The line between raw and badly produced

[Kes-Es]

Yeah I know, I'll probably go back to lurking quicklike here soon but it's been on my mind lately that the line between endearingly raw and just annoyingly produced is both very thin and very obscured I've heard the former about my tunes but I think the latter. Anyhow I'm sure other people wonder this, I'm capable of the clean production and such, it just feels heartless and cold to me. Discuss.

[Electric_Head]

It sure is a fine line to tread.
I tend to lean on the raw side which some folks have said is too raw.
But I think it is not raw enough.
That`s where subjective listening comes into it.
However, even listening subjectively sometimes is not enough to make me say that something is good.

[wub]

I hate and I mean fucking HATE when a mixdown takes all the life out of a tune. But I listen to stuff like Bluezr, who is lo-fi as fuck with his productions - turntable, Boss SP-303 and all bounced out to tape AND THATS IT. Fucking lushness. Grainy as hell, sure, but I love that sound, character, warmth, whatever you want to call it. Makes a tune sound alive, much more than any polished identikit piece of shit I hear 100 times a day online.

Case in point - http://bluezr.bandcamp.com/track/5150-211

10m27s of lo-fi gloriousness. Shitty sound quality but tbh that just adds to it IMO. The amount of times I see people talking about sampling white noise/vinyl crackle, even going so far as to use vinyl crackle emulation VSTs, and for fucking WHAT??!?! Get it right on a tape deck, end of.

[hasezwei]

I hate and I mean fucking HATE when a mixdown takes all the life out of a tune. But I listen to stuff like Bluezr, who is lo-fi as fuck with his productions - turntable, Boss SP-303 and all bounced out to tape AND THATS IT. Fucking lushness. Grainy as hell, sure, but I love that sound, character, warmth, whatever you want to call it. Makes a tune sound alive, much more than any polished identikit piece of shit I hear 100 times a day online.

Case in point - http://bluezr.bandcamp.com/track/5150-211

10m27s of lo-fi gloriousness. Shitty sound quality but tbh that just adds to it IMO. The amount of times I see people talking about sampling white noise/vinyl crackle, even going so far as to use vinyl crackle emulation VSTs, and for fucking WHAT??!?! Get it right on a tape deck, end of.

i don't have a tape deck
but i've been thinking about rawness a lot lately, there's old software-based dubstep records that sound incredibly raw anyway. there must be something they did differently back then, and i'm fairly sure they didn't use tape emulations et cetera.
maybe the mastering engineers?

[NoMan_dubstep]

i think its more of a case of ... what didnt eveyone do back then. the tighter production side of things i thik is more favoured therefore more people trying to get good with it. personally i think the rawness has to be in the right place. when a synth is gritty as hell and in the right place there is nothing better.

[hudson]

Rawness is an art, almost an instrument. Look at guys like Flying Lotus, and the older Dubstep artists, the production is raw, but still good. It's really just another production technique I guess, mixes make songs just as much as the notes, so a really raw, grainy mix only works if the song calls for it. Would bro-step sound good or be at all popular if it stuck with the roughness of the original Dubstep productions? No, it almost depends entirely on the mix to make it good. Another example is Sigur Ros; they wouldn't sound as good without the clean production, massive reverbs and studio tricks, but, for example, the really old Bright Eyes/Conor Oberst recordings would just sound weird if they were recorded on anything but a shitty four track in a basement. It's all about context. If you're sound calls for good, clean mixes, do it! But if it doesn't, don't.

EDIT: I'm rambling a fuck load for some reason, sorry.
Another example that just popped in to my head is in art (paintings and such). You can look at the subject and the colors of the painting as the song, and the way the artist paints it as the mixdown. A good artist can take a fucking pear or something and turn it into the most heart-breaking or happy or scariest thing you've ever seen, just by using the right techniques. Sometimes the right technique is a watery brush and washed out colors, sometimes it's dry and scratchy paint. Think of the mix like that I guess.

Fuck, I don't even know if any of this belongs in this thread

[jrisreal]

I hate and I mean fucking HATE when a mixdown takes all the life out of a tune. But I listen to stuff like Bluezr, who is lo-fi as fuck with his productions - turntable, Boss SP-303 and all bounced out to tape AND THATS IT. Fucking lushness. Grainy as hell, sure, but I love that sound, character, warmth, whatever you want to call it. Makes a tune sound alive, much more than any polished identikit piece of shit I hear 100 times a day online.

Case in point - http://bluezr.bandcamp.com/track/5150-211

10m27s of lo-fi gloriousness. Shitty sound quality but tbh that just adds to it IMO. The amount of times I see people talking about sampling white noise/vinyl crackle, even going so far as to use vinyl crackle emulation VSTs, and for fucking WHAT??!?! Get it right on a tape deck, end of.

i KNOW man! Absolutely hate when instruments sacrifice their character and fullness just to be able to fit in with other instruments. They don't need to do that live do they? So for my mixdowns, I use a lot of sidechain EQ'ing so that when theres room there, the instrument will use it and will back off when another instrument needs it. Dont know if that will cause problems down the road, but I don't mind.

