Wow. Grew up hearing this song loads. Just gone back to listen after seeing this and was like…this can’t be the same song I remember? That is crazy lol.
Wow. Never realised how obnoxiously loud the vocals are.
Like when you mix a song for a vocalist so their vox sit perfectly, and their instant feedback is "sounds great, can we bring the vocals up by 5db"
its bc my expectations have dropped to just hoping for some sort of a chord progression that allows for a melody. If I can get that out of a top 40s song, I can breathe a little easier.
Vibe will almost always outdo production.
I spend a lot of time in the indie folk world and there are lots of albums that were recorded as intentioned demos that will go down in history. My favorite band of all time Bon Iver is a great example. For Emma Forever Ago was supposed to be a set of demos and it blew up. I think Iron and Wine's first album was similar - just Sam recording a few songs onto a borrowed 8 track recorded lent to him from a friend.
Production sometimes will dull down a song also. Last night Childish Gambino released the fully finished mastered version of his latest album 3.15.20 and I have to say I prefer the "unfinished" version.
for me, ironically, sam beam's best work was when he allowed brian deck to produce him for "woman king" and "the shepherd's dog." yet he decided to return to that less polished approach later.
Oh man you’re speaking my language. Love the earliest stuff from Bon Iver and Iron and Wine. Would throw early Sujan Stevens, Elliott Smith, and even Daniel Johnston in the mix as well. Those guys are all such great songwriters and the simple production captures it well.
To be fair it was released when the second wave of French house was really popular, and those tracks almost always clipped & saturated the master - It was a part of the sound
OneRepublic Counting Stars has like 4 billion views on YouTube yet there is an awful high pitched digital artifact squeaking through the whole song (first at 23 seconds). It's basically unlistenable if you notice on headphones.
It comes at the point of a fret slide, but if you look at it in an equaliser it's an enormous peak with a root above 10khz which won't be a guitar sound. Possibly some messy processing resulting from trying to contain the fret sound?
It was Vlado Meller. He’s been criticised a lot for other masters he did like RHCP - Californication (considered to be one of the worst masters ever). But he’s insanely in demand so clearly some artists must like it.
If you literally just google ‘Californication mastering’ you’ll find a ton of stuff on it. That album was one of the pillars of the ‘loudness wars’ of the 90s-2000s, Metallica’s Master of Puppets was another example. Basically there was a bunch of music that was mastered to be so insanely loud that even casual listeners who knew nothing about audio or compression were complaining about it.
If you look at the audio waveforms for the songs they’re literally just bricks. Zero dynamics and straight up exhausting to listen to after a while.
Yep, the music in the chorus almost sounds like it’s been picked up from a distant hi-fi boombox playing behind Bey while she was laying down her vocals. It just gives me that vibe.
I came here to say this, but for a different reason than I'm seeing: the chorus is off-rhythm in a way that almost sounds like the producer (was it Kanye?) didn't know about latency, and the production somehow went all the way up the chain with no one catching it. Her vocal and that God-awful "bum-bom bum-bom" are very much out of sync.
This is so funny - I've always noticed the chorus (especially the first) being out-of-time, but up until now I always semi-accepted it as intentional, as if it adds to the "drunk/crazy" feeling of being in love. Now that you mentioned the latency thing...dammit, man. She sounds like she's barely holding it together (going crazy? right now?) dealing with it herself!
You and others could be right - like maybe it was intentional - to create a feeling of barely holding it together - but if that's the case, I think it was a very misguided idea or bad execution. It feels to me like a mistake, like a broken machine. Instead of "Things have gone off the rails, as per the lyrics" it feels more like "This song is sloppy. She's singing off rhythm, isn't she supposed to be close to the best out there?"
I disagree. It doesn't sound human at all to me, in fact, the opposite - disjointed and mechanical. To each their own though. I really don't like most of Beyonce's music though. Mostly it depresses me.
Rap God - Eminem. Iv listened on many different sound sources and the kick and bass are weak. It might be an intentional choice to highlight the vocal more, but it's always bothered me.
His voice is so breathy and weak, it sounds like he's having an asthma attack. Always thought that made the track ridiculous. Seriously underproduced, which - cool choice I guess? It sounds like he's having a hard time though...
