Switched on Pop - Mastering Music (with Dallas Taylor of Twenty Thousand Hertz)

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

Dallas Taylor, host of the stellar sound design series Twenty Thousand Hertz, stops by to fill Nate in on the science and style of mastering: the subtle art that explains why Metallica had to re-release a controversial album, Kanye sounds so crisp, and why the best pop really pops.  Songs Discussed Lizzo - Juice Kanye West - Heartless Led Zeppelin - Stairway to heaven Pink Floyd - Money Daft Punk - Get Lucky Metallica - The Day That Never Comes DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince - He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper The Beatles - Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds Intrigued by mastering? Get your fix with the Twenty Thousand Hertz episode The [Compressed] History of Mastering. We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: https://voxmedia.iad1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_ewVXHPZIsQNlxCR?Source=note Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Hey, everybody, before we dive into this awesome episode, a quick announcement. Vox Media is doing a survey. It takes like five minutes to fill out, but doing so really helps them and us serve you up the best quality podcast stuff. So please take this survey at www. Voxmedia.com slash pod survey. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm sound designer Dallas Taylor.

And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So Nate, I wanted to tell you about this cool thing that I have gotten into. Who are you and what have you done with Charlie Harding? I don't know what you're talking about. Who's this Charlie Harding person? I seem to recall that I used to host the show with. songwriter Yeah, songwriter Charlie Harding.

Wait a minute. Dallas Taylor. It's coming back to me now. Wait, you're Dallas Taylor, host of the awesome podcast, 20,000 Hertz. And, you know, I guess since you're here, is there anything you want to talk about?

Well, I guess I can. I mean, I'm always kind of working on something anyway. So here's something that I've been thinking about a lot. But first, I want to start with an example. So I want you to tell me which one of these two examples sound better to you. So here's one. So that's the first one.

So now take a listen to the second version of this. Let me know what you think. Okay. Do you have any overall thoughts? Do you hear any differences between the two? You know, Dallas, my initial reaction is that, and I'm not going to necessarily have the vocabulary here, but the second example you played sounds like juicier.

It sounds thicker. It sounds deep. deeper. It makes my head nod with that much more intensity. What's going on here? So nothing is different other than I turn the second one up. Oh. But all of what you said is exactly the phenomenon that is totally appropriate. Our ears are weird and they react to things in different ways.

So everything that you said is absolutely accurate. Let's run that back one more time because that's blowing my mind. Okay, can we listen to that first example again? Let's do it. And the second? That's wild. It kind of sounds like I'm listening to a different song, but you're telling me that all that's changed is that you've upped the volume of the second example. Yeah, the second example is two decibels louder. So what musical phenomenon are we dealing with right now?

That's a little example of how our ears hear the world slightly differently. What it means is that our ears don't necessarily hear everything exactly as the world presents them. You know, we kind of know that dogs can hear really high pitches, and we know that our hearing kind of, of gets the top end of our hearing kind of goes away with age, but we can't hear super low frequencies, but there's slopes in there too. And so by turning it up just a little bit, you hear a little bit more bass, you hear a little bit more treble, it sounds a little bit more full, and it kind of tricks your ears a little bit. That's not necessarily what I'm here for. I'm here to demystify the dark art of mastering. And that's been a lot of the motivation for how mastering has been approached for a while and for a lot of different reasons. I am so glad that Dallas, my long-time co-host here, is bringing this topic to the table because it's sort of a scarlet letter that I wear as a musicologist. I don't really know what mastering is. I hear this term all the time.

I see it on, you know, liner notes for a record mastered by so-and-so. But, man, I would be lying if I said I really understood this dark art. you're referring to. So I'm excited to dig into this topic. Me too. And I guess the first question that I always have about this is what is the difference between mixing and mastering? So there's a big difference. The mix is, you know, after you compile all the recordings and, you know, all the takes from the drums, the vocals, all these things you compile all this together, mixing is taking all of those elements. You're mixing the individual instruments. You're mixing in the voice, you're kind of doing panning,

you're adding effects, volume, compression, EQ, auto tune, all that stuff. So there's a ton to it. I mean, the vast majority of the creative process, that's all happening like in the mix. A lot of times, especially with really big artists,

they may be mixing and working with different engineers and different cities and different time periods and all this stuff. And eventually all these things have to kind of be put together next to each other. And if you just put them together as they are straight from the mix, can kind of sound wonky.

Is it like carpentry? You put your table together and all the different elements go into place and are joined properly with all the right nails and fasteners. But then at the very end, you need to like stain the thing. You need to finish it. You need to give it a glossy sheen. Or like furniture picking. They all have to work together in the end.

It might be an awesome piece. But this other piece might be an awesome piece, but they totally clash. And so that sometimes happens even with great mixes to begin with. Okay, so you've just described mixing. And honestly, it kind of seems like that's everything. It's like how loud instruments are relative to one another. It affects what is left? Like what is mastering add to that final mix?

