Category Archives: Music
Dynamic & Spacious Songs – Part 1
I’m been working a lot lately, and consequently have listened to a tremendous amount of music. Over the next week I’ll be posting some blog posts reflecting on choice favs from the past 2 weeks along with explanations from what made them ‘stick out’ to me. For some it’s the music in and of itself, and for others a combination of both the music and mixing.
1) Ricky Martin, Fuego de Noche
Most would see that title and move on (or flame me) thinking back to his ‘Livin’ La Vita Loca’ days. I honestly really disliked his music growing up. However, 4 years ago I was flipping through the music stations on our TV looking for some background noise for a late night work session and found this. I had no idea how profoundly good a musician Ricky was. I was blown away by the emotion in his singing and the way hey carried his voice in and out of the song. This is also one of the best piano/cello/vocal songs I’ve ever heard, both musically and technically. It’s extremely dynamic, to a point where it sits as a high up example of how powerful musical expression can be when done with nuance and care; it rises to great heights and plummets into quiet reflection, all with only 2 instruments and one vocal! It’s unfortunately very normal in our culture for constantly loud and unendingly ‘in your face’ music to be everywhere…in the church, our school kid’s iPods, in clubs, etc, etc. I think it’s for this reason I’m drawn to live or ‘unplugged’ versions of artists music lately…they are forced to give some space to music they wouldn’t otherwise under the thumb of a record company in the studio. All that said, get over your dislike of ‘sentimental’ music and listen to this song. Listen to/watch it at the 480p quality setting if you can.
Reverb in Daughtry’s Latest
It seems like reverb has had limited use in the last 5-6 years for mainstream pop and rock music, except for the every now and then occurrence. Even in mainstream studio recorded worship music, it’s used somewhat sparingly in a historical context. It’s been very dry, compressed, loud, busy, etc…but not very ‘spacious’. I guess bands like Coldplay don’t fit that description, but you know what I mean?
Listen to Chris Daughtry’s latest single, ‘Crawling Back to You’ and the space the producers/engineers gave it:
(Listen at higher quality if u can)
It’s a different sort of space and I think it sounds awesome, especially on quality speakers. Other effects in this track aside, I really like its use of reverb. For his voice it sounds like a couple verbs, one of which has a time sync’d pre-delay (so it it’s on/off beat). The drums sound equally awesome, with a perfect amount of decay on their medium-large room sound-you don’t really notice it during the chorus or bridges…but definitely in the verses. The overall sound seems like a throwback to the ‘Celine Dion sound’ for my mixing ears. That’s all for today.