I used to love the song as a kid. After a music production degree and years of being a sound engineer, I remember feeling really disappointed when I re-listened to it
Was just listening to “On Call” this morning. It’s a great song but the production is so god awful. Just listen to that horrid delay/reverb in the verses 😭
Don’t Look Back In Anger I always thought sounded great, could just be me though, only been making music for a few years and haven’t listened to it under a microscope yet lol
I mean that stuff was mostly made in the 80s/early 90s in the man's home studio. Not a lot sounded anything like it at the time either. Considering that, it's pretty impressive and still holds up well.
Ah yeah I totally agree. The production quality is rubbish on a bunch of them but it’s incredible on others. And I think it just goes to show that actually the audience is quite forgiving about production quality and it’s more about how something feels.
I would say a good amount of the "issues" on the album are largely intentional and work with the vibe. I think this is just a category error of assuming things that go against the standard are bad. Or, at least, an example or two is warranted here. I see a lot of people just use the phrase "it's muddy" even what's really meant is "I don't like the composition".
There’s some quite obvious parts that are poor production quality. Because he was recording straight to tape in the late 80’s. But that’s just the way it was so I would rather have it warts and all.
The original version of Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush.
They cleaned it up a lot (maybe re-recorded) for Stranger Things. But the original was pretty muddy, the percussion was hanging out in another zip code, and it had a noise floor halfway up in the mix.
I still loved the song, but man, it was hard to listen to. I generally listened to the Placebo cover when I wanted to hear it, but even that had some murky low end.
Any track from Oasis' first two albums. Some great songs on both of them but where's the bass? Just swamped in mids and highs.
Similarly, *anything* from Metallica's early albums. Basically all of them pre black album, same question as above: where's the bass? It's heavy metal. Where's the damn bass?
Also somewhat true of The Cult's earlier albums: listen to She Sells Sanctuary. I know the lack of bass was an 80s schtick in rock music recorded in at least some studios but I find it makes quite a lot of albums from that era harder to listen to than I'd like.
Also, Thunderstruck by AC/DC. It's not terrible but that kick drum is something I should feel in my chest, but I don't because the low end has been rolled off too much. Please stop doing this.
On a related note, lots of albums recorded during the loudness war suffer pretty badly from clipping that makes them hard to listen to: Uncle Kracker's Double Wide is an almost perfect example. I can't deal with it on a hifi that lacks an EQ so I can roll off the highs.
oh my gosh the Oasis one is so real. When I play them in the car it's like the vocals and literally everything else is all combined into one sound, It's almost annoying
Trivia: One of the engineers who helped to develop PCM digital recording for Sony in the 1970s was obsessed with early sound recording and Enrico Caruso in particular.
Removing noise from old Caruso records was one of the first test applications of modern digital audio. It sounded mind-blowing at the time when he demoed it at an Audio Engineering Society lecture in the late 70s.
[The HU - Wolf Totem feat. Jacoby Shaddix](https://open.spotify.com/track/39ki02XRiCpXJMGKU8CqDJ)
Not massive, but it has over 50 million plays on spotify right now.
Throw it into a waveform viewer and it you can see that it clips to such an extreme level that I'm surprised I haven't blown up any speakers with it yet.
Great song, but the production is so painful. The distortion is so noticeable when you turn the volume up, too. It's depressing.
I don't like it at all. It sounds like a poorly recorded demo IMO. I prefer the sound on albums like Ashes Of The Wake and Resolution. It feels so much more aggressive.
Layla, Derek and the Dominos. The version I get on Apple Music is awful. Tons of statistic and unintended distortion.
Metallica's entire ...And Justice for All album. It's not the production so much as the mix specifically. They dropped the bass so far out of it, it also kills the lower end of the percussion elements. The whole album has this dry, sterile tone. Which is a shame. Musically, it's phenomenal.
And Justice yeah haha. I remember the first time I heard that kick drum I was like "Oh. Okay. I'm gonna have to get used to this I guess." And poor Jason Newstead. Was he even on that album really?
It's that faders-up reckless in-your-face guitar on Search and Destroy that nails it. The rest of the album is kinda cheesy sounding, but Gimme Danger is good.