Well, there's so many different places that that music is going to go. It could go at least traditionally into a cassette or an 8-track. vinyl record nowadays it's going to go to streaming it's going to go to YouTube it's going to go to these different places so they all have slightly different constraints or benefits and so the mastering process is is a bit of like what is it going toward and how can we maximize everything in this sonically to kind of get us there but the real trick here is that like it's extraordinarily hard to find any pre-mastered tracks out there usually artists keep that super close close to the vest. And they just don't share the premasters because it's pretty much like sharing

unfinished work. Gotcha. But with a lot of Google searching, I did find one track that I thought was pretty cool that was unmastered. This is Heartless by Kanye West. So I don't even think Kanye wanted this to go out, but somebody somewhere leaked like a snippet of this unmastered version on the internet. And his reaction a couple days later was just to post the entire. unmastered version on his blog. This was back in 2008. Yeah. And then shortly after it released on iTunes mastered and all that stuff.

But, you know, it's kind of through these really serendipitous, like, leaks and things that give us even a glimpse into, like, what mastering does. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of times it's real subtle. So, you know, that was the unmastered version. And here's the fully mastered, you know, as it is on the album version. Wow. Soutle, but it's there.

Can we run those back one more time to really hear the difference? Sure. Here's the first one. And here's the mastered version. This is wild. I mean, hearing them back to back, again, it's subtle, but the mastered version is deeper and thicker and more like immersive somehow. A little wider. I can see why you wouldn't want the unmastered version to be released.

It does sound a little naked or something. Yeah, and slightly louder. It's only like two decibels louder. You can clearly hear that like the EQ kind of pushes the 808 up a little bit more. And there's a little bit more compression on the vocals, which sometimes they'll pop out and the brick wall will kind of push that stuff down. But generally like mastering is super subtle. Like there's no enemy here. But it is kind of a dark art.

And it's generally kind of performed by these like elite golden ear type of specialist. And pretty much all music gets mastered in some form or another. like all the way from classical music to really, you know, punchy pop tracks. Generally with classical music, they want it to stay as true as possible to the dynamic range. And so if you ever kind of just turn on a classical piece, it might be really quiet. And then you turn it up and then you forget about it. And then you turn on your pop track and it blows your eardrums. That's definitely happened to me before.

It's generally the final step after mixing and before it goes. to broad audiences or streaming or anything. And the mastering engineer doesn't really have anything more than just a stereo mix to work with. And so they're really analytical on what has been presented to them. I mean, I also believe that, like, just having kind of some,

having someone like a golden ear at the end of the process is really helpful. It's someone who's heard, you know, who knows hundreds of albums before and we'll hear more albums and they're kind of know what's happening in the industry. and stylistically from like a high level audio file perspective. Is that a term that's used golden ear?

Depends on the connotation. I don't. I love it. It should be. I love it. If someone calls you a golden ear, it's kind of like you can hear some real nuance. But it's funny. With music and sound in general, you never know who's just like blowing smoke and who's

a real golden ear. I think it does tell you something about the process you're describing, which is this subtle. I mean, you called it at the very start of the show, like a dark art. And it is because when you're mastering, a masterer, is that a word? A masterer? I like it. Usually it's going to be called a mastering engineer.

A mastering engineer. They're not able to go in and tweak any individual sounds within the recording. They take the finished recording that's already been mixed and just do these subtle tweaks of volume and compression. Yeah, that's a very subtle task. Well, it really goes back to also these things could be mixed in different places with different inspiration. And, you know, someone may, you know, nowadays can get inspiration at 3 o'clock in the morning, go down to their basement and kind of start building and making and crafting and really love something and go, you know, this is, you know, spend a few days or whatever and make it great. And then they send it off to the mastering engineer.

And then the mastering engineer is like, oh, there's no frequency content below 80 hertz. and it's because your speakers didn't have that. So they're kind of there to make sure that like every aspect sonically is presented properly. And usually there are these hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear and room and calibration, which kind of, you know, I feel good about. You know, I want my music to be kind of like, I don't know, taken care of by someone who's kind of seen it all. It makes sense.

You're recording a track. You listen back to it and your home speakers and you think this sounds, amazing. This is perfect. But then someone else playing it out of their iPhone on the subway might think, oh, wait, I'm not hearing any bass in here. The mastering engineer is the guardian of those sounds. And we'll make sure that they're going to sound good no matter where they're coming from. And they're really thinking about all that stuff. Mastering engineers understand that a lot of things are being played back in earbuds appropriately. But sometimes these tiny speakers have resonant frequencies unto themselves. and like certain frequencies can kind of scream at you and can kind of hurt. Yeah. And some of them can kind of cause hearing damage in some ways just because the actual physical thing that you put in your ear could have certain resonant frequencies that are louder than what anybody else has heard in context.

