ragingmime

I a few days ago, I finished a new track called Black Zero, named after the character from my friend Tom Pinchuk’s Ruin. (Shameless plug: his upcoming hardcover, Hybrid Bastards, rocks!) Anyway, have a listen:

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After the break: audio geekery and what’s next for this song.

I haven’t compressed the song yet, so the song has really loud and quiet parts instead of sounding uniformly loud. As a result, the song currently looks like this:

This is opposed to the Prodigy’s “Invaders Must Die,” which looks like this:

The Prodigy song does have distinct quiet and loud parts, but when it gets loud, it’s cranked to 11. In digital audio, the amplitude of a sound wave is measured as a decimal between 1.0 and -1.0, where 0 is silence. Anything higher than 1.0 or lower than -1.0 will clip, causing really nasty-sounding digital distortion – which sounds decidedly less awesome than analog distortion.

Anyway, Liam Howlett and friends (ok, probably just Howlett) have gotten the track basically as loud as it can go, and it’s a better listen for it. I’ve mostly avoided compression myself because it can often rob songs of their expressiveness – imagine if you took a recording of a jazz pianist and compressed it so that each note was played at the same volume. It’d sound like it was being played by a robot. But with dance music, it’s kinda expected – compression gives songs an extra oomph and reduces headaches for DJs. The trick is to do it gently, so listeners don’t get worn out by five minutes of full-blast audio.

When you hear this song next, it’ll probably have a few tweaks to the mix – I rushed it a bit to get it in for the Together Bedroom Producer competition – and I’ll probably cave to the in-your-face sound of compression.

Tags: Music