if we’re just talking production, does anyone else actually like the mix/master of TIW? or am i in a tiny minority?
Uroboros isn’t my favourite of theirs compositionally, but that’s another album i think ends up so interesting and compelling to me because of the bizarre-ass mix decisions someone made. I’ve heard it remastered and expanded - but not only was that less interesting to me, i think i wouldn’t care for the album at all if that’s the only way i heard it.
I don’t think my mix engineering skills are enough for me to completely understand why i like these sorta mixes… But both albums, they’re definitely consistent in their sound throughout, and that matters a lot to me. The cymbals don’t pop out in one track and stay quiet in the next, for example.
And the instruments falling over eachother, relatively un-EQ’d, leaving Kyo’s voice to take the hit in volume - i think that does a lot to widen the sound of the band. I can rarely tell what any single instrument is doing - i just ride a wave on casual listens and if i’m paying more attention, listening for one instrument feels like discovering it.
Plus vocals recorded loud but mixed soft is like my favourite trope in guitars music already - i think that gives the sense of “bigness” to the whole ensemble, and prevents you from hearing the song as The Lead Vocals and then The Background Instrumental.
I’m the biggest Sustain the Untruth stan, but the version on Arche is strange! I see why most people don’t like it… they took everything new about that track and rolled it back; the synths cut less, the track doesn’t whomp and roll with sidechains, and Kyo’s voice floats in top of everything with no interactions. If you haven’t already, listen to the original single mix - it’s a way more dynamic master that leans 100% into its experiments
Just like rinkaku’s first mix, the vocals are buried enough to move organically with the song, instead of against it.
TL;DR i love when Diru fucks up their mix in a dense, mid-heavy way cuz it sounds more wholistic to me, but Vulgar and Macabre are still their best masters overall.
I love the master of TIW but I don’t agree with the characterization: “I can rarely tell what any single instrument is doing”. On TIW I can feel like I can hear every instrument with perfect clarity. They’re perfectly spaced from each other while still feeling full and cohesive. On Uroboros (original) I can actually still hear everything technically, but less so especially the low growls.
I think what is a good master is subjective, some black metal fans I’ve seen won’t listen to anything that doesn’t sound like it was recorded with an old mp3 player. But I’m just confused with the characterizations of TIW as muddy as clarity feels like it should be objective. Maybe it was just made for my ears
‘Production’ is the creative design process behind the album. How it sounds, which instruments play which parts, how the audio is filtered and effected, etc. This is also an umbrella term for the whole music-making process.
‘Mixing’ is the balance of instruments in volume and frequency placement (or ‘EQ’). Effects like compression are typically used on each instrument as part of this balance.
‘Mastering’ is the treatment to the final rendered files to add compression, more EQ, and volume balancing so the album flows well without issues between tracks. Mastering is the last stage before an album gets pressed.
For what it’s worth, TIW has an okay (not great) mix but an absolutely horrible master that completely destroys its dynamic range, forcing everything to be brickwalled and removing subtlety in the quieter tracks. Having said that, it does feel like perhaps too much compression and distortion was also added in the mixing phase which only compounds the problem.
TMOAB is an album with a similar aesthetic to TIW but manages to do it right; it’s raw and distorted in all the right places while also being very gentle when it needs to be.
I think the meaning of the three words are well understood, but your example is a great one of how hard it can be to point at some quality (say, harsh compression) and say at what stage of production it came from
OG UROBOROS is technically ‘not good’ in many ways. The drums sound like garbage cans and paint pots. Everything is really raw and dry. It’s quite ‘punk’ in its slapdash aesthetic. However, this does add to the crazed unpredictability of the album. It’s like a continuation of TMOAB’s sound albeit with much more complex compositions. The mix itself feels like an afterthought and was probably rushed. What I like about this version regardless of its failings is it feels sincere, deeply passionate, and of the moment, something that the remaster lacks.
Nu-UROBOROS is much deeper and darker with reverb all over like it was recorded in a cathedral. It sounds massive, and the dirt is gone. I get why they made this decision artistically but ultimately find myself coming back to the original mix more often. The remaster is just too clean. This album benefits from a layer of grime.
Side-note: I can’t tell if the drums were entirely re-recorded or whether Tue Madsen switched Shinya out completely for samples.
Sorry to be boring. I was replying to this comment:
Just because an album has discernible bass and the instruments sit well in the frequency field doesn’t mean it has a good master, it means the mixer has done their job right.