Right. And so mastering engineers understand this. Mixers understand this generally. So they're just trying to make sure that this piece of music is being presented in the best way possible in all mediums. But generally, the number one thing that they're thinking about is, is making. making sure that they're matching the songs across the whole album, because it could be kind of mixed by lots of different people.

They're kind of setting the pacing and the silence between songs and stuff like that. And they also just want to know, where is this going, you know, what streaming services, you know, YouTube or iTunes or Spotify or any of these things, or if it's going to even going to be a vinyl mix, which is kind of coming back a lot. And they kind of need to know how the physical mechanism actually works. And so a lot of, you know, most of this stuff is really small adjustments to sound. generally. It's changes to tone and EQ and dynamic range. But the thing that they get the most hate for is how loud things are getting. I'm curious to know how mastering evolved over time.

Like, was this always the concern? What was mastering like in the early days? Yeah, so music used to be a lot more dynamic. So that's really just a fancy way of saying that they used to be a lot louder in comparison to like how soft it was. So it used to be a lot softer and a lot louder and to kind of get us back into the world of like the 70s style of mastering and stuff this is the softest part of stairway to heaven so i've done no volume adjustment on this and i think you'll notice that you kind of have to lean in it's a little bit quieter than everything we've heard so far yeah very faint like you're hearing uh elves in the woods from a distance dancing to a mysterious tune okay cool but if you wanted me to like

turn that up to an appropriate level where it's like, oh, this sounds nice and full. Like you would have naturally turned that up a little bit. But had I done that, this loud part would really be screaming at you because of the dynamic range. So it kind of started the soft part softer so the loud part was clear. But here's the loudest part of stairway to heaven. Yeah, that is raging. That is like the epitome of loud rock and roll. Yeah, people always want things to be like, how can you take it louder and louder?

but this is an example of like good psychology. What they do is they start at a volume that's quieter and you physically turn up your volume. So they turn up your stereo at the beginning of the song. So then you leave it alone, you get into it, whatever. And then it forces it to be louder. And you don't really notice. It's just like the intensity is something that doesn't happen nowadays. I mean, interestingly, even the waveform of stairway to heaven is kind of like the stairway up and up and up, even in volume.

Interesting. So today you wouldn't find a track with those extreme lows and those extreme highs of volumes. I imagine it would, if we looked at the waveform of a contemporary song, it would be like flatter, not a staircase, but one of those moving walkways in the airport or something. It also has to do with the way that we consume music. If you think about back, you know, maybe in the 70s, you may have a stereo and you kind of just set the level and you kind of listen to, full albums. You know, you start and you play the whole thing. This is something that, you know, a little sidebar, I really enjoy now very intentionally listening to full albums from, from top to bottom. But it's something that we don't do a lot of now with playlists and all this stuff and can kind of bounce all over the place with volume. Yeah, totally. So another thing to keep in mind is that the format was in analog. And so these were things like the vinyl record, the cassette. And for analog, there was you had to really have this like headroom you had to have this buffer for allowing these dynamics and music

and so this this was kind of set at a lower volume than what it turned into later because if you think about it like you could you could literally bounce the record needle out of the groove with bass at a certain time wow yeah that's an amazing image i love it okay yeah so there's a lot of limitations to the physical medium too So in addition to, you know, kind of listening to albums from top to bottom, there was also these kind of physical limitations. And that's just one of many. In the 80s, there was this in this giant seismic shift because of digital technology. It kind of changed everything, as we know. So that kind of initially, that initially manifested itself as the CD.

Right. So now you no longer have to worry about having so much base that the needle on your turntable. jumps out of the groove of the record you're playing. But I have to imagine there's still some pitfalls when it comes to music in the digital era. Yes. So with every new technology and new advancement, we soon find out that they can be abused. And so in this case, what happened is now in the digital world, we have a ceiling.

We have the maximum level that you can make a digital file all the way up to here. And it is not debatable. It is a hard, fast line, whereas in the analog world, It was a little mushy and you had to be conservative with how you did that and how you approached that. But now we know all the way within, you know, 0.000,000,000, 1% of max loudness where to go. And so now songs could be louder than ever. And so we've been living through something called the loudness war all the way back from when it started in the 1980s. So it's like too much of a good thing.

You don't have the same limitations on loudness that you did in the analog era, but that freedom has been abused. Possibly, yeah. Possibly. Possibly. Debatably. So I think if you think about that very first example I played for you, where if we just inch it up a little bit, you get a perceived volume difference.

Now, assuming that if we just go louder and louder and louder, louder than the other track that you're hearing, then naturally the idea would be like, well, if this is louder, going to be better. But there's only so far you can go in digital stuff. These waveforms are being squished and squished and squished into the tiniest amount of dynamic range. And it's not even new. Like this didn't just happen with digital technology.

