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Music production was at it's best in the 1980s


fraroc
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I fully believe that the production of rock music and metal, the way the music itself was mixed in the studio, was at an absolute peak in the 80s. In the 70s, studio music sounded way to flat and tinny, which makes heavy songs sound not heavy at all...And from the 90s onwards, the "Loudness wars" happened, in which any form of proper mixing was thrown out the window in favor of making the album sound as heavy as possible a la Vapor Trails and Death Magnetic.

 

In the 80s, the studio magic made the music sound so vibrant, almost atmospheric, it made every instrument shine on it's own. It's a perfect cross between heavy and light sounding music.

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80s albums sound very overproduced to me personally. I'm happy they got a tiny bit louder and full-bodied but that doesn't excuse the plague of reverb and overly loud synths.
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80s albums sound very overproduced to me personally. I'm happy they got a tiny bit louder and full-bodied but that doesn't excuse the plague of reverb and overly loud synths.

Are you going to produce some albums soon so we can see your theories put into practice? Or are you just going to sit around and do nothing wasting years on this site with nothing better to do!?

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80s albums sound very overproduced to me personally. I'm happy they got a tiny bit louder and full-bodied but that doesn't excuse the plague of reverb and overly loud synths.

Are you going to produce some albums soon so we can see your theories put into practice? Or are you just going to sit around and do nothing wasting years on this site with nothing better to do!?

 

big hmm

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I don't worry too much about production, songs are the important thing, have they got good song writing.

 

As a fellow metal fan you know that there is plenty of stuff in the genre that has bad production. Especially when you look at some of the earlier work of the bands who came up during the 80s. But I've found more often than not a good song can overcome bad production.

 

Every decade has both good and bad when it comes to album production. Sure it would be nice if everything sounded like Moving Pictures or Screaming For Vengeance but that's not always possible.

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I don't worry too much about production, songs are the important thing, have they got good song writing.

 

As a fellow metal fan you know that there is plenty of stuff in the genre that has bad production. Especially when you look at some of the earlier work of the bands who came up during the 80s. But I've found more often than not a good song can overcome bad production.

 

Every decade has both good and bad when it comes to album production. Sure it would be nice if everything sounded like Moving Pictures or Screaming For Vengeance but that's not always possible.

Aye!

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80s albums sound very overproduced to me personally. I'm happy they got a tiny bit louder and full-bodied but that doesn't excuse the plague of reverb and overly loud synths.

Are you going to produce some albums soon so we can see your theories put into practice? Or are you just going to sit around and do nothing wasting years on this site with nothing better to do!?

 

big hmm

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I disagree. While there was a boat load of great music and producers in those days, technology today has made here and now the golden age.

 

Steely dan being the kings of production may disagree with me!

Trouble is a lot of producers and mixers cancel out technological advances by brick walling everything.

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I disagree. While there was a boat load of great music and producers in those days, technology today has made here and now the golden age.

 

Steely dan being the kings of production may disagree with me!

Trouble is a lot of producers and mixers cancel out technological advances by brick walling everything.

 

That may be but a dude with a good laptop has better quality control than studios in the 70's is what i have read. Not that this an area of expertise of mine.

 

Maybe music production was best in the 70's and music video production was best in the 80s.

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I hated a lot of new wave music because it was so synth heavy and cheesy sounding. The thing I disliked the most about pop in that decade was the ubiquitous saxophone. I took a sound engineering course once. I registered for it so the school would let me use their creative suite to do my design homework.
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I hated a lot of new wave music because it was so synth heavy and cheesy sounding. The thing I disliked the most about pop in that decade was the ubiquitous saxophone. I took a sound engineering course once. I registered for it so the school would let me use their creative suite to do my design homework.

Can you play the guitar like Richie Faulkner though? So good that you really should replace him immediately!?? And get out there on the FIREPOWER tour??

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70s > 80s = 90s > 00's onwards > 60s > everything before

 

80s got really overproduced to my ears. There's a reason GnR cut through the bright and shiny hair metal and have gone down in history as better than those bands with production more akin to Toys In The Attic than Hysteria. For a time in the late 70s and early 80s, production was at a big peak for may bands, not least Rush with PeW through Signals. Some 70s production was maybe still too rough around the edges to sound so clear today as it used to, but the best produced albums of the 70s are generally the best produced albums of all time, and still sound fresh. Albums like Born To Run, A Night At The Opera, basically anything Pink Floyd did in the 70s, Permanent Waves, Selling England By The Pound, Boston, Fragile, Who's Next, Quadrophenia, and so many others from that decade... every album since has been held to the high standard of some of these records.

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i just wanna say. there are a bunch of 80's albums that while overproduced and way to synth hot the music is so good i love the album anyway. Power windows i'm staring a hole right through you, lol

 

Mick

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Music is produced according to what the listener is going to hear it on - for example, Phil Spector and his "wall of sound" was made for AM radio - in mono ... At the time, I'm sure it sounded great on a car radio that had nothing but two small dash speakers, but on today's systems, I don;t think most of his productions do the music he produced justice ..

 

The Ronettes with today's technology would be incredible - not that they weren't, but Phil's mono techniques and the range in which he recorded things in just don;t do it justice ..

 

I was listening to Megadeth's Dystopia today, and even though I am really into retro gear and recordings, I think it captures the energy of the band better than some of their early works ..

 

With that said, I think what the 70s and 80s had over today's albums is the producer ..

 

A guy like Bob Ezrin was an absolute genius in the studio and knew what instruments went where on the frequency spectrum .. He put calliope in KISS' Flaming Youth and it was ingenious - it filled out areas that electric guitar don't ....

 

I think what we need is not different technology, but more producers who are knowledgeable in how to use it

Edited by Lucas
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Simmons pads called...they want your post back, fraroc.

 

Like there's anything wrong with being a Gen-Xer in a millennial body.

People are too obsessed with that generational crap it's nothing but bullshit really.

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