What I mean is what albums do you think are great, classic or whatever, but the production quality is bad or the mix is so poor that it takes away from the awsomeness of the album?
If you could have one album re-recorded, played exactly the same way, but mixed differently so the sound quality would be improved what would it be?
Mine is “And Justice For All” by Metallica. It is one of my alltime favs but you cannot hear ANY bass guitar on that whole CD. If you listen to it on a thumping car stereo the mix is so bad that you can’t really turn it up because the bass drum overpowers everything else and Lars just really isn’t that good and you can hear him off beat alot and it ruins the sound. I read an interview in Playboy a while back with the guys from the band and they all said that they purposely cut the bass guitar to a minimum on that album because they were bitter about Cliffs death. It’s too bad because its an awsome album.
A close second is Chaos AD by sepultura.
Anyone else understand what I am asking here? What albums do you think could use a new mix with todays production quality?
Every Misfits album.
It sounds like they only spent about 5 bucks on studio time and paid the staff in deposit bottles.
Great albums; sound quality completely sucks.
Some Kind of hate wouldnt be such a good song if it didnt sound like it was recorded in a tin can. I think the poor production quality compliments the Misfits sound.
I’d like to hear what Jimi Hendrix would be doing with modern equipment. Are You Experienced? and Axis:Bold as Love were recorded on 4-track equipment!*
*I think; Experienced? may have been 8-track
The rawness is what makes his songs so appealing IMO. Just compare the very early Trojan Records’ Bob Marley ska recordings with his later reggae work and you can clearly hear how high-end production turned his music into lame pop calypso.
How about King Crimson. The sound quality is terrible on most of their CDs. This is probably due to the fact that their albums are old as hell, and since Crimson was never as big as some other bands, the CDs weren’t remastered or at least not very well.
Also, most old jazz music. While re-releases of old, old Miles Davis or Coltrane sound ok, you can only imagine how these guys would sound now.
Everything by Jefferson Airplane. Those albums were inflicted (or is it infested?) with the infamous RCA hiss disease. Even the early cassettes had hiss on them, which indicated that the problem was in the master tapes.
And it would be so nice to hear early 60s albums in true stereo rather than the reprocessed mono that put the voices in one speaker and the instruments in the other. I tell ya, when we had to trudge uphill both ways to the record store through sabre-tooth tigers just to get a 45, them’s were the real days of music.
I also can’t stand the drums on many 80’s (mostly pop ) songs. They sound like they used a drum machine, but a VERY BAD ONE (they very well may have). I know electronic music was in then, but come on. There would be many pop songs which I would actually listen to if it weren’t for the friggin’ drums.
I have to nominate Dookie by Green Day - for being recorded in the '90’s, it is so muddy that I can only imagine how a well-recorded version would rock.
The Rhino remaster isn’t perfect, but the sound quality is good enough to crank…just ask the neighbors on my block. Every other month or so whenever “Spinning in circles, miracles happen, As lower life life shows me in to my doom” erupts out my closed basement windows, the Vietnam vet down the block comes a knockin and asks for a volume adjustment.
You guys are nuts. You want to re-record Jimmy Hendrix? And make him sound like what, f*ckin Lenny Kravitz?
I have such an intense hatred for needlessly clean recordings. If there is a distinct problem with hearing one or more of the instruments, by all means, that ought to be corrected. But you want to clean up Iggy Pop?!? The Misfits?!? Of course the sound was shit. That’s the whole point!!! That’s why Lenny’s version of American Woman sucks compared to the original, and that’s why The Red Hot Chili Peppers ain’t no good anymore.
I can think of only two offhand (lemme skim my cd collection and I can probably come up with a bunch more, but…), Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions by Killing Joke and Streetcleaner by Godflesh. The KJ album is one of the most intense sounding albums I’ve ever heard, but it’s so quiet, so very quiet, compared to what it should have been considering what went into the making of the music. The Godflesh disc is one of my all-time favorites, but they were nobodies when they recorded it and you can hear the production screaming “we have zero clout” (quietly, of course). Godflesh later got their own studio due to Columbia expecting them to be the next NIN (this just in, they weren’t), and the engineering of the albums produced in the mid-to-late 90s is exceptional, but I wish their best work could have gotten the resources the later stuff got.
Wow. That’s a pretty sweeping statement about music IMHO that has become timeless. If you prefer the early ska to his roots style, that is your right; but insulting this giant of an artist by calling his work lame is not only ludicrous but also ignorant.
“You see men sailing on their ego trips
Blast off on their spaceships
Million miles from reality…”
-Bob Marley “So Much Trouble in the World”