Oh…sound quality…heart rate returning to normal, urge to kill lowering.
LOL
Slight hijack:
Hey, you might not like his tone, but Mould worked his rig specifically to get it, and it was nice equipment. Usually 2 Fender Concerts and 2 JC120’s, with an Evantide Harmonizer and Roland delay. Not really cheap stuff.
But those SST records were all recorded cheaply, and the results were pretty uneven sonic-ally. Sometimes you got someone good running the board, sometimes you didn’t. If the original tracks aren’t engineered well, a remaster might not fix it. But even then, a lot can be done with a bad tape in the right hands.
And well, yeah, VU had a few of the same problems SST had. By the time of White Light/White Heat, they had nice guitars and a Vox amp endorsement, but their recording budget wasn’t huge. To top if off, if the guy behind the board isn’t into the music at all, you’re headed for problems. VU surely brought this response in people. When recording “Sister Ray” the engineer said:
That guy’s not very likely to be worrying about whether your amp is mic’d correctly, and since VU and Husker Du were quite loud and dense, it’s really hard to get that sort of thing right. So, since everyone’s a critic, we sometimes get great songs recorded poorly. So it goes.
That’s a band that always comes to mind when I hear discussions about recording quality. I’m pretty forgiving of recording quality, but I just could never get into that band, even though my musical tastes should make them a slam dunk for me, because I just can’t get past the muddy recordings. Meanwhile, I like Bob Mould’s other stuff just fine. As for the Velvet Underground and Nico, it’s always sounded warm and intimate and raw without sounding sloppy to me. Never had an issue with the recording quality.
1:10-1:23 of “Femme Fatale” is where it’s most notable.
I’m listening to Husker Du’s “Warehouse: Songs and Stories” right now and it doesn’t sound too bad to me. Maybe a little lacking in bass, but fairly crisp and clear.
In regard to what I posted, that’s one of their Warner records, where they had a bigger budget. Even then, it’s got its own sins, IMHO. It’s drum sounds are pretty generic for the time, and very sanitary for the style. The guitar and bass sounds have similar problems. But then again, they produced the record themselves, so I’m arguing with the artist here. The sound I dislike could have been exactly what they were going for. My favorite production-wise is “Terms Of Psychic Warfare” off of New Day Rising, which is largely a less tightly produced version of the same sound. Both could benefit from a better drum sound, but chasing good drum sounds can get expensive*.
What I didn’t know until looking around today was that SST has apparently refused to remaster the records they retain the rights to for CD (or at least did). Damn, all the more reason to own your masters, folks. Pay for your own recording time. That way, you get to say what goes on from start to finish, and can always go back and fix your “mistakes”.
And really, the VU+Nico isn’t really recorded that badly considering the time and the challenges of capturing a loud band on tape with the current technology. There’s lots of bands from the time that had mediocre recording and production values. To have a stellar recording on a mediocre budget in 1966 is really an exception. We should probably thank our lucky stars that it’s not less hi-fi.
*What’s weird about that is, drum recording seems to get exponentially better around 1990. After that year, even garage-y recordings started to get decent drum production. I’m not sure what caused it. Since I don’t have any evidence, and it’s about an acoustic instrument, I blame Heavy Metal instead of Rap.
Interesting. So what explains all the hi-fi jazz recordings from the 1950s?
Well, without a specific recording being mentioned, I can’t address the specifics. A lot of those old recordings don’t have much in the way of information on how they were recorded, and even bad engineers (like me) can hit the sweet spot sometimes.
But a lot of those recordings were done by RCA, Columbia, etc. Those studios were the high point of recording at the time. Some produced the equipment themselves, and the engineers were trained in what they were doing. Additionally, even the loudest jazz band is very low volume compared to what rock bands were capable of in the mid 1960’s and later. The sound pressure levels of some of those amps in their “sweet spot” can get way beyond what an average 1960’s (or even 70’s or 80’s) engineer was capable of handling. It approaches being able to record a jet engine and getting it to sound right. It’s a different level of hard. Good, cheap, available used compressors are probably the real answer to why recording got better around the beginning of the 90’s. Through my umm, somewhat pro/am career, the studios that I like to work with always seem to want to talk about their compressors when you ask what makes “their” sound. I’ll have to ask the the older folks that I know, and search around for the answer to why drum sounds changed (usually for the better) in the 90’s.
And modern drums are just difficult, more than most instruments that a studio runs into. It’s probably actually harder to reproduce the hard punch of a modern kit without thinning it out, vs. just letting the resonance of an older jazz kit work in a much sparser mix. But then again, I know my engineer skills well enough that I tried to argue myself out of my last live sound job. I did fine, but if you’re not in a last minute pinch, you can find better than me.
And that’s the number one reason the audio quality was poor. Andy Warhol was technically the producer, but mostly for promotional reasons. His knowledge of recording was so poor he couldn’t say much more than “that sounded good”. Throw in a record company that offered very little money for recording (and was primarily a jazz label), and we’re lucky anything usable came out…
…of course had it had a big money budget with high quality engineering, it wouldn’t nearly have had as much effect in the birth of punk/alternative/indie rock.
To compare like with like, this album was recorded at about the same time as (Frank Zappa’s) The Mothers of Invention double-album debut Freak Out! for the same record label, partially in the same Hollywood studio, and possibly under the guidance of the same producer, Tom Wilson (or so says John Cale).
One big difference was - according to figures I pulled from Wikipedia - the Velvet Underground’s budget was somewhere around $1,500-$3,000 while the Mothers of Invention spent roughly $25,000-$35,000 (going over budget).
Still, the two albums don’t sound vastly different to me sonically, and since nothing like the Velvets had ever been recorded before it’s remarkable how well theirs holds up.
One of my five favorite bands, and I can’t believe they let New Day Rising, in particular, out the front door sounding like that.