do you think it helped vk fandom in any way?? really curious.
I think I mentioned it before, but I prefer when bands do costumes or makeup or something visual with their act, and it makes them less interesting if they don’t. Sure, the music can be great, but it would have to be something extraordinary for me to bother watching a live performance of some normies in shirts and jeans.
But now that I’m exploring asian metal, I’m starting to develop another bias: against singing in English. When I check out a band like this, I’d prefer them to have something that makes them different from western metal. It can be instrumentation (which is why I like folk metal), but the most straightforward and obvious thing would be singing in their native language. Like, what was the point of me digging up some Vietnamese metalcore band if I close my eyes and they’re basically indistinguishable from a western one? And then I open my eyes, and they’re a bunch of nerds in shirts and jeans. 
Like, come on man. I’m gonna need more than that.
I can still end up liking the band of course, but at this point having English lyrics is pretty much an obstacle that I have to mentally surmount to get there.
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I was talking with some of the cool fellas on my Discord, and proposed the idea that Dir en grey should follow PHALARIS up with an unplugged mini-album of retakes. No ASOM-style shenanigans either; true effort needs to be put in. We came up with enough songs for an album. Here are some of our picks:
- Otogi
- JESSICA
- Phenomenon
- Toguro
- dead tree
- audrey
- Tefutefu
- 304 Goushitsu, Hakushi no Sakura
- Rinkaku
- Aka
- GARDEN
- Sajou no Uta
- mushi
- DRAIN AWAY
There’s probably more, but you get the point. If you’re looking for me to say something controversial, it’s that Dir en grey fell into the seven-string trap. This is my personal theory here, but there’s a paradox in that even though seven strings affords more immediate flexibility, you have less overall choice in tunings to play around with (If this seems paradoxical to you, explore the number of overall tunings for 8 and 9 string guitars and watch the variety evaporate). The low string commands respect; after all you added it so why not take advantage of it? Except that when you wrap around the scale and start digging into G and F#, the guitar enters bass territory. Multiply this by three and it’s a musical mudslide. I said somewhere else that Drop C is the sweet spot, but if you asked me where the absolute limit was I’d say (for seven strings) Drop A / A Standard. Anything under that sounds more muddy, less heavy. B Standard is heavy enough out the box. I’ve been a lifelong fan of this band, and I’ve watched them slowly slide from E Standard all the way to A Standard, and I sense a resistance to go the other way. The band doesn’t want to go soft, but like I said going even heavier has diminishing returns. So they’re wandering this valley of A and exhausted almost all the things that sound interesting.
So go touch an acoustic guitar and get Takumi on the piano, and bust out an album that would make the undecided re-rec cheer. No unnecessary ooga-booga; bring melody first and foremost. Dir en grey are at their best when they do ballads. Their visual material stands the test of time because of simple but strong melodies. Their new stuff is more rhythm than melody, especially the heavier stuff that all merges into an amorphous blob of Bull, and even the lifelong fan in me will admit this direction is stale. So take the daring leap. Make an acoustic album of ballads. Expand the palette again.
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I think it’s mostly Kaoru who has fallen into a slump of “ride the low A, give 'em the same syncopated rhythm again, hit refresh and do it again” in a lot of ways. I first noticed it with how often that same rhythmic motif appeared across TIW - and while it’s a catchy vibe, it gets stale when used over and over. it becomes exactly that ooga-booga riffage you’re talking about I think. Die at least seems to still break out the 6, I think there’s even a song or two on ARCHE where he’s using a 6-string in C# while Kaoru is using his 7 in A. In a lot of ways, Die’s ideas are what I think keep melodically and harmonically interesting ideas in the band’s music. If he, Takumi, and Kyo took point on producing an acoustic EP, it would be gorgeous.
I’d argue though that there’s just as wide a plethora of alternative tunings for 7-strings as for 6-strings, they just don’t get used and thus not propagated. You can take any alt tuning for a 6-string, and make the lowest string be an octave below whatever you’ve tuned the regular A string to, and you end up with big chunky chord voicings suddenly being available to you. Kind of like how Devin Townsend adopted his open C tunings to 7-strings by just adding another octave below the A string tuned to G.