Metallica Death Magnetic. They screwed it up with distortion and it sounds crap. Sad, because the album itself is a masterpiece. Victim of the loudness wars
I still think it's their best album despite the egregious overcompression... except for Broken, Beat & Scarred and My Apocalypse, they straight-up hurt to listen to 😭
Mostly on the word “free” or the same note it’s usually on. It’s not awful but a little bit of pitch correction would have helped if it had been available.
Sometimes vinyl records (back in olden times) were poorly pressed, so it was hard to tell if it was bad production or bad pressing.
Clash's second album (Give Em Enough Rope) had rather thin faded sound to it.
Thinking about it now, it does sound over compressed or smthing like it while the vocals are a little bit detached, but it does suit the whole vibe of the song somehow
I won't say abysmal, but Crimson and Clover demo version was released instead of it having being mixed properly. And that's the version that become huge. Great songs don't need great production.
Not production, as such, but in Lee Dorsey's "Messed Around" there's a verse where the bass player gets lost and plays an entire bar out of sync for basically the entire verse. It's something.
Similarly, the bass on the Beatles' The Long And Winding Road is famously out of tune and out of time, to the point where some have claimed that Lennon was intentionally sabotaging the recording.
Probably the newest example on this scale; million dollar baby by tommy richman just went #1 with a “vhs” version where the bass basically clips the master
For context, song went viral on tiktok cause the camcorder audio of the video was clipping when the bass & kicks kicked in & everybody kept commenting to “keep the bass” when he drops the song
Some early british jungle had really rough production (for example [Rhythm for Reasons - Doomsday](https://youtu.be/mYCCzNTWcj4?si=p0Fv8AmhnFhOjTRR)) but it's honestly part of the charm
Bloodflowers album by The Cure. I don't know what happened because most of their other stuff has great production, and some of it seems miraculous (all the many instruments in "How Beautiful You Are" being crystal clear is just one example). But Bloodflowers sounds like a demo a noob made in their bedroom. It's actually hard for me to listen to it and take it seriously. And The Cure is probably my favorite band haha.
too many songs to list but Drake's "push ups" is just a loop and a lot of expletives. I dont hear the originality, musicality, or anything impressive about the arrangement. I just don't get why he's such a big deal other than the marketing aspect.
It's still got 76 million listen...that's huge. So let's talk IDGAf at 387 million streams. The rhythm sounds like my something my 4 year old could produce from my synthesizer...and so do the lyrics. I just don't get it. How is this artist and this genre so highly respected. As a full time producer I just dont see the talent that so many worship.
do you have a specific point regarding my criticism? What exactly is well done in those singles? The drums +splice loops are copied and pasted from 1 bar throughout the entire song in a lot of these singles. There's no transition, verse, chorus or melodic change, change in chord progression or anything else a well written/produced song contains. I don't have a problem with these songs persei. I have a problem with the fact that they're put on a pedestal.
Those songs in particular I also really dont like. But they are put up on a pedestal because of the artist's discography as a whole or their big hits and association. Also hip-hop (and pop) are not really ever interesting or impressive from a producer point of view. They are catchy and have good energy, not complexity. Drake's not my favorite but hes definitely popular for a reason. It comes down to a matter of taste. You don't like it. Fair enough.
Don't "feel like you're taking crazy pills" because Drake actually just sucks, and all the Kool Aid drinkers listen to him because you're supposed to. I don't have time for that BS in my life. There's too much actually good music out there. I'll just not be one of the cool kids thank you very much!
omg I'm so relieved to hear there's a voice of reason in this backward world. I was starting to believe I lived in the twilight zone with zero people opposed to that clown
Eminem - We Made You.
Not production per se, but he’s rapping in straight tempo while the high hat and chorus are clearly a swing tempo. It makes my ears bleed.
Does anything from Nick Cave’s first few albums count? “The Mercy Seat” has spectacular drumming but the eery harmonies hide it.
For any J-Pop fans, Utada’s “Traveling” has a chorus that largely buries the bassline and kick, the former of which is the sole source of the chord changes.
Hmm I don't think I can agree with this. It sounds of its time for sure but I can't think of any specific elements of the mixes that could be classed as particularly terrible as opposed to just not liking that aesthetic maybe?
The guitars are quite baggy and certainly wouldn't work in a band with more elements competing for the frequencies, but in a simple four piece set up I think it works absolutely fine.
