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Are drummers annoyed/angered by the loudness war?
Now… Metallica’s totally unprofessional eff-up aside, a lot of metal music out there *is* pushed to the limit and still sounds incredibly good. I’m listening to Bodom right now and their production is fantastic; I’ve imported several tracks to see how brickwalled their sound is, and sure enough, they’re pushing red. Somehow there’s still plenty of breathing room for dynamics and I appreciate it.
Obviously distorted guitars can be limited and compressed and still sound good.
But what about drums? Drums’ sound are all over the place, from crystal cymbals and thudding snare to the rolling thunder of bass and reverberating toms.
I’ve never read any drummer complaining about their sound (I don’t read drummer rags though). But in the hopes of squeezing as much loudness out of today’s heavy metal, are drums being sacrificed and no one is acknowledging it?
The three biggest instruments that are routinely compressed are bass guitar, drums, and vocals, I would say even in that order.
The difference between compression to achieve an even sound and brickwall limiting to achieve maximum loudness is substantial – it is vital to have an even volume and tone throughout a track, and it is not all that often that drummers can achieve this, unless they’re experienced at studio recording and can rein themselves in a bit. It is natural for everyone to put emphasis on certain parts of the music, but recording is different from a live performance – even a 6db variation can place an undue emphasis and feel out of place in the mix.
Case in point for me was when I was helping an engineer record one of the bands I was in… the drummer was great live, but he had two “flaws” from a recording standpoint – when he hit his toms he tended to be very energetic, and his double-kick was a little weak. In that situation you have to compress the kick to keep it at an even volume, otherwise the weaker kicks will get lost in the mix, and you have to rein in those crazy toms, or they just totally squash everything else.
In general with drums everything but cymbals can safely be compressed a little harder (ie 6:1 or more) but often even the cymbals have a bit of light compression on them too, just to keep them even.
Vocals are compressed almost all the time – unless you find the rare singer who has mic control, volumes can be all over the map. Again, you want vocals front and center, but you don’t want them going from very quiet to very loud!
Bass guitar is almost always a must for compression, even with many studio musicians – you’ve just *got* to have a solid bassline!
The primary difference between your normal compression and brickwall limiting is how the transient is treated. The very first part of a sound is the loudest part – often many times louder than the rest of the sound. This is especially true with percussion (ie a snare drum). “Normal” compression will seek to find a balance between the transient and the rest of the volume, while preserving that feeling of the transient being louder than the rest of the tone (as that sounds natural to us). Brickwall limiting squashes the transient, because with the transient squashed you can raise the overall volume of that sound much higher…. again, if the transient is three times as loud as the rest of the sound, if you lower the transient to 1/3rd you can then raise the volume of the rest of the sound x3!
That, in essence, is the loudness war – the gradual lessening of that dynamic quality (the difference between the loudest and quietest parts) in order to raise the overall volume.
Anyways, we expect drums to be compressed – its almost a prerequisite to any recording being level and sounding good in a mix. Probably the only genres left where compression is entirely or almost entirely absent is jazz, some blues, and classical music – I’ve actually heard debates about the merits of compression within classical music, whether it should be used at all!
I should probably mention that we can use multiband compression to selectively compress some frequencies more than others, and we can use techniques like parallel compression, tape saturation, panning, EQ, and mic’ing individual components of the drum kit to be selective about how, where, and how much we compress as well.
Hope this helped!
Saul
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