I go to the gym. There, I hear digital radio. Some stations suck, some are brilliant, and most of them play ‘Valerie’ by Amy Winehouse, a lot. Last week, Dusty Springfield’s ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ was playing on a gold station. It sounded different: I’d never heard the bass on that song in 39 years. It was INCREDIBLE. A beautiful, sinuous, sexy, athletic, bubbling stream from one Tommy Cogbill, clearly one hell of a bass player.
So far so good. Trouble was, the track was treated and compressed, probably for MP3 and the transmission chain. This did not do the song any favours. That striking bassline was WAY up, the middle and top was sort of up, but a lot of the rest was… just hoovered back into the mix. Yuk.
So the same thing that brought Cogbill’s work to the fore damaged the rest of the mix. I’m all for digital storage, so we can have huge libraries to use as brilliant programming resources (see this interesting post from Billy Sabatini). But aren’t we in danger of damaging prime gold repertoire by crunching stuff down so insensitively? This is a huge problem with 60s and 70s material, which was often recorded live or near-live, with a wholly different approach to balancing and mixing. This stuff was built to jump out of tiny transistor radio speakers. Now, it’s altered by digitisation and remastering for radio, and crushed almost beyond recognition to fit on our Ipods and our databases. It’s not so much a technical issue as a cultural issue. To store our libraries in the digital world, we reprocess, remaster, spindle, fold, and mutilate our music. We commoditise and devalue it. We are in real danger of ignoring what the producers, artists and musicians were trying to do. Maybe that doesn’t matter to some stations, but it matters to old farts like me who remember the stuff from the first time around.
There’s good and bad here. I don’t have a solution. I’d just like to hear a better way of processing classic hits from 30, 40 or 50 years ago.
Hell of a bassline though…
Tagged: compression, Gold, libraries