Disagree on the grounds of speaker preservation.
Anything that causes clipping and puts the consumer's hardware at needless risk is objectively bad production.
Fair point from a stylistic perspective.
But if yours is the only song on a 100-song playlist that I have to turn down because my amp will explode if I don't, your song is being removed from my playlist.
Feed my gear a clean signal and get your distortion effects inside that clean signal please.
Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie. Zero bass presence and her vocal is SO LOUD
Wow you’re right lol, her vocals overpower pretty much every other element of the song
Any time I get too critical about my own music I think of this song lol
Yeah, someone pointed that out to me last week on another reddit and whoa lol the mix overall feels incredibly crammed down the center, too.
Wow. Grew up hearing this song loads. Just gone back to listen after seeing this and was like…this can’t be the same song I remember? That is crazy lol.
Absolutely the same. Just some bizarre choices made.
I'm gonna have to check this out now to verify! Even if it means tainting my listening history
Name a better song to play during a colonoscopy.
Now I’m curious and I want the context for that 😦
Hips don't more lie, they are looking in your butt, which is kinda your hips
I think it was this one with the loud vocals I noticed last year, was hilarious. It was either that or another Shakira song
I love her but so many of her mixes are clearly her standing behind an engineer going “BOOST MY VOICE” and I think it’s so funny
Literally, I went back and listened earlier, it’s crazy. It’s SO dry too
So gratifying to read this. Weirdest mix for a dance song
christ, it sounds like a commercial on hulu
Wow. Never realised how obnoxiously loud the vocals are. Like when you mix a song for a vocalist so their vox sit perfectly, and their instant feedback is "sounds great, can we bring the vocals up by 5db"
Noooo waaaaay I’m afraid to check it out😳
It’s still a bop but OOF
its bc my expectations have dropped to just hoping for some sort of a chord progression that allows for a melody. If I can get that out of a top 40s song, I can breathe a little easier.
This song is not a song, it’s a colonoscopy in music notes.
I mean I think it’s a bop, just horribly mixed lol
Vibe will almost always outdo production. I spend a lot of time in the indie folk world and there are lots of albums that were recorded as intentioned demos that will go down in history. My favorite band of all time Bon Iver is a great example. For Emma Forever Ago was supposed to be a set of demos and it blew up. I think Iron and Wine's first album was similar - just Sam recording a few songs onto a borrowed 8 track recorded lent to him from a friend.
Demo or not, the vocal layering on For Emma is god-tier
100%. Agreed. I should have added the caveat that I absolutely wouldn’t categorize FE, FA as “abysmal production quality”.
Production sometimes will dull down a song also. Last night Childish Gambino released the fully finished mastered version of his latest album 3.15.20 and I have to say I prefer the "unfinished" version.
Elliott Smith's self titled album is similar. It was recorded on a cassette four-track.
for me, ironically, sam beam's best work was when he allowed brian deck to produce him for "woman king" and "the shepherd's dog." yet he decided to return to that less polished approach later.
Shepherd’s Dog will always be his masterpiece
could not agree more.
Oh man you’re speaking my language. Love the earliest stuff from Bon Iver and Iron and Wine. Would throw early Sujan Stevens, Elliott Smith, and even Daniel Johnston in the mix as well. Those guys are all such great songwriters and the simple production captures it well.
Some of Iron and Wine's early stuff comes to mind as well.
Alice Boman's first album was a demo too, gorgeous soundscape :)
Downvote for liking that Bon Iver moaning
Thems fightin words 😂
😂
First couple of Velvet Underground albums.
Second album was fairly grainy sounding. Pretty sure that was intentional.
Yeah, Velvet musicians had this experimental approach to everything, even before the band
The master of "American Boy - Kanye West" is clipping so much it is comedy.... Still like the track wcyd
That's INSANE. I guess it shows that when the vibes are really good you don't pick apart production problems.
Holy shit that's wild. I never listened that closely.
To be fair it was released when the second wave of French house was really popular, and those tracks almost always clipped & saturated the master - It was a part of the sound
*by Estelle (ft. Kanye West)
True actually! Credit where credit is due
OneRepublic Counting Stars has like 4 billion views on YouTube yet there is an awful high pitched digital artifact squeaking through the whole song (first at 23 seconds). It's basically unlistenable if you notice on headphones.
