blink-182 - One More Time… (October 20, 2023) • Page 134

Without the stems? Just turning down frequencies and EQing it down probably? Trying to compress just that portion? I dunno, to me that’s like close to fan cuts of famous movie’s territory. Oh you re-edited Goodfellas? Pass. Haha.

 

I’m more curious what they’re listening on. Some Spotify version on Beats headphones or Sony earbuds and then declaring the compressed as hell TikTok version from their phone speaker sounds better after they edited it is in the wild weeds of no thanks to me.

 

Yeah it sounds great on my Sony WH1000XM3 headphones anyways; the kind of headphones definitely make a difference

 

I will reiterate that Reddit needs some other fuckin hobbies

 

Reddit is a place I dare not tread for fear of losing brain cells

 

Yes. And I have a degree in arts.

 

Am I the asshole is a fun subreddit

 

I actually can’t hear the vocals over the drums in TURN THIS OFF! when I drive my car lol. It’s fine on my HomePod and AirPods but my first 2 listens were in my car and I couldn’t hear what the joke was lol

 

Listened in the car about a dozen times today. Really love this album more and more each listen. In no order, Anthem, More Than You Know, Dance With Me, Turpentine, Blink Wave, and Otherside are my favorites.

 

“Remixing” an album without stems is dumb. And I’m never gonna replace the official versions with some random fan edit. But the drums are crazy loud. Honestly, everything is. My main gripe with this record continues to be the production and how every layer often sounds like it’s fighting to be loudest. I find it suffocating and void of atmosphere

 

You can stem-split songs with plugins like Izotope RX, but it never sounds good.

 

because Apple literally promotes AirPods/Beats products as being able to listen to Atmos content properly. That’s why

 

I think something that gets lost in the nuance of these discussions is taste. Taste in mixing and production is just as subjective as taste in the actual songs. I personally think the drums are too loud, but I also think certain elements of plenty of other music I like are too loud. It's part of the listening experience, no one is wrong or right for thinking a mix should be a certain way.

Also, who cares about fan edits. That's exactly what they are. Edits made by fans, for fun.

 

Ugh. Yeah, don’t like the sound of that. Makes me feel the same as “I had AI re-record this guitar to sound like X and put it in this Metallica song” or whatever hell we are gonna probably be in in ten years.

 

It has it's place. Can be very fun for sampling or pulling stuff out just to hear in isolation (did this alot with the most recent 1975 LP when it came out) but yeah I do think we are entering a dangerous era of entitlement with music. Some of the grossest shit is the people making "AI covers" where they write their own shitty version of what they think an artist sounds like and use AI to replace their voice.

 

I’ve seen people use that free one too, Moises, which yeah sounds awful. It’s not bad if you’re maybe just trying to solo something to learn but acting like it’s tolerable listening quality is bananas

 

Oh yeah, I totally think that’s all coming. And I don’t think I like it. I’m already starting to feel somewhat annoyed with the “production” talk that seems to dominate too many new releases these days anyway. I dunno if that’s become an engrained way for people to think about music, but I very rarely find it interesting anymore because it seems so prevalent and half the time I think people’s speakers are badly EQ’d or they don’t actually know what it is they don’t like so they blame Jack Antonoff instead.

Was it Brian Fallon that recently was like “you don’t like it? Ok let me hear your songs?” Can’t remember for sure. But part of me does have a knee jerk reaction where I’m like “do you think you can do better than Randy Merrill?” - like, I would trust his ear over anyone on Reddit, and maybe that’s my own bias at this point.

 

Blink were great tonight

 

I downloaded the AI removed vocals “instrumental” version of some of the Blink albums to see what they sounded like and it was unlistenable.

 

If you guys want to hear actual shitty production, I’m putting out an album next month

 

I think production/mixing is way more accessible these days. Anyone can download Ableton and spend enough time fucking around to convince themselves they're Chris Lord-Alge, or whatever.

As I pointed out (with poor timing) much earlier in the thread, I did study in an Audio Engineering program in college and recently graduated. I say that only anecdotally to say it has definitely colored how I assess music as a whole, and at times I let it distract me more than it should.

 

I agree with this 99.9% of the time but I just can not get over how Take the Sadness out of Saturday Night sounds lol

Edit: I should clarify too that I don’t believe he did a bad job with it. I’m sure it sounds exactly as he wants. So my trouble is more with the decisions than the execution.

 

Yeah, that’s probably true and fair.

I think I’d be more interested in someone saying “I like when a song sounds like it was recorded in a big room” and references like a Thrice song or something. But the “so and so sucks at the thing they do and get paid big bucks to be one of the actual best in the world at” stuff grates on me more and more as I age. I’d buy an argument that people wish Blink didn’t try and make their songs sound like what’s popular right now, I’d probably argue that’s the band from day one and this version of what’s popular is to what was happening on early albums too (but when you’re young you don’t know that).

And now I’m just going on about my current least favorite music trend and production talk lol. I should stop.

 

Hahaha. I was more referring to everything else he produces. But I do totally agree with that. IMO that’s where I start thinking about intentionality and why the artist made those choices. What was the reason and what were they trying to get out of the song/art by doing it that way. And sometimes I totally disagree with their choices. But I wouldn’t then try and go clean up Jack’s album and be like “fixed it” - haha.

The choices on that one still baffle me though as anything besides him doing it as a direct response to the criticisms or something.

 

Hah you got me like 2 seconds before I edited my post to clarify that I’m sure it sounds exactly like he wants. I just do not get the choices for the life of me.