Who says you can’t teach an (59-year) old dawg new tricks? He’s heading into his seventh decade this year, and we bet he does more with his iTunes than you. We’re speaking of course about Ry Cooder (Rolling Stone‘s 8th Best Guitarist of all time, not the Tortoise song) and his newfound love for mastering albums using iTunes. Via NYT:
But he hasn?t been prolific as a solo artist recently, mostly because he has had trouble capturing the sound he wanted on a compact disc. On his new album, he achieved that sound with a little help from an unlikely source: Apple?s iTunes program.Last year, as Mr. Cooder worked on ?My Name Is Buddy,? an oddball folk and blues concept album about a red cat that travels through a mythic American landscape, he ran into familiar problems … ?It started to sound processed,? he said. ?We were losing the feeling of the thing, and this is not music that can withstand this.?
Then Mr. Cooder noticed something else: When he burned a copy of the album using Apple?s iTunes software, it sounded fine. He didn?t know why until one of his younger engineers told him that the default settings on iTunes apply a ?sound enhancer.? (It?s in the preferences menu, under ?playback.?) Usually, that feature sweetens the sound of digital music files, but Mr. Cooder so liked its effect on his studio recordings that he used it to master ? that is, make the final sound mixes ? his album. ?We didn?t do anything else to it,? he said.
NYT then quotes mastering master Dave Fridmann, who recounts that Clap Your Hands loved listening to the new record on their iTunes, adding, “it beefs things up and brightens them and you can definitely tell the difference.” So, sound engineers: Ever used the iTunes-master technique? We know how painstaking the mixing and mastering process is; here’s your shortcut. Or, at least you can make like Fridmann and playback the fruit of your knob-tweaking labor through your iTunes. Your clients will marvel at its beefy brightness.
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Or you could just boost the low and hi ends of you eq.
i tend to immediately turn off anything that says “Sound Enhancer” as it often tries for a “3-d Sound” or fake surround sound effect over stereo music. This, of course, is awful and mostly causes phase problems and headaches.
I’d recommend a good EQ and a stereo imager plug-in/outboard box over a consumer software’s features….
But hey, maybe it sounds great on blues concept albums about cats.
old people, jeez.
“Hey, this record is starting to sound too processed. What should we do?”
“I know! Let’s process it with Sound Enhancer!!”
BRILLIANT.
The question now of course is what’s it’s going to sound like when it’s ripped off CD and played in iTunes through sound enhancer AGAIN!
steve albini, forgive them, for they know not what they hear… (90min 130mb lecture here: http://www.mtsu.edu/~nadam/downloads/SteveAlbiniweb.mov )
i love it. perhaps we can master on the iPhone. APPLE KNOWS ALL!!
First I recoiled in terror, then I vomited, then I recoiled for a second time.
Unacceptable.
Great, now we have even less reason to spend thousands of dollars on mastering anymore, we can just do what Ry Cooder did and everyone will think it sounds cool anyway. Like we were doing before anyway. Real Player is just as good as iTunes, is just as good as Sonic Foundry, is just as good as Audio Desktop, it’s all the same, as long as the music is not crap. That’s the problem, a bad musician blames his mastering tools, or something like that.
This whole story has serious holes. While I do like the job the sound enhancer does, I did a couple of tests with it turned all the way up and it’s clear that the filter is NOT applied to ripped cds.
Someone’s either stupid, or lying.
This is definitely an amusing story. Ry is a great guitarist. His Into the Purple Valley album (1972) is one of the best sounding albums of the rock era, it seems to me. My Name Is Buddy is a quirky, interesting album. I’ll leave it to others to decide if they think it *sounds* as good as Ry’s earlier albums (I don’t think folks will have much trouble telling Buddy from Purple Valley, sonically, myself).
But I have to ask you — what happens when all those happy-go-lucky all-buttons-on iTunes folks — including Ry — listen to My Name Is Buddy on their iTunes — WITH ‘Sound Enhancer’ ON (as it defaulted to and as many folks leave it) — and NOW it’s got TWO LAYERS of this so-called ‘enhancement’ going on…
Too much of a good thing?
A recording engineer would have to think so. We’re trained to be logical. Or — at least — we used to be.