The Beatles actually got Abbey Road to buy this fancy compressor just because they were trying to compete with the volume coming out of Motown. Oh, really? So this was something leading into the digital world. Right. And so essentially now we have this finite ceiling of loudness. Everyone can push all the way toward it. We can make the volume of anything, any track max out right before the absolute maximum possible level. And again, with this old analog tech, it's like you had to be really conservative.

And since then, like every single year, the average volume, so the average between the quietest and the loudest part, has gone up and up and up since every single year. Whoa. Wait, that's kind of staggering. Like since the dawn of digital, music has been getting, like, from an absolute perspective, just louder and louder? If you look across the board of all music, it's been getting louder and louder and louder. That's wild. Okay. Yeah. So to rewind, I'm going to just acclimate you a little bit to the difference in just volume that happens straight off of the record.

Here's Pink Floyd, Money. So that's a digital file. And then nowadays, kind of your average level is more like this. So this is Dua Lipa. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. I would argue that the sound of pop music and hip hop nowadays is kind of defined by what some would call a limitation or like an overabuse, but it kind of works now.

Yeah, no, it's really interesting to compare the Pig Floyd track from the 70s to the Dua Lepa track from the last few years. It's like the Dua Lepa track, every element is like pushed to the maximum volume limit. And you're listening and you listen to it and it's just like, it's overwhelming in a good way. Yeah, it's not bad. So it's not an argument that it's bad or good. It's just the difference in style of where things have moved. So these loudness wars are still ongoing.

And every track you hear is whether you're aware of it or not is sort of competing for your oral attention. Yeah. And so while it might work with pop music or hip hop or something like that, I think we could agree that not all music needs that treatment. but that other type of music has to compete on the same level as that. Otherwise, you might get a heavy metal track that's eight decibels lower than a bubblegum pop track. And that's embarrassing. Yeah, having your heavy metal track sound lighter than like a Carly Ray Jepson song would be very embarrassing. So, yeah, are there artists who are sort of pushing back against some of these trends in mastering?

Yeah, so right in the middle of this war in the 90s, like it just kept creeping and creeping and creeping. Nirvana's Nevermind kind of went against that trend. And it was mastered with a little bit more headroom. So if you would have just listened to It next to another track, it would have been a little bit quieter. But I don't think anybody went back and went, oh, never mind was really quiet. Because we have the- I've certainly never had that. Because we have the volume with us. And even more recently, like Daff Punk, Get Lucky, had more punch because of it.

These were conscious decisions by someone to give themselves a little bit more, even though their song might sound a little bit quieter than somebody else's. That's fascinating. A way to stand out today is actually to maybe decrease the volume of your track a little and introduce a little more dynamic range. Yeah. That's retreat to move forward, sort of. And a little sidebar here, just to remember, we haven't even talked about MP3.

And so this was also happening about the time where MP3 started to take over for wave files. So wave files are these pristine files. It's full quality. But you got to get rid of something when you're going to take this giant full quality song and make it one, one hundredth the size. So a lot of this started back over the, like in the Napster days. Like imagine like you got your backstreet boy CD. You pop it into your computer. You have a dial-up internet connection and you want to get this shared to Napster.

So what are you going to do? You're going to do all the settings that like, oh, I like the file size of that. And it's smaller and smaller. And you listen to it and you go, hi, that sounds fine to me. Because without context of what it could sound like, it's kind of okay. But that kind of led us into kind of where we're going because it's almost like watching, you know, these tiny MP3 files is kind of like watching YouTube or Netflix before it fully buffers. You know, it's kind of like fuzzy. And then it clicks into HD or 4K. That's kind of what the MP3 was doing with mute. music. You know, it's almost like back in the day when we had standard definition television sets, we didn't really complain about it. When we had DVDs, we watched it, and it's looked amazing compared to VHS. But if you look at a DVD now, it looks awful. And that's kind of what a lot of music has been for a really long time. And so the good news is there is hope, but there have been some really bad offenders along the way. Why don't we take a quick break and then maybe we'll return for a sort of rogues gallery of some of the worst casualties of the MP3 era and the loudness wars.

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Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Okay, we're back. We are deep in the weeds of mastering. And we're going to get to know this dark art of music a little bit better by actually studying some of its casualties now. Yeah. So I would say that the first thing that comes to mind when anyone talks about mastering gone wrong,

is the death magnetic story by Metallica. I'm going to play you what came off of the CD. Okay. And I'd just love for you to give me your reaction. Sounds good. So here's the day that never comes off of the original CD. Okay, initial impression. It rocks deeply.

