Hitting the Analog Master Buss to Shave Transients

transient shaving....

Hm, there is a serious difference in what drBill does, when he limits that few transients of tracks, that lead to a +5-7dB RMS in the mix...
...or limiting transients hard, compressing the shit out of the signal, limiting again, and doing this on every thinkable level of the mix, tracks, busses and master.
That's what really is done with some of this "unlistenable" and totally disposable pop music.
An old friend of mine produces this stuff to finance his 'projects of the heart' with rock and 'good' music. His platinum record stuff is Mallorca and Apre-Ski party stuff, basically ugly simple dance rhythm on simple melodies to sing along after a lot of alcohol...
..resulting in a DR of 6-7, and still his clients complain that he refuses to go down to a DR of 5 like his competitants. No joke.
And yes, he absolutely knows what he is doing, and he can also produce folk rock music with preserved transients, high DR and excellent natural sound. But it doesn't pay his bills....

Uhm.
well, we are talking shaving transients. But it is about how we do it, how much we shave and if and how much music suffers from it...
I still believe (or at least i want to believe) that most engineers who know their stuff would like to preserve as much quality as possible. This is compromised by the demands of the clients, which often do more harm than good, may they be aware of it or not...
Now, that you quoted me, uhm, yes, sounds a bit strange.
Don't know if it really means, what i think it means. LOL :-D

Where'd you get that pic of Tony?  LOL

The thing is, you don't have to mic close if you use a couple of gobos. I do it all the time and my place isn't huge. I never mic cabinets on the grill and I turn things like hard tambourines strikes and loud snare hits down by cutting them and pulling them down in post instead of compressing them to death. Transients are preserved and sounds stay natural in the mix. The real issue here is that engineers don't want to spend an extra hour doing that and prefer to squash and color tracks up with hyper compression. That is far from my taste and cup of tea. Brent Mason gave me one of the best compliments the other day. He said "my guitar sounds real, natural and more like I hear it in my head" when I record with you. Imagine that, I mic him a foot and a half away with a Royer and a Miktek PM-9 through an RTZ preamp, high pass him at 100hz with an RTZ eq and straight though Apogee converters into Cubase. He sounds like a sublime version of Brent Mason that way. Squashing his sound takes away who Brent Mason is to me, because I know exactly what he sounds like in the studio and live. He isn't into the hyper compression thing either. My feelings on this are way more in this way of thinking when dealing with all acoustic instruments, like a bluegrass band. Locking instruments like that in a hole sounds so goofy to me and doesn't sound real at all. If you do that to real grassers, you are getting fired if they have anything to say about it.

Bill, despite your continuing condescension toward me, I decided to let it go because I'm not going to waste my time arguing with you, I'm well aware that your enormous ego will never allow you to budge, let alone admit to being wrong, so believe whatever you want, leave me out of your diatribes, and stop trolling me.

Really, guys? Can we please keep the egos in check? Well - put it this way - I am going to start keeping egos in check with the delete button. I BEG you people that don't get along to please use the ignore feature for one another...or maybe I'll turn it on for you.

Yeah, I took it as good natured ribbing and didn't give it another thought.

I could :-) Whenever I'm in a store and I hear one of those cannon shot snares from an 80's song using a Linn drum or an Emu sp-12 or drumulator, I roll my eyes, because I' was as guilty as the next guy from abusing that junk. Same snare on a thousand records, yikes.

Really? OMG, we are lost....