All I Know: 80s Mix

[dcp10200]

Your comment was spot on. I put the mix up today on the Bose 2+1 system in the lounge (this being frowned upon at midnight, when I posted). For all its faults, the Bose highlights issues in the low-mids. I made two corrections: (1) to cut the 3rd-5th harmonics of the kick further; and, (2) dropped the baseline 2db, bringing it up more selectively in a few sections.

I just downloaded the mp3 of the final mix off of the forum this time, the mud is gone from the low end and the automation of the bass in the track really breaks up the song more, good work .

I noticed that compared to my mastered mix that you've actually got less low end going on and more midrange going on, my mix has a more smiley face eq balance and a fair amount of low end going on which tends to make it sound more mushy. The snare in your mix also is lower down which allowed you to turn your mix up abit more than mine. I'm assuming that your mix also works better on smaller speakers and phones because of these differences in balance

The comment about the loudness wars is pretty spot on, I had to do a presentation when I went to audio school on a topic of my choice and I chose to do it on mastering and the level wars that have been going on. The reason for the loudness wars was that jukeboxes in bars and clubs had to be heard over a crowd of loud/drunk patrons. Record companies as a result ordered that singles played it clubs should be mastered as hot as possible in hopes of being able to be heard, this idea of having louder masters eventually crossed over to radio, Motown Records are actually one of the originators of this trend and part of the Motown sound is a heavy reliance on driving compressors hard. In the 80's with more and more use of synth based instruments and drum machines in pop music dynamics became less noticeable because the velocity sensitivity of alot of synths at the time was pretty limited and of course running into tape machines also did some of it's own compression to the sound. From about 1991 is when the loudness wars really started to push music in a less dynamic and more in your face direction with Nirvana's Nevermind, Metallica's Black Album, and in 1992 Alice in Chains' Dirt. These records still had dynamics to them but were way hotter in level when compared with similar rock records in the 80's. Really the album that popularized the brickwalled chaos we have now is Oasis' What's the Story Morning Glory, the waveforms on that album pretty much look like a Kit Kat bar. From then on in the 2000's we pretty much got to the point of just clipping and squashing the life out of records, the extremes being Death Magnetic by Metallica and the CD master of Stadium Arcadium by Red Hot Chili Peppers ( the vinyl version is mastered by Steve Hoffman and is really dynamic and punchy sounding).

Welp, that went on longer than I was expecting, sorry for the thesis on dynamics in mastering! There's more on this subject written by way more qualified sources but this is my basic understanding of the subject and I'm probably butchering alot of points, but here it is.

Cheers and congrats on the mix,
Dcp