Re: (TV) On and off topic

[Maurice Rickard <maurice@mac.com>]

At 10:31 PM -0800 12/5/01, Michael Olcsvary wrote:
> Off topic:  Why do all the electric guitars on the radio drone in the
> background like electric razors?

The goal is probably an aggressive noise/crunch kind of thing 
(depending on the genre--which one did you have in mind?).  It's hard 
to get vocals through that, however, so you put the hypercompressed 
vocal up front ("'Cause that's the way the Beatles did it, 
maaaaan..."), and squash every last dynamic out of the 2-mix so it's 
"radio friendly," thereby reducing your already compressed (from the 
distortion) guitars into background hum.  Remember: if you vary 
dynamics at all for even a fraction of a second, or if you in any way 
fail to shove your song down the listener's ears as hard as 
everything else on the radio, the listener will get distracted.  Then 
they'll start channel surfing, forget to listen to the back 
announcements and the ads, and not buy stuff (your record among 
them), and then the terrorists will already have won.

Fortunately, to prevent all that, most radio stations hypercompress 
everything anyway, but it's better if you compress it too, just to be 
sure.

HTH,
Maurice
--
Maurice Rickard
http://mauricerickard.com/
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