Music Used To Sound Good, Then It Took An Arrow Through The Knee - Page 2

Check out mapleshaderecords for some old school recording style. I can vouch for them. Good tunes.

You realize that Beck's music for the most part is composed with instruments that have no "true" or "natural" sound to them right? The truest sound of an electric guitar is the sound of an acoustic guitar, which is obviously not what the artist intended. The truest sound of a keyboard is a piano or harpsichord, again not what the artist intended. When you are dealing with music such as Beck's, there is no "most honest", "truest", or "most natural" sound.

Take an electric guitar for example. The sound it makes is affected by the guitar itself and its current settings, the amp, whatever effects pedals are being used, the settings on the amp, etc. It's not like an acoustic guitar where you can really say there is a "true" sound (that which comes from the actual instrument before it goes through anything else). With an electric guitar the entire thing is a made up sound with no truer or more honest counterpart. So, how does it matter if there was heavy equalization and compression used on the guitar afterwards? How does that make it a less honest or less true sound? Would it somehow be more true if instead of doing it afterwards, they programmed a custom effect pedal to create that sound and then re-recorded the guitar track so that what came out of the speakers is what was actually recorded?

Enjoy your Beck and forget about how much of the sound may be the result of meticulous mixing tweaks.

Maybe he was referring to Sea Change :P

Most recordings are made with the intention of being played back through speakers, so they won't sound so great even through the best headphones. There are some binaural recordings made using a dummy head with microphones in the ears. These will sound great through headphones. Why the difference? First of all when listening with speakers, each ear hears both speakers, but the further speaker from the ear has a slight delay in when you hear that sound, and its volume will be decreased slightly due to the extra distance. There are some headphone amps that will mix some of one channel into the other channel, and you can control this effect(crossfeed). It still isn't the same as recordings made using a dummy head. Why can't recording be made both ways, with the consumer getting both versions, the traditional version for playing through speakers, and the binaural version for playing through headphones?

Seems like most recordings today are mixed with some crossfeed already, actually. Very rarely do I hear a recording with complete channel separation.

Its not really crossfeed, its just that hard pans aren't as common in today's loudness-warred mixing style for whatever reason.  The better the mix the more I need crossfeed to keep the asymmetry from giving me a headache.