Okay. But we're talking about mastering. So I'm now have a little more, you know, vocabulary to talk about this. Okay, so I'm hearing like one thing is that the vocals are kind of hard to hear. They feel like they're buried amidst all the other instruments. Like it's hard to differentiate one from the other. It feels a little flat, perhaps. So a lot, there are a lot of complaints from Metallica fans that it sounded really, really bad compared to what they've heard before. And I will admit, I am also a Metallica fan. So hearing that, knowing what, where I'm going with this is kind of

painful to hear that version of it. But it's also a great example to play when you don't know where it's going, because our brains accept what we hear. Remember I was just talking about MP3s and kind of downgraded quality and all that stuff? Well, I think it's going to be real clear here soon. So what happened was, is this CD came out. Around the same time this album came out, there was a new guitar hero where you can play this track in Guitar Hero. But very quickly, as the internet does, they started to put two and two together and realize, wait a second, something about the Guitar Hero version sounds different than the actual version that came out on the CD.

And so someone posted this to the internet. So here's the Guitar Hero version of that same track. We're going to play these back to back. So here's the very beginning of the Guitar Hero version again. And here's the very beginning of the CD version. The guitar hero one, the first one, sounds better. A lot. The CD was like overdriven so far that the actual signal is just straight up distorting the entire track.

So here it is again. Wait, this is crazy. Like the CD itself sounds blown out. It sounds crunchy and staticy and crappy. But then when you play the guitar hero version, it sounds, oh, that's what Metallica sounds like. So what happened here? So, you know, the one thing that I found in the research and stuff is, like, artists typically won't acknowledge it. They'll just slowly kind of fix it over time.

So since then, I believe the only place you can hear this version of it is from the CD. And let's give everyone, you know, credit here. It may have just been a mistake. That would explain a lot. But the actual mastering engineer has semi come on the record while through a private email to say that, you know, he's, that it was kind of overdriven already before it got to him, and he wasn't proud of this, but he hopes that, like, this example here

will bring some sort of good as far as backlash against these volume wars. Fascinating, yeah. Even the most, like, you know, even like the most go-to mastering engineer, this mastering engineer is Ted Jensen out of Nashville, which is just an icon, was like this was a problem.

Now, to be fair, since then, you know, if you listen to YouTube or the music video or iTunes or any of that stuff, this version has been scrubbed. But as far as I'm aware, this was the very first CD version. But that's not the only place where sometimes mastering gets a little wrong. And I recently did a show about the 808 kick drum and just hanging out with DJ Jazzy Jeff, as podcast hosts do. And he dropped this nugget on me. When we did, he's the DJ, I'm the rapper, was the first. record that I used 808 and 808 samples on that I wanted the kick drum to really resonate.

And I remember fighting with the engineer because I wanted to push the envelope on how loud and how deep I wanted the 808 because I knew there were some hip hop records that you would get in a car and you would play it and the entire car would vibrate. And I was like, I want that. I had to fight with the engineer to turn it up, and he would turn it down and turn it up, and I had to kind of explain to him, like, I understand that there is a technical way that you think you're supposed to do something. I want to push that envelope.

I need this to be this loud. I need to be almost at the brink that it's not distorting and it's not overpowering everything, but I need this to be the focal point of the record. Hip hop is something that the drums have to drive the record. and I got him to allow me to do it to the point that I loved it. And what I never realized was I never told the mastering engineer that I wanted that. And he thought it was a mistake. And he took all of the 808 out of the album.

And I don't think I've ever said this in public. I can't listen to he's the DJ. I'm the rapper now. That is the biggest record we've ever done. And I absolutely hate the way that it sounds. they sucked all of the bottom in from the 808 out in mastering. Yeah, pretty heartbreaking. Wow, wait.

This is such a different take on this phenomenon we've been talking about where DJ Jazzy Jeff actually wants to sort of push the limits and get that speaker rattling, body shaking sound by reaching the upper limits of what the human ear and human speakers can tolerate. Well, when this album came out, it was kind of during this transition too. So maybe this mastering engineer didn't come across that very much or was like, you can't technically do that. I mean, he is already trying to fight with the engineer of like what he wanted because it's what he heard, you know, out on the street and with people. But this was just slowly moving its way into the mainstream.

And so to support that, you know, it's heartbreaking that he says he can't even listen to this because it's the biggest thing that they've done. But, you know, for sake of analysis here, here is he's the DJ. I'm the rapper straight from the CD. So put your mind back in that 808 thing that real ringy sound. And if you're listening on earbuds right now, you might not notice it, but I promise you if you're in the car right now

or if you're listening on a big stereo, you're going to hear the difference here. So this is maybe our interpretation of maybe what he meant for it to sound like. It's a huge difference. Not to be bitten. But as it seems, some suckers keep forgetting the rules about rapping, but that's all right. Because in the next five minutes.