I also think that, even as guitars approach “bass territory,” the timbre is still entirely different. Part of it is what the pickups are capturing, part of it is the scale length and string thickness, and a HUGE part of it is the voicings of guitar amps as opposed to bass amps - the former is a cutting out a lot of low end and A LOOOOT of high end, the latter is closer to an FRFR system. There’s a reason why Animals as Leaders, even using 8-string guitars in drop E, still record bass and program synth bass in that same octave for their albums. The timbre of a bass playing a low E is very different from a detuned guitar, even after we apply heavy distortion to both instruments. When mixing music in the style of Meshuggah, I end up treating the bass and the guitars very differently.
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Also, I realized as I was typing that last reply that I seem to always have some kind of answer to your posts in here - I promise I’m not trying to be contrarian, you just happen to post things that are well thought out, as well as often in my wheelhouse of audio and guitar. You get me thinking about these things and approaching them in my mind in a way I haven’t had to before, which I really do appreciate
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I don’t know why but I Imagine If Initial’l would have went into the Wafuu-Kei or Showa Kayou-Kei direction, they would have executed it really good.
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KAKUMAY actually became a good band.
In hindsight I realize that An was not fit for the VK scene whatsowever imo. I think his voice is more suitable for the Indie J-Pop scene which to be fair applies to alot of VK vocalist but especially An because his voice is so far away from the Typical VK vocalist cliche (You either got a Kyo-clone, a RUKI-clone, and anything in between, An however does not fit anywhere imo)
Also, since Arlequin’s reputation is in the gutter rn, i wonder if Xaa-Xaa with AKI on vocals would work.
I just couldn’t listen to Merry past nu chemical rhetoric and I don’t know why.
As for hot takes, I hope the GazettE goes full djent/prog-metalcore for the next album. Or at least features another artist on a song. I think Chino Moreno (Deftones) would fit on one of GazettE’s more ballad-y type of track.
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remixes (that no one does anymore) aside, vk bands never do that, and I don’t see why gzt would even bother
Nah, i doubt they even knew each other, gzt even managed to be one of the bands that get “Literally who’ed” by Corey Taylor back in Knotfest japan interview back in 2016 (I mean he’s skipping a few names just because there’s too many of them, but still)
the more likely collaboration imo is BMTH ft. Kagami (DEXCORE) since Olli seems open to collab with anyone at this point so…
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Petit brabancon
You would think that this would be “A Perfect Circle” of Jrock, but so far it’s more of Kyo’s and Miya’s old demos garbage bin. They have a frickin Tokyo Shoegazer member ffs, you would think that everyone will involve in the writing/composing in some way, bringing their influence and sound into a perfect combination but nope, it’s almost all Miya’s.
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Kodou is pretty good.
What quality do you keep your music in?
The debate that’s as old as Tainted World! I can’t believe there was a time that I didn’t know what those funny looking numbers meant 
. But in all seriousness, this is a tricky question to navigate. My answer to this has changed over the years. On one end, you have the need to keep files at a practical size if you want to take them on the go. On the other hand, you don’t want to sacrifice quality either! Then you have to consider that most visual kei is not mastered or produced very well, and the audio equipment most people use aren’t guaranteed to be audiophile-grade, and if we want to be anal about it we can also talk about acoustics and perfecting the room for the experience, but there is also weight to media preservation, so the goal of this argument starts to get a bit hazy.
I’m not here to convince you to keep your files at a certain size. Rather, I’m here to talk about 24-bit music. One thing to consider when keeping a local collection is if you want FLAC or MP3. MP3 is great for keeping the size down, but you are subject to whatever settings the CD was ripped at. The file also can’t be adjusted later down the line without losing more quality. AAC is more efficient, and VBR is a nice feature, but still subject to the same issues. OGG splits the middle in a way that benefits nobody. So then you step into ALAC/FLAC/WAV territory, where in all honesty I can’t hear a difference between 320 CBR and 16-bit FLAC on a good day.