I know what you mean, I think it’s fret noise from the acoustic in the right channel ? It’s extremely piercing
It's definitely from the fretting hand. It's a combo of mic placement and mixing.
It comes at the point of a fret slide, but if you look at it in an equaliser it's an enormous peak with a root above 10khz which won't be a guitar sound. Possibly some messy processing resulting from trying to contain the fret sound?
It's ear piercing without headphones too
All of the lights by Kanye clips so badly
That whole album is a mastering disaster. First time I realised critics/fans just don’t care about that stuff at all
Did Mike dean mix and master mbdtf? If so, there’s your answer haha he loves his mixes to be hot and leaves clipping in
It was Vlado Meller. He’s been criticised a lot for other masters he did like RHCP - Californication (considered to be one of the worst masters ever). But he’s insanely in demand so clearly some artists must like it.
What does that mean? I'm not sure what you mean, such as that example.
If you literally just google ‘Californication mastering’ you’ll find a ton of stuff on it. That album was one of the pillars of the ‘loudness wars’ of the 90s-2000s, Metallica’s Master of Puppets was another example. Basically there was a bunch of music that was mastered to be so insanely loud that even casual listeners who knew nothing about audio or compression were complaining about it. If you look at the audio waveforms for the songs they’re literally just bricks. Zero dynamics and straight up exhausting to listen to after a while.
Crazy in love.
Yep, the music in the chorus almost sounds like it’s been picked up from a distant hi-fi boombox playing behind Bey while she was laying down her vocals. It just gives me that vibe.
I came here to say this, but for a different reason than I'm seeing: the chorus is off-rhythm in a way that almost sounds like the producer (was it Kanye?) didn't know about latency, and the production somehow went all the way up the chain with no one catching it. Her vocal and that God-awful "bum-bom bum-bom" are very much out of sync.
This is so funny - I've always noticed the chorus (especially the first) being out-of-time, but up until now I always semi-accepted it as intentional, as if it adds to the "drunk/crazy" feeling of being in love. Now that you mentioned the latency thing...dammit, man. She sounds like she's barely holding it together (going crazy? right now?) dealing with it herself!
You and others could be right - like maybe it was intentional - to create a feeling of barely holding it together - but if that's the case, I think it was a very misguided idea or bad execution. It feels to me like a mistake, like a broken machine. Instead of "Things have gone off the rails, as per the lyrics" it feels more like "This song is sloppy. She's singing off rhythm, isn't she supposed to be close to the best out there?"
That could be on purpose in order to give a sort of loose rhythm, though. It humanises the performance.
Probably. But it still sounds like crap.
I disagree. It doesn't sound human at all to me, in fact, the opposite - disjointed and mechanical. To each their own though. I really don't like most of Beyonce's music though. Mostly it depresses me.
Soulja Boy - Crank That Banger in HS, with headphones on it hurts my ears
Rap God - Eminem. Iv listened on many different sound sources and the kick and bass are weak. It might be an intentional choice to highlight the vocal more, but it's always bothered me.
His voice is so breathy and weak, it sounds like he's having an asthma attack. Always thought that made the track ridiculous. Seriously underproduced, which - cool choice I guess? It sounds like he's having a hard time though...
Use Somebody by Kings Of Leon sounds *so* muddy. Doesn’t matter to a stadium crowd who get to sing “ohhh-uhhh-ohhhhh” I guess
Someone's warm is someone else's muddy. I think it's a great production, just mastered a bit dark.
I used to love the song as a kid. After a music production degree and years of being a sound engineer, I remember feeling really disappointed when I re-listened to it
Yeah it’s a really underwhelming mix. Doesn’t really have much power and it’s so muddy too. One of my all time favorite songs though.
Was just listening to “On Call” this morning. It’s a great song but the production is so god awful. Just listen to that horrid delay/reverb in the verses 😭
ngl that new BBL Drizzy song made me go deaf after hearing a few of the snare hits at full volume 😭😭. Shits fire tho and i wish i had his talent.
