunted geeks with wallet chains?

 

It didn't take much soul-searching to realize that the answer was basically both.

[dew]

@dethtoll I kinda understand where you're coming from, but I disagree. I've never felt like shunning the music I liked in my younger years, I merely adjusted to something new and currently catchier without burning the bridges back. Then again, I was never a true metalhead and I only cherry-pick stuff that catches my attention. That way I don't feel like shitting over the entire genre because of overexposure. If anything, I had an intense post-rock episode some (many) years back and let me tell you, the genre is as tired and stale as metal if you invest too much time into it, heh. Give me death over Red Sparrowes, ugh.

 

I do find stereotypical metal fans obnoxious and anyone who claims to love Pantera might as well be saying they rewatch, like, 1995's Dangerous Minds with Michelle Pfeiffer every weekend and cry at the end, as far as I'm concerned. Unironically liking Manowar is like masturbating to Kull the Conqueror in my book. But the genre is actually rich and interesting! You said it yourself that post-rock/math-rock influenced metal, so why not dedicate time to Russian Circles or Giant Squid, or metal's own Mozart, Devin Townsend? I mean, he made fun of wallet chains 20 years sooner than you (albeit in different context)! When the mainstream bores you, it's time to explore the fringes - and I don't mean the guys with the face paint gurgling something about Satan.

 

Basically at this point it's like saying all pop is shit. Is most pop shit? Yes. But say a mean thing about Tori Amos and I'll fight your objectively ignorant ass!

[[McD] James]

57 minutes ago, dew said:

@dethtoll I kinda understand where you're coming from, but I disagree. I've never felt like shunning the music I liked in my younger years, I merely adjusted to something new and currently catchier without burning the bridges back. Then again, I was never a true metalhead and I only cherry-pick stuff that catches my attention. That way I don't feel like shitting over the entire genre because of overexposure. If anything, I had an intense post-rock episode some (many) years back and let me tell you, the genre is as tired and stale as metal if you invest too much time into it, heh. Give me death over Red Sparrowes, ugh.

 

I do find stereotypical metal fans obnoxious and anyone who claims to love Pantera might as well be saying they rewatch, like, 1995's Dangerous Minds with Michelle Pfeiffer every weekend and cry at the end, as far as I'm concerned. Unironically liking Manowar is like masturbating to Kull the Conqueror in my book. But the genre is actually rich and interesting! You said it yourself that post-rock/math-rock influenced metal, so why not dedicate time to Russian Circles or Giant Squid, or metal's own Mozart, Devin Townsend? I mean, he made fun of wallet chains 20 years sooner than you (albeit in different context)! When the mainstream bores you, it's time to explore the fringes - and I don't mean the guys with the face paint gurgling something about Satan.

 

Basically at this point it's like saying all pop is shit. Is most pop shit? Yes. But say a mean thing about Tori Amos and I'll fight your objectively ignorant ass!

 

I don't care for Manowar, and I dislike Pantera, but those are some pretty dumb generalisations to make about literally anyone who listens to them.