BUT
Things get different when we step up from 16-bit FLAC to 24-bit FLAC. You would think diminishing returns would kick in more, but it doesn’t. 24-bit ALAC sounds noticeably different from 16-bit ALAC for several albums in my library. The separation and sound stage feels much more advanced, as close to listening to vinyl as you’re going to get unless you want to get into DSD territory (but still doesn’t take the cake to a true LP experience IMO). The instrument that benefits the most from this is one that we don’t often talk about here - the drums! Yes, all the toms, cymbals, gongs, snares, and hi-hats feel more alive and advanced in 24-bit, with attack and decay feeling more consistent. Hearing percussion that doesn’t sound like shimmers or static is such a blessing. But ghost notes, light piano flutters, dead notes, and even the acoustics of the room it was recorded in are more detailed.
I’m really trying to explain this without the standard audiophile jargon such as “air” and “space”, but these are damn good descriptors of what I’m getting at.
But most importantly, these overlapping sounds are rendered with enough resolution for them to be perceived simultaneously, instead of emphasizing the loudest sound at any given moment. On 16-bit media, I find myself leaning into the guitar melody, but the drums capture my attention the most for the 24-bit version of the same song! I A/B’d this with my wife, and I got it right, so it’s not perceptual bias either. I know researchers say we shouldn’t be able to hear much above 20kHz, but I can’t explain the difference any other way.
However, all of this hinges on having an audio setup that can reveal all of these details. It doesn’t need to break the bank - I use HD600s powered by a Boss Katana 50 mk2 guitar amp plugged directly into my computer through USB. This runs for about $568 currently - that’s pricey, but not $1000! And even this is overkill. You can get great headphones and a killer DAC for equal or lower price and still get to the goal, but you have to make sure that every part of the audio chain is set to the highest quality possible. I use iTunes, so I set up my preferences like this:
So I suppose my unpopular opinion is that 24-bit music is a substantial improvement over the 16-bit counterparts. Even for visual kei - I have some 24-bit early Lycaon and while it’s not as much of an improvement as 24-bit BORN, it’s there! I totally understand everyone’s audio workflow is different, but I also believe you can’t judge 24-bit music to be useless until you are able to hear it as intended. I prefer it whenever I can get my hands on it. After all, space is (relatively) cheap these days! In fact, it might even ruin music a bit for you. When your ears hear a track you’ve listened to fifty times in a 16-bit environment, the details in a 24-bit version of the same song will stick out. And going back to anything lower than 320 MP3? Forget it. The song feels flat.
I totally encourage VK bands to release more of their music in 24-bit. It’s a good thing.
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While I fully agree that 24-bit music over 16-bit resolution, what are you hearing in the frequency spectrum between the two?
As far as I’ve known, bit depth controls only dynamic range. There should be zero difference in frequency response between different bit-depths, at least until you start going down far enough to incur bit-crushing. Frequency range/response should be dictated by sample rates. And up-sampling anything if you’re only listening to the audio shouldn’t have any kind of effect at all - there’s zero data in the file above Nyquist. You only really need to up-sample if you’re manipulating the audio in a way that can add harmonic saturation, so that you can avoid aliasing.
I absolutely would understand hearing a difference in space and ambience though!! Reverb/delay tails can get quiet very quickly, and at lower bit depths these can disappear more quickly, and a higher bit depth will give you much more room under 0dBFS before the sounds disappear into nothingness (96dB for 16-bit, 144dB for 24-bit). I fully believe you could be hearing that extra sense of ambience from that!!
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I would say that I don’t hear anything new, but that what I hear I hear with more resolution and clarity. The drums are the quickest example, but there was another song where I could hear the guitarist sliding over the strings ever so slightly and I thought that detail was cool too!
That’s absolutely fascinating to me
What were the songs? I would love to try and do some listening tests myself - even if I can only acquire a 24-bit file I can easily down-convert it myself. Might grab my roommate and have him flip between them for me so I can do a blind test
I just have one thing to say…
Stop to hear/rip in mp3 hahaha change to AAC please.
Its better lol
Drums on this track:
The other tracks that caught my attention is from the same album, 龍凰童子, but they haven’t uploaded it yet to YouTube. It’s the opening instrumental called 霓 that goes into the second track 龍葬. The harp (?) on the first track and the space around the opening vocals on the second track also stood out to me.
What are some of the hottest takes in here so far to sum it up a bit? 