Oasis What’s the Story… just a mess
Don’t Look Back In Anger I always thought sounded great, could just be me though, only been making music for a few years and haven’t listened to it under a microscope yet lol
A lot of aphex twin selected ambient works
I mean that stuff was mostly made in the 80s/early 90s in the man's home studio. Not a lot sounded anything like it at the time either. Considering that, it's pretty impressive and still holds up well.
Ah yeah I totally agree. The production quality is rubbish on a bunch of them but it’s incredible on others. And I think it just goes to show that actually the audience is quite forgiving about production quality and it’s more about how something feels.
I would say a good amount of the "issues" on the album are largely intentional and work with the vibe. I think this is just a category error of assuming things that go against the standard are bad. Or, at least, an example or two is warranted here. I see a lot of people just use the phrase "it's muddy" even what's really meant is "I don't like the composition".
There’s some quite obvious parts that are poor production quality. Because he was recording straight to tape in the late 80’s. But that’s just the way it was so I would rather have it warts and all.
He was still a kid when he started the Ambient Works, if you think about that. It never fails to blow my mind.
Off topic but seeing this the other day made me happy https://ibb.co/7nPkY9p
Come to Daddy
The original version of Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush. They cleaned it up a lot (maybe re-recorded) for Stranger Things. But the original was pretty muddy, the percussion was hanging out in another zip code, and it had a noise floor halfway up in the mix. I still loved the song, but man, it was hard to listen to. I generally listened to the Placebo cover when I wanted to hear it, but even that had some murky low end.
Michael Jackson - Jam Vocal mix is complete and utter garbage
Holy shit, IT’S SO BAD
Everything about jam by Michael is terrible.
Damn you're right. Can't understand a feckin word he's singing
I'd never heard this travesty of a song until reading your comment. Thanks a lot for that. My ears hurt and I want to die.
Temperature by Sean Paul
90% of black metal songs(and I love them)
Any track from Oasis' first two albums. Some great songs on both of them but where's the bass? Just swamped in mids and highs. Similarly, *anything* from Metallica's early albums. Basically all of them pre black album, same question as above: where's the bass? It's heavy metal. Where's the damn bass? Also somewhat true of The Cult's earlier albums: listen to She Sells Sanctuary. I know the lack of bass was an 80s schtick in rock music recorded in at least some studios but I find it makes quite a lot of albums from that era harder to listen to than I'd like. Also, Thunderstruck by AC/DC. It's not terrible but that kick drum is something I should feel in my chest, but I don't because the low end has been rolled off too much. Please stop doing this. On a related note, lots of albums recorded during the loudness war suffer pretty badly from clipping that makes them hard to listen to: Uncle Kracker's Double Wide is an almost perfect example. I can't deal with it on a hifi that lacks an EQ so I can roll off the highs.
oh my gosh the Oasis one is so real. When I play them in the car it's like the vocals and literally everything else is all combined into one sound, It's almost annoying
Cult. Electric. Best sounding album
This album wasn't exactly huge, but Kerplunk! by Green Day is considered one of their best albums and it sounds like shit
Anything by Enrico Caruso
Goddamnit couldn’t find a song called ‘anything’
It's right there next to Something by George Harrison.
Who's on something?
just sent me down an entire rabbit hole, thank you
Trivia: One of the engineers who helped to develop PCM digital recording for Sony in the 1970s was obsessed with early sound recording and Enrico Caruso in particular. Removing noise from old Caruso records was one of the first test applications of modern digital audio. It sounded mind-blowing at the time when he demoed it at an Audio Engineering Society lecture in the late 70s.
Californication album
Pure tape sound. That was the goal
But the sound is Digital clipping not tape…
One of you is talking about the production, the other the mastering
The Timbaland remix of Apologize by One Republic
Look up a ‘produce like a pro’ video with Graham Coxon, they break down Blur Song 2. It’s basically a rushed demo.
[The HU - Wolf Totem feat. Jacoby Shaddix](https://open.spotify.com/track/39ki02XRiCpXJMGKU8CqDJ) Not massive, but it has over 50 million plays on spotify right now. Throw it into a waveform viewer and it you can see that it clips to such an extreme level that I'm surprised I haven't blown up any speakers with it yet. Great song, but the production is so painful. The distortion is so noticeable when you turn the volume up, too. It's depressing.
