Why Music Used To Sound Better
Can he handle his manleys?
The downside of not watching tutorials is that it takes longer to figure things out by yourself. But this is outweighed by the upside: if all you ever do is copy other people’s tricks, you’ll never develop a sound of your own. The reason so much music sounds the same is that everyone’s copying each other thinking ‘this is what success sounds like.’ On top of that, everything is crammed full of autogains and peak limiters that flatten the sound, make it uniform, and crank up the volume.
Now, a peak limiter can be necessary sometimes—but usually, it’s not. The real issue is that, in the software, that tiny checkbox is set to ‘on’ by default. So lazy sound engineers don’t even bother checking, and everything ends up filled with clipped peaks.
Got a bit of hand cramp from driving. No, not the car: the problem with a digital sound studio is that you have to do everything with a mouse, even the mixing boards. An old-school studio engineer would ‘ride’ a channel with a mixing board, and yeah, you can do that digitally too, but it’s just a bit more cumbersome. Probably another reason why music used to sound better.
(And I haven’t even talked about oversampling or always applying dithering with maxed-out settings.)
Yesterday I had this insight when I started listening to other country tracks on SoundCloud. These are popular songs SoundCloud itself recommends to me, not songs I’ve painstakingly searched for:
AUCH! How is this even recommended by SoundCloud? I won’t name names—no need for drama—but it’s astounding that this kind of stuff passes for ‘normal’ on SoundCloud. And then I play my own track and suddenly feel pleased again:
And how does this guy have 340 likes? Not a single comment on the track? He must have paid for them. That makes it all the more bizarre, right? Let’s see what else SoundCloud serves me:
Another awful song, slightly better mastered, but you can hear how the sound engineer slapped an autopanner on the vocals to tone down their sharpness, which just makes the voice wash over you in weird waves. That’s not good mastering.
Next one: A three-time ACM “Entertainer of the Year” with 26 number-one hits, 15 billion streams, and over 20 million albums sold—you’d think that puts you in the pro league:
Never mind the painfully clichéd lyrics and cookie-cutter sound: anyone can hear that the guitar should have more compression because it’s bleeding into the vocals now.
In short, the bar isn’t set very high. It’s sloppy work, if you ask me. But when sloppy work becomes the standard—and this trend has been happening in literature for a while too—then eventually, people’s ears adapt to garbage.
I don’t think the decline in sound quality can be separated from brain plasticity. Laziness, automation, everything needing to be cheap and effortless—it all plays a part. An audience that only processes lyrics as wallpaper.
“Some people just like performing to make others happy,” Veer told me yesterday. Well, I get that. But that has nothing to do with the art of songwriting. And the fact that people find joy in predictable garbage with terrible sound is, to me, downright scary. I can’t really separate that from the growing trend of deeply rooted fascism everywhere. That too is the result of extensive brain damage.
Yours truly,
Martinus Benders