I’ve gotten some pretty wild, strong compliments on The Light of Day, one person even saying “The production quality is perfect!”
This is not only really nice for me to see, it’s an interesting counter to audiophile fetishism, the constant barrage of people saying negative things about various technologies.
I originally recorded those tracks 12-14 years ago. I definitely did not have the production skill then that I do now. At that time I didn’t use EQ much, relaying on voices to sound OK together. I didn’t worry about highpass filtering before certain types of effects for clarity. I didn’t worry about stereo phase correlation / mono compatibility. I didn’t really know how to use a compressor properly. Dynamics were mostly a matter of setting volume levels on synths and calling it good, avoiding clipping. I didn’t scrutinize every plugin to see if it caused aliasing. I did pretty much everything at a 44.1Khz sample rate, and didn’t think about oversampling. It was all recorded using VST plugins (and at the time it might have been all 32-bit)… and it was all done in FL Studio, you know, that program that the techno and hiphop kids used cracked copies of but no self-respecting “pro” would use.
And you want to know the real kicker? I didn’t have the original DAW projects or stems, or in fact even lossless WAV files. These were all remastered from lossy MP3s, some of them as low as 128Kbps.
Also, I did this all on headphones. Both originally, and the rework. Not expensive nearfield monitors in an acoustically treated studio. The very idea probably causes some folks to break out in hives.
Yes, I put a little work into making them sound nicer — with more plugins, and still at 44.1kHz (*). A little cautiously targeted saturation, some EQ nips and tucks, the trusty MagicDeathEye compressor which hasn’t let me down yet, and judicious limiting and boosting and oversampled clipping. A bit of fake tape mojo here and there. Slightly more radical work in a couple of places. But the fact is, I didn’t need to record at 192Khz or use analog tape and tubes, or consult an actual mastering engineer, for people to think it sounded “perfect.” Granted, these are synthetic soundscapes, with a sound intentionally ranging from dark to sandpapery — I’m not trying to perfectly preserve the sizzle of cymbals or every detail of a vocalist, or make a bass guitar and a kick drum hang together with a perfect groove. It’s noisy, ambient/drone/soundscape stuff. What makes it “perfect” is not quantifiable. So I’m happy to have reached it, at least for a few folks. 🙂
(*) when recording now, I use a 48kHz sample rate because that is what BoredBrain OptX supports if I want to use all 8 channels. Sometimes this gets converted to 44.1 during editing — I’m not sure why — and sometimes it doesn’t, but it doesn’t really matter as long as I don’t accidentally paste a snippet between different sample rates.