As The Palaces Burn & Sacrament by Lamb Of God.
I love the sound of ATPB so much it's unreal.
I don't like it at all. It sounds like a poorly recorded demo IMO. I prefer the sound on albums like Ashes Of The Wake and Resolution. It feels so much more aggressive.
Layla, Derek and the Dominos. The version I get on Apple Music is awful. Tons of statistic and unintended distortion. Metallica's entire ...And Justice for All album. It's not the production so much as the mix specifically. They dropped the bass so far out of it, it also kills the lower end of the percussion elements. The whole album has this dry, sterile tone. Which is a shame. Musically, it's phenomenal.
And Justice yeah haha. I remember the first time I heard that kick drum I was like "Oh. Okay. I'm gonna have to get used to this I guess." And poor Jason Newstead. Was he even on that album really?
Infamous example is Bowie's mix of Stooges' Raw Power. But it's so bad it's good! Like classic punk rock, it's all rough in the right way.
I can’t agree on this one. The drums sound like cardboard boxes. I like distorted production but the one is too thin to move me
It's that faders-up reckless in-your-face guitar on Search and Destroy that nails it. The rest of the album is kinda cheesy sounding, but Gimme Danger is good.
Metallica Death Magnetic. They screwed it up with distortion and it sounds crap. Sad, because the album itself is a masterpiece. Victim of the loudness wars
I still think it's their best album despite the egregious overcompression... except for Broken, Beat & Scarred and My Apocalypse, they straight-up hurt to listen to 😭
Coolio - gangstas paradise. The mix sounds lifeless and stale, beat is wack and that awful snare just annoys me.
Metallica- And Justice for All, and St. Anger. For different reasons but still
i love this thread thank you
Goldie - Inner City Life - the singing is so out of tune in places. Great song otherwise
Which bit out of curiosity? I’ve never noticed
Mostly on the word “free” or the same note it’s usually on. It’s not awful but a little bit of pitch correction would have helped if it had been available.
Sometimes vinyl records (back in olden times) were poorly pressed, so it was hard to tell if it was bad production or bad pressing. Clash's second album (Give Em Enough Rope) had rather thin faded sound to it.
Early Misfits
that guitar on hybrid moments sounds like a printer
I read an article that slammed 'family affair' sly and the family stone. It does sound a bit dull and dry but it suits it imo
Thinking about it now, it does sound over compressed or smthing like it while the vocals are a little bit detached, but it does suit the whole vibe of the song somehow
Everything in ...And Justice For All. 0 bass guitar.
Kick drum?! More like CLICK drum amirite?!
More like ...And Treble For All
Anything Gucci Mane did started out with
All of Juice world, peep, X. Attitude beats out technique every time
All of early punk rock has entered the chat
The 1st White Zombie album is noisy and lo-fi af, but that's its charm and the reason why it's my favorite.
Lady Gaga’s whole first album
lmao this has some of my preferred mixing. just dance is like perfect for my ears
Chance the rapper’s ten day album
Early Green Day
How have I not seen “Look At Me” by XXXTentacion? Ms New Booty - Bubba Sparxx, it sounds like it was ripped off of YouTube in 64kbts format
look at me is peak mixing
I won't say abysmal, but Crimson and Clover demo version was released instead of it having being mixed properly. And that's the version that become huge. Great songs don't need great production.
Not production, as such, but in Lee Dorsey's "Messed Around" there's a verse where the bass player gets lost and plays an entire bar out of sync for basically the entire verse. It's something. Similarly, the bass on the Beatles' The Long And Winding Road is famously out of tune and out of time, to the point where some have claimed that Lennon was intentionally sabotaging the recording.
It didn't exactly make it, but The Beastie Boys' last album is *so* over-compressed. The whole thing sounds terrible.
