One quick thing about that Paramore waveform I posted earlier (and props again to Matthew McVicker for figuring it out). I basically posted it to say, “I don’t like records that sound like this.” The super-compressed “brick wall” mastering that makes everything in the song very loud. You might say, “Well it’s rock music, it’s supposed to be loud,” and that is a valid point, but the you kind of have to think about what compression means in cases like this. Volume is, of course, something that we can control as listeners. You turn up the volume to hear something louder. But volume within in a particular piece of music is dependent on the difference in relative volume between the quietest sounds and the loudest sounds (called the dynamic range). I feel like the ultimate example of this in popular music is PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me”, which was recorded by Steve Albini. Think of the difference between how very, very quiet that opening bit is and how violently and cathartically loud it gets when the song kicks in. The dynamic range in this song is so wide that many people find it annoying. Because to hear that opening part well, you turn it way, way up, and then when it kicks in all of a sudden your neighbor is stomping on the ceiling. But if you ever have the time and focus to really listen to this song properly, on a decent stereo and really crank it, when the drums and guitars come crashing in it is absolutely devastating, like it almost knocks you over. But dynamic range isn’t useful only for these moments of extreme volume shifts. If the record isn’t mixed so that every element is the same volume, you get to hear more details, pick out instruments, and with something like Paramore I really can’t do that. I just get single slab of sound and everything kind of mixes into one thing. Which is obviously a certain quality. Some music has extreme compression like this and it becomes an integral part of it. Andrew WK’s I Get Wet, for example, is supposed to sound like this singular raging slab of sound with everything mixed together. But often this choice is not made for particular aesthetic reasons that are true to the song but because, if you are scanning the dial on your radio, compressed music sounds a little louder and our ears, on a quick listen, are drawn to louder sounds. Someone in the comments to my original post said that if this is a punk song, that amount of compression seems reasonable. But the above waveform is from Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum”, a punk song that we can all agree sounds pretty intense. And as you can see it’s a loud master. But that extra bit of space there, to my ears, really makes a big difference, you can hear the guitars and bass and drums (cowbell!) as distinct things and it really gives it so much more movement and force. The brickwall master of the Paramore track is just hard for me to listen to at length.