It's a huge difference. Yeah, it really is. And I love that because maybe now DJ Jazzy Jeff can listen to this classic song by him and the fresh prints and not feel so crestfallen over what could have been. Sadly, that was put together by my team. And I don't know if DJ Jazzy Jeff is ever going to hear it. But, you know, this is an amazing transition to what remastering is, because this would be an awesome album to remaster. Yeah, I'm so glad you brought this up because it's something I see again and again, you know, classic albums remastered. And honestly, once again, I don't really know what that means.

So, and I don't know, frankly, if it's just kind of like a marketing ploy to get you to buy something that you might already have in your collection. It's absolutely a marketing ploy, but it actually is legitimate. to. And so what remastering is is where you take these original reel-to-reel tapes and with newer technology, you know, as we get better and better digital technology and newer tech, these things can be kind of re-transfered in higher quality ways. And so all kinds of albums, especially albums that people continuously buy, you know, people like Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, the Rolling stones, like these things get re-released over and over again because people buy them. And when a new remaster comes out, you know, services like, I,

iTunes and Spotify usually remove the older versions from their library, which is interesting because kind of the whole perception of what classic music sounds like is being reshaped every time a new remaster comes out. So like as we replace the old versions with newer ones, we're kind of rewriting history at the same time, but it's not all bad because they sound amazing. Yeah. And it shows that a classic record is a living object.

And it will sound different and mean different to different people at different times. What might be an example that we could use to like hear an original versus remastered version? My favorite example is Lucy in the Sky from the Beatles. So let's listen to exactly what it is straight off the original master. Okay, I've got that in my ears. Okay, so years, years, years later. They do a new version. This is not the only remaster, by the way.

So here's the 2009 version that was from the same source. I believe it was a stereo mix. So this is their kind of remastered version, 2009. Interesting. Okay, very similar, but I definitely hear a difference. A little cleaner around the edges, a little more clarity in the vocals. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so nine years later, they did another remaster.

Now, is it for marketing? Who knows? But this time they were able to get a hold of the original multi-track tapes, which is a lot more depth. And so this version like completely like blew up with with audio files. So why don't we do this? I'm going to play the 2009 version one more time. And then we're going to play the 2018 version right after it.

Great. Whoa. That's, I mean, it's too bad this is radio because my eyes are popping out of my head right now. That was such a different experience. You're saying that's the exact same original recordings. Yes. But remastered and it sounds like a different track. Yeah, so that was remixed and remastered because they had even more to go with in the 2018 version.

So the amazing thing is they've done this for a lot of the Beatles albums now. And it's something I don't even know if a lot of people know. And just a name drop a little bit because, you know, I work in a little bit of the music and the sound stuff. I actually wrote Rick Rubin because I have his email, you know. But I asked him as like, what's the best, you know, mastering thing that sticks out in your mind more than any other. And he's just like, the white album, the latest version of the white album just blew his mind off. And so there's this gold mine of new Beatles stuff. You know, marketing has told us, you know, here's a new remaster.

Here's a new remaster. You buy this, you buy this. But now this is awesome. These are great remasters. So that's one of a lot of examples of where remixing and remastering can make a huge difference with technology now. But kind of like recently this terrible thing happened where Universal Music is the biggest record label in the world. And recently there was a fire on the Universal Studios lot that just happened to catch a where. warehouse on fire that just so happened to have hundreds of thousands of original masters in it.

And so these are, you know, I can't even begin to start this list, but I'm going to just start throwing stuff out. Okay. Old stuff like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Billy Holliday, on the second line of eight lines. Patsy Klein, Chuck Berry, Elton, John, Leonard Skinner, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Buffett, Eagles, Aerosmith, Iggy Pop, Patty LaBelle, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Please Sting I'm just gonna skip around here REM Janet Jackson Guns and Roses Queen Latifah Sonic Youth No Doubt 9 inch Nail Snoop Dog Nirvana

Sound Garden Hull Beck Cheryl Crow Tupac M&M 50 Cent The Roots and it just keeps This is a scratching

the surface of what original Master tapes most likely burned in this fire at Universal

That is That is heavy. That's crazy. Yeah. So it's one of those things that you don't, you can't really understand what that, what that loss is for music without hearing the remaster that we just heard. So what that means is that we can't do that same experiment that we just heard with the, with the Beatles, Lucy in the sky with diamonds, with so many of these artists you've just mentioned. like unless they have already transferred the multi-track versions of these tapes to digital files now if they've done that already for some of these but it's most certainly not been done for all of these for all of them yeah because again it's a marketing thing like who who are we going to revive you know so you just never know so that's all these remastered tracks that could have been just gone up literally in flames yes yeah and so a lot of people are calling it the biggest loss in the the music recording history. But again, when we're talking about mastering and we're talking about remastering and all this stuff, it's like, why do we need these original tapes when we have what I have here on the CD? Well, now we know, without a shadow of a doubt, that like sometimes the best