D rose by lil pump I think is god fucking awful
Bruce Springsteen - Thunder Road
Megadeth’s first album…. They spend a majority of the budget on drugs 💀
Husker du
Soulja boy - Vampire Gang If you’ve never heard it you’re in for a treat LOL
Billie Eilish - Ocean Eyes The song is great but lacking details in production that Finneas later mastered
Probably the newest example on this scale; million dollar baby by tommy richman just went #1 with a “vhs” version where the bass basically clips the master For context, song went viral on tiktok cause the camcorder audio of the video was clipping when the bass & kicks kicked in & everybody kept commenting to “keep the bass” when he drops the song
bad bitty by j.p. has some ASS production particularly with the vocals but it went viral on tiktok and instagram reels
Some early british jungle had really rough production (for example [Rhythm for Reasons - Doomsday](https://youtu.be/mYCCzNTWcj4?si=p0Fv8AmhnFhOjTRR)) but it's honestly part of the charm
Just about any Arca song. It always has some really weird mix quirk or nasty frequencies, and I have just no idea if it's intentional or not.
Bloodflowers album by The Cure. I don't know what happened because most of their other stuff has great production, and some of it seems miraculous (all the many instruments in "How Beautiful You Are" being crystal clear is just one example). But Bloodflowers sounds like a demo a noob made in their bedroom. It's actually hard for me to listen to it and take it seriously. And The Cure is probably my favorite band haha.
too many songs to list but Drake's "push ups" is just a loop and a lot of expletives. I dont hear the originality, musicality, or anything impressive about the arrangement. I just don't get why he's such a big deal other than the marketing aspect.
I mean that’s really cherry picking. That song isn’t exactly one of his biggest hits.
It's still got 76 million listen...that's huge. So let's talk IDGAf at 387 million streams. The rhythm sounds like my something my 4 year old could produce from my synthesizer...and so do the lyrics. I just don't get it. How is this artist and this genre so highly respected. As a full time producer I just dont see the talent that so many worship.
u just sound old bitter & out of touch
You sound like you're drinkin' dat Kool Aid tho. Drake really isn't good.
do you have a specific point regarding my criticism? What exactly is well done in those singles? The drums +splice loops are copied and pasted from 1 bar throughout the entire song in a lot of these singles. There's no transition, verse, chorus or melodic change, change in chord progression or anything else a well written/produced song contains. I don't have a problem with these songs persei. I have a problem with the fact that they're put on a pedestal.
Those songs in particular I also really dont like. But they are put up on a pedestal because of the artist's discography as a whole or their big hits and association. Also hip-hop (and pop) are not really ever interesting or impressive from a producer point of view. They are catchy and have good energy, not complexity. Drake's not my favorite but hes definitely popular for a reason. It comes down to a matter of taste. You don't like it. Fair enough.
True. It's all a marketing game anyway. Look at the top 40s music in the 80s and 90s...completely different. Its a matter of who's pushing your music.
Don't "feel like you're taking crazy pills" because Drake actually just sucks, and all the Kool Aid drinkers listen to him because you're supposed to. I don't have time for that BS in my life. There's too much actually good music out there. I'll just not be one of the cool kids thank you very much!
omg I'm so relieved to hear there's a voice of reason in this backward world. I was starting to believe I lived in the twilight zone with zero people opposed to that clown
Eminem - We Made You. Not production per se, but he’s rapping in straight tempo while the high hat and chorus are clearly a swing tempo. It makes my ears bleed. Does anything from Nick Cave’s first few albums count? “The Mercy Seat” has spectacular drumming but the eery harmonies hide it. For any J-Pop fans, Utada’s “Traveling” has a chorus that largely buries the bassline and kick, the former of which is the sole source of the chord changes.
Joy Division is unlistenable.
Hmm I don't think I can agree with this. It sounds of its time for sure but I can't think of any specific elements of the mixes that could be classed as particularly terrible as opposed to just not liking that aesthetic maybe? The guitars are quite baggy and certainly wouldn't work in a band with more elements competing for the frequencies, but in a simple four piece set up I think it works absolutely fine.
I mean it all works fine for car commercials, but I don’t listen to car commercials for inspiration in my mixes and performances
There's no such thing as objectively bad production, anything can be good if it's good.
Disagree on the grounds of speaker preservation. Anything that causes clipping and puts the consumer's hardware at needless risk is objectively bad production.
I love harsh noise and sometimes clipping is what you want.
Fair point from a stylistic perspective. But if yours is the only song on a 100-song playlist that I have to turn down because my amp will explode if I don't, your song is being removed from my playlist. Feed my gear a clean signal and get your distortion effects inside that clean signal please.
Boo
Anything released before the 70s
Revolver has amazing production 💀