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Re: (TV) On and off topic



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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