sounding version of our favorite music is not what we have right now that's accessible. And one day, we could come back and make it better and more intentional from what the artist originally meant for it to sound like. And I think that's such a great takeaway here because remastering is not just about how can we make this sound like something, you know, of the present moment, but rather, you know, in this, in a hypothetical world where Lennon and McCartney had access to, you know, modern mastering tools, what might this music have sounded like? Like, let's bring it into technicolor. Well, Dallas, that was a slight downer of a note to end this episode on. Can we bring this conversation about mastering to a more positive conclusion? Yes. The great news is that mastering and remastering is going through a bit of another revitalization,

if you will, right now that a lot of people don't realize. So, you know, on one sense, the only physical medium that's growing in the music industry is vinyl. and I think anybody who actually plays things on a new vinyl especially there's a big misconception here about vinyl like sometimes you put on an old record onto a turntable it's all crackly and nasty and you're like this does not sound great well of course it doesn't it's been scratched in a case for 50 years yeah but like a new vinyl record on a great turntable

it sounds incredible and so this this is coming back the physical medium of taking an album pulling it out of a piece of artwork putting it on a turntable putting a needle on it and walking away and listening. And in this, mastering engineers just can't take the iTunes version and then just press it to vinyl because of all these problems of the actual physical medium. So that's kind of pulled people back to go, wait a second, we can have a little bit more juice here and a little bit more punch on this. But because we have to for vinyl. And so a lot of people might think that the vinyl record sounds better, but they can't put their finger on it. Well, it might be because

the vinyl record has these physical limitations that force it to have more dynamic range and more punch. Interesting. All the buzzwords that people say when they listen to vinyl records. Right, right, right. Oh, interesting. So it's not anything inherent about the medium of vinyl itself. It's more of the limitations that make it sound so refreshing maybe from what we're used to hearing on Spotify and iTunes, et cetera. I do believe that there is something to be said for the analog thing and not having bits and, you know, bit rates and sample rates and all that stuff. I think that there is, you know, a natural, a more naturalistic.

sound. Not to say that anything in digital is bad, because that's not true. Digital sounds amazing, but there are vinyl aspects. It's hard to know. I mean, all this stuff is such a mystery, because you might have a vinyl record that has been mastered completely differently, so you can't really compare that. But what I do know is that sometimes when you do hear it, you're like, wow, this sounds incredible. Like all these Beatles albums, I have the remasters on vinyl. And not only are they remixed and remastered, but they're also having to be forced onto vinyl, which was the original intent to begin with. So I kind of feel like it's like the best version of what was intended by the Beatles to begin with.

Sure, yeah. The great news is that I think it's really easy at this point to say that like streaming services are the problem. The great news here is that they're fixing this problem. And so there's a couple things I would say right off the bat while I have this airtime that I would say that you can do is... Get up on your soapbox. It's first off, you can go into Apple Music or Spotify or however you listen to music,

streaming music. And there's going to be a section in there in the settings where you can turn on high quality streaming. Yes, that will be more for your data plans, but it'll sound better. And it's a mark difference, in my opinion. So if you have a higher data plan or whatever, or if you're on Wi-Fi, I suggest go and switching over to high-quality streaming. That will immediately kind of like push us out of that like really bad MP3 zone and then start to kind of get higher quality music and be a little bit more discerning because of that. Nice. Yeah. But these streaming services also get complaints from listeners. And the number one complaint is, job.

giant jumps in volume. This also happened with commercial television. And Congress had to come in and regulate how loud commercials could be. But with music and streaming services, it's much more of like a self-policing thing. But what they want to do, you know, services like Spotify or whatever, like wants you to just enjoy your music without having to think about these giant changes in volume. Yeah. And so they're starting to measure loudness in a completely different way. They're measuring loudness from like an average level,

and then they're taking all of these average levels and then putting all the songs back to back. So what that means is they're not measuring it from the max level. Like it touches here, so we all, everything's super loud, but then you still get these varying, you know, if you listen to again that Led Zeppelin piece versus, you know, some new pop track, you're not getting that spike in volume. What they're doing is they're measuring these things as an average

and now putting all of those averages together. So the great news here is that now, we're in a world where like getting that dynamic range back to the artists, you know, volume as a tool. And for so long, that's been taken out of the toolbox. Right. But now due to the way that we listen, we now have volume as a tool again. And that's thanks to the streaming services, especially the ones that want things to just play coherently from one to the next. And really, if you're over compressing, if you're going too far to try to compete with that 90s and 2000s loudness war, you're just going to sound like kind of crumptory.

crunchy and kind of sad compared to giving more punch. Yeah. So whether intentionally or not the streaming services are now sort of playing the role of the UN in the loudness wars or something. Absolutely. They're mediating the conflict in their own self-interest. Yeah. And I know that iTunes even has like a special like mastered for iTunes badge where they're also

trying to fight the problem as well. So the amazing thing here is that artists know what they're doing, mastering engineers know what they're doing, mixing engineers know what they're doing. The people who are serving you this music want to make it better. We are all of these people and we are all music lovers. And I don't think that there's any kind of like bad person out there trying to like take your music and make it worse. It's that you can take comfort in knowing that like everyone in the chain understands it. And everyone in the chain wants to serve you the best version of this music. And it's really exciting.