[Lucifa]

Reminds me of old 2004/2005 Grime instrumentals, the mix downs were raw as fuck and you'd be lucky to find ones with over 128kbps bit rates. That just added to the charm and grittyness though. I remember actually preferring a tinny, shoddy limewire rip of a Low Deep instrumental I had, to a decent quality version of the same instrumental I came across years later.

You can definitely have a too cleanly produced track IMO. And I reckon present Dubstep suffers a lot from it. All the DJ Fresh/Nero/Chase & Status anthems at the moment are fantastically mixed, immaculately so, razor sharp synths and crystal clear highs, but they ultimately any character or soul. You can argue thats solely down to the artist, but I do reckon the cleaniness contributes.

It'd make sense as you have these dozens of plug-ins thats sole purpose is to dirty up the track.

[Teknicyde]

Post DNB mixdown 'rules'... rrrr....

Why my hiphop sounds as it does... Slam into tube > record.

[.onelove.]

Post DNB mixdown 'rules'... rrrr....

Why my hiphop sounds as it does... Slam into tube > record.

Tube? Elaborate

[efence]

Case in point - http://bluezr.bandcamp.com/track/5150-211

10m27s of lo-fi gloriousness. Shitty sound quality but tbh that just adds to it IMO. The amount of times I see people talking about sampling white noise/vinyl crackle, even going so far as to use vinyl crackle emulation VSTs, and for fucking WHAT??!?! Get it right on a tape deck, end of.

omg, if people like this i should start sifting through my old 4 tracks. i have 2 boxes of tapes of old drum machines and crappy samplers. theres an easy way to get this sound. old samplers no eq recorded on tape....BLAM! thats the secret.

[hutyluty]

i dont like "clean" dubstep- sounds too much like rnb to me, really well produced minimal beats. Theres got to be a bit of an edge to it or else its kind of just wishy washy and you dont notice it. little bit of dist on things helps i find

[Kes-Es]

More interesting topic than I thought, great responses.
I dunno I make lots of different sorts of music so this applies to everything, I hear guys like Burial or Mount kimbie on one side and there is a raw quality to it, whether it's the sample use or what, it's there, and it makes me like their music better, on the opposite side you hear guys like 16bit who's old stuff felt like it was all distortion, songwriting makes up for it though so nobody minded. It's a thin line and I feel like I got a foot on each side. Personally I dig it when it's there and I don't really dig overproduced tunes.
Fuck I dunno I love shoegaze.

[narcissus]

all about the contrast between clean/dirty elements

[Artie_Fufkin]

I like black metal because of the terrible quality
But indeed I think having things too polished can make the music lose a certain feeling. Like the difference between older thrash/punk/death metal and the stuff today where everything is super tight and has squeaky clean production and its just really sterile.

[amphibian]

Yeah I know, I'll probably go back to lurking quicklike here soon but it's been on my mind lately that the line between endearingly raw and just annoyingly produced is both very thin and very obscured I've heard the former about my tunes but I think the latter. Anyhow I'm sure other people wonder this, I'm capable of the clean production and such, it just feels heartless and cold to me. Discuss.

Purely an opinion piece. I feel quite the opposite.

[hudson]

Almost everything I do in Reason goes through a few Scream 4s on the Tape setting

[nowaysj]

Love dirty mixes. But it is like the song needs to call for it. And I just happen to like songs that call for it:)

If I have to err, I err on the side of dirty

[Basic A]

Post DNB mixdown 'rules'... rrrr....

Why my hiphop sounds as it does... Slam into tube > record.

Tube? Elaborate

PAiA Limiter, run it through a few times over, gives it all a real warm, nostalgic feel... I dont mean to slack on mixdowns, but I do... why the left field stuff I make all has a certain 'sound' about it... slack mixes, tube limiters, shitty mics... Like noways said, it has to call for it... Id never work that way in dubstep.

[Manic Harmonic]

Just use a match eq and match it to a shitty recording of a punk rock song. Crass or something.


Just kidding. Although that could be an interesting idea. I've been having trouble with this recently... I listen to my older songs and they sound really raw. Back then, I wasn't doing as much eq-ing and compression, and overanalyzing all the sounds. A good idea (that I would like to try) would be to not focus much on getting each sound perfect, and then fix only the extremely problematic parts after the song is finished. That's pretty much what I was doing when I started out, except for the fixing the problematic sounds part. I also notice that a lot of songs that I consider "raw" are lacking in treble and have a really "warm" sound. Burial comes to mind.

Also, an old trick of mine was running certain sounds through a tape recording. Super cheap and effective when that's the sound you're going for.