Radiohead popularised “stem” around the In Rainbows era, and for some reason the term stuck regardless of context.
The mastering has to play some part in it because when they remastered Uroboros they made the low growls more discernable - unless the term remastering includes remixing. As a side - I think everything about the recording, mix and audio quality on TIW is great.
Yea same. I feel like the only content we get these days is the band talking about how deep their lyrics are and how hard they had to struggle and find together to write [album title]. They feel way too professional and seem to forget how important it is to connect with people through that.
The term “remix” has generally been taken to mean mashups, like ‘Numb/Encore,’ or cases where a DJ has taken bits of a song and added other parts on top (like Skrillex remixing a Lady Gaga song for a mixtape). But listening to Remastered & Expanded, I can clearly hear a different mix going on - the drum shells are replaced by samples, the bass tone is a bit different, and just the overall balance of instruments is different. It’s clear to my ears that the ‘Remastered & Expanded’ is also fundamentally a different mix than the original
Absolutely. ‘Remix’ is an fairly broad idea that ranges from
simple rebalancing of a song’s constituent parts (e.g. UROBOROS R&E), to
re-editing those parts into a similar but new track (e.g. Sustain the untruth REMIX, ARCHE disc 2), to
composing an entirely new piece of music and simply laying the vocals over the top (e.g. embryo ウテウテブギウギ哀歌).
Those are the main ideas. Some other examples include Mash-up, Dub, Extended, Chopped & Screwed, etc.
UROBOROS R&E is a remix in the same way that The Beatles’ White Album from 2018 is a remix (although more liberties were taken in DEG’s case).
UROBOROS original release was recorded and mixed by Yasushi “Koni-young” Konishi, who also mixed TMOAB (which is why they have a similar feel). Interestingly, he also recorded (but didn’t mix) the vastly superior single version of Hageshisa. UROBOROS was mastered by Ted Jensen.
UROBOROS R&E was of course mixed by Tue Madsen and mastered by Alan Douches (the DSS team).
Yeah, most likely. The Internet was beginning to get huge in 2007. Certain websites (like ACIDplanet) and bands like NIN had been releasing multi-tracks for a while before this, but not many were aware of it. When Radiohead released their own tracks as “stems”, that got a lot of eyeballs. From that point, it was rare for the term to be used correctly.
‘Stem’ is actually a fairly old term from film audio that was co-opted by the music industry. It means a sub-mix of several consolidated multi-tracks. So for example, your percussion multi-tracks might consist of toms, kicks, hats as separate tracks, while the stem for that would be simply ‘drums’ on one track.
Yeah this is what I’ve always known stems to be, and what my stem print tracks in my mixing template are meant to be - a simple way for me to print just those submixes down as needed (most recently for a drummer who was filling in for a band I’d mixed and mastered for, he wanted the drum stem to study and the rest of the instrumental stems to practice along to before the show). My frustration has grown as more and more people IN THE AUDIO WORLD are using “stems” and “multis” interchangeably, people who should KNOW BETTER and yet I’m still correcting them
Yeah and that broadness just creates ambiguity and confusion imo. Like if I’m referring to a Beatles “remix” most people will probably assume I’m talking about a song from ‘Love,’ but I’m probably more likely to be referring to Giles Martin’s stereo mixes on White Album 2018!! Whereas so many remastered albums are ALSO given a fresh mix, but that gets sidelined and everybody focuses on the “master” part of that
Im joining the “I dont have an issue with how TiW sounds massive”. Haha. But I do have to wonder how it could have sounded if treated differently as having seen them perform the album live and on live recordings some of the songs or at least aspects of certain songs sound so much more massive than the studio versions. And i mean in a big way, not “well its live, it should do” kinda way. Haha.
The way I’d describe TIW’s sound is thusly: Let’s say you bought a kitten and kept it in a small sealed box. You feed and water it through a hole in the side. Eventually, as the kitten grows into a cat, it fills the container completely, its body becoming increasingly crushed and distorted as it itself becomes a cuboid, trapped and stifled in an airless prison.
Now, you could’ve just opened the box when the cat got too big so it could have space to run and breathe and do whatever cats do, but you didn’t, and now it’s broken forever.
Yeeeeep. TIW was slammed into the limiter too hard, so everything seems to start at 100% and then when the song needs to get bigger it literally cannot, and instead gets smaller in some cases