And it even has gone so far that like certain artists, have been giving different masters for different platforms. So as an example, Janelle Monet actually put out two different masters for one for iTunes and one for YouTube. Now, it's real slight, but these are different, but these are different files, which is fascinating, that they're going this far to maximize audio fidelity. So one is slightly more compressed, a little bit louder, and that's the one that went on the CD and on iTunes, and that's this one. And then see if you can tell the difference. It's real slight, but here's a slightly more dynamic YouTube version.

I'm not sure I can hear the difference. Can we play them one more time? Sure. Here's the iTunes version. And then here's the YouTube version. Oh, wow. No, okay. I totally heard it that time.

I totally heard it. The YouTube version, the second one played. You could hear the ceiling a little more. there was more dynamic range. The first version, the iTunes version was a little bit more like packed to the upper limits.

It was a little louder and crunchier. I think I'm starting to get the hang of this mastering thing. And what's amazing about this is there's no better or worse here. And the reason that I wanted to play that track now is because that really illustrates just how much artists and the people along the way care when they're making a version for iTunes and a version for YouTube.

Like we're in a new renaissance. of the way that things are presented and people are going as far as to do tiny, tiny almost imperceptible differences to maximize something debatable to begin with. And it makes me so happy

to see people care about sound like that. You know, it's like for so long, music was almost like who could be the loudest. It's almost like if you took every photo on the internet and the, and you just made them all bright, like as bright as bright as pop.

to where it's stick out. Like that's what music has been for a long time. And now, thanks to like streaming services who are evening out volume in the tracks, artists can start to mix and master tracks like how they want it to sound and not to serve some, you know, be louder than the next person on the radio. So I'm glad to see that this is like pushing back on the alternate agendas of how we treat audio. And now like things can be the best they can be without any compromises. And really like the best tool that we're, like, the best tool that we're we all have as consumers is our volume knob. Like that can make things, if you want to listen to your music loud, listen to it loud. If you want to listen to it quiet, listen to it quiet. And the good news is, is like the industry knows that. This is so cool. Wow. I mean, not only does this shine light on this subtle musical phenomenon that I've always been aware of, but have never quite understood, it's, it'll make me think a lot differently about like when I listen to music and when I listen, you know on a streaming platform versus on the radio versus on a CD versus on vinyl and I appreciate this this note of hopefulness that that you're bringing here because I do recognize that it's

very easy to kind of just put on this curmudgeonly sort of air and say oh man music back in the day music sounded so good and now it's just been compressed and destroyed and corroded to Are you saying there's cynicism and music analysis? I mean, one might imagine someone saying such a thing. Surely not, surely not me. Dallas Taylor, I'm so glad you hijacked the co-hosting seat while my erstwhile podcast partner, Charlie Harding, is often babyland. Well, thank you so much for having me.

I've been a huge fan of Switched on Pop for a long time. So this has been a total thrill to do, and I cannot believe that I'm here. I want to tell people where they can find more of your work. I host a podcast called 20,000 Hertz. It's all spelled out. So you put in T, W, E, etc. And you're going to find another show that's all about sound and music and where we kind of take a teeny, tiny little sound.

And we just explode it into stories and the stories behind it and kind of how it was made and all this stuff. So you can find that in any podcast player just by searching without any numbers, 20,000 Hertz. Yeah, I've listened to pretty much. every episode. It's great. And the excerpt you played earlier from DJ Jazzy Jeff, like that's part of a whole show that you're doing. It's a whole show about the 808 drum machine and just how it completely revolutionized hip-hop. This episode of Switched On Pop was produced by Dallas

Taylor. Our mixing and editing is by Brandon McFarland. Our production fellow is Megan Lubin. Bridget Armstrong is our producer and our executive producers are Liz Nelson and and Neshot Kirwa. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can find more episodes of our show on any podcast player you like Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Radio Public, Iheart Radio. We're there. Reach out to us. Find us on www. www.Switchdownpop.com on Twitter at Switchdownpop. Instagram at Switched on Pop. We want to talk to you. So reach out and touch someone. All right, y'all, before we go, one more thing. We and Vox are conducting an audience survey to better serve you.

It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here. www.w.com slash pod survey. Until then, thanks for listening.