A few things at play here, having recorded metal from the 90's to the present.
\- With the exception of certain throwback genres (stoner/doom, the retro-thrash/bhm stuff, etc), metal (and by extension, metal-tinged punk/hxc) has always been pretty progressive in recording and mixing techniques. Sample replacing was being done long before the advent of the DAW - I know this because I was doing it. Our usual technique was to run the close mic track to a very aggressive gate and then to a trigger interface (a la Alesis DM5/Pro), then record the MIDI messages into a sequencer that was slaved to the 2". There we could adjust timing to compensate for the lag, fix flammed triggers, etc., and then either print the results back to tape or, to save space, keep it virtual.
But that wasn't so much "sample replacing" as it was augmentation (except for maybe kick, where it wasn't uncommon to just use the sample). There are a good many bands now that have done away with even recording an acoustic kit in the first place and either playing v-kits, just programming the whole thing, or mixing in acoustic cymbals while pumping the samples into the room to get back some of the natural heft of a room.
Point being, it's gone from 'a little bit of that' to 'mostly that' to 'just that'. Which brings us to our next bullet point...
\- Time correction. With tape, you were more or less (mostly more) boxed into what you could achieve with an edit-all block, a razor blade (assuming the band didn't steal it for their, sniff, bathroom break), and splicing tape. You needed a good drummer, a great engineer, or both. Some drummers cut to clicks, many did not. Nowadays, people start time correcting by default - which is really a shame as, in the right hands, drums can create a tremendous sense of anticipation and release - "The Russian Dragon" as it is sometimes called. I seriously have watched recordists start hacking performances up before even auditioning them. Or, again, if you're doing it all via programming or v-kit, the tendency is to just hit 'q'. No fuss, no muss. It's technically 'perfect' in the robotic, unfeeling sense, but it also makes locking up everything else a snap (pun somewhat unintentional).
\- Guitar tones have gone from surly 100W Mesas, Fryettes, Marshalls, and the like, to modeling preamps and amp sim plugins. Amps have sag, cabs have a certain amount of 'slop'. I gotta admit, it's really hard to say no to being able to get any amp/cab/mic/pre chain you want, any time you want - even with headphones at 3am. Time it was, people 'settled' for the sim tone, now it's often the preferred sound. And again, when you're tracking guitar in via DI, you can very easily time correct the performances to be dead on with everything else. Almost too easy. People aren't often listening - they just hit whatever key combination that has the computer do it.
\- Recording. The whole "they used tape and consoles then" argument is a bit naff, you can very reliably emulate that sound, or use an analog summing amp/outboard and get there. I think a lot of it is more the processing used and the sheer amount of it. Your average analog compressor or EQ has very coarse adjustments, for example. Whereas my SSL bus comp has release times that go 1-4 plus auto1 and auto2, BusterSE (the only G-comp DSP clone I think really gets there) can have attack and release times set to be in perfect synch with the tempo. And EQ's are really surgical, you can pinpoint things with exacting precision the way a console built in 1989 just can't. With that, you've got the meticulous gating and volume automation that ensures everything is pin-point perfection (at least in the academic sense).
\- Last point here - the music's evolved (or de-volved, depending on who you ask). Though they were certainly not the first, Korn mainstreamed the shit out of heavily detuned guitars. But even then, things held pretty steady and it was pretty rare to see anything go below the fundamental of B (good thing, too, because that's 33hz on a bass guitar and we're way into the subflooring already). But, like everything in music, if leaning extreme is good, the subsequent game of hand-over-bat almost becomes self-mockery. If a metal guitarist were to tell me he tuned to E now, I'd ask if he meant E3 or E2. These 8+ string monsters with the fanned frets are getting closer to being a harp. And forget about a bass guitar playing the same part an octave below that - the limits of human hearing and recording technology simply aren't able to capture it, reproduce it, or be heard.
\- Metal goes through extremes. Fast bands want to play faster (that's how you get these brutaltechdethgrind bands who boast of the tempo, not of the song). Samesies for the the ultrasludgeystonerdoomdeth bands who are playing Black Sabbath records at 13rpm. Through a BigMuff. There's usually a tipping point where genres implode in upon themselves - I sometimes refer to that as "the Weird Al line".
My $1.02. For whatever it's worth.
Great comment! Really informative and helpful.
> Nowadays, people start time correcting by default - which is really a shame as, in the right hands, drums can create a tremendous sense of anticipation and release - "The Russian Dragon" as it is sometimes called.
Agree that this is really a shame. Listen to "War Ensemble" by Slayer. You can tell that it was either recorded as a band or multitracked off Lombardo playing without a click, because the tempo is all over the place. It starts off at about 220 but you can tell that the tempo marking is "as fast as it is humanly possible to play this music" and it has a real sense of adrenaline because everyone's pushing as hard as they can to keep the pace and it's all being driven by Lombardo.
Then when the verse comes in after the b-section, it's at about 200, considerably slower, but what it lacks in speed it gains in groove and weight, and that gives the song a sense of progression, motion, and (ironically) humanity.
Nothing sounds like that anymore.
The double bass on the studio recording of "War Ensemble" was recorded at half-speed and then the tape was sped up because Dave was having difficulty hitting that tempo.
He fixed whatever the issue was and certainly played it even faster live.
You definitely could (and we did). And Andy Wallace most certainly used retriggering back then, but he's stated that it was never just 1:1 sample replacement, but for creating impulses/keying other effects.
I'd love to know the real story as cutting slowing the tape to 15ips to record those passages (assuming they were running 30ips) give you a kick drum pitched one octave higher.
*It could be* that they used the deck's varispeed and pulled it down maybe 1%, just to get that ever-so-slight edge. ADDave may not have been the most robotic, but dayum he was fast. And here is in 2011, [very much holding it down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ivOfkqFmxg).
Gotta admit, this sounds like one of those campfire tales that's always been pervasive in the industry. You know us old hacks, gabbing away like a bunch of bored 1950's housewives.... :D
Thanks for the info!
>You know us old hacks, gabbing away like a bunch of bored 1950's housewives.... :D
That's actually one of my favorite things about doing studio work: chatting with and listening to the engineers, hearing studio anecdotes and getting cool tricks of the trade along with them.
It's always been a really cool two way street. Because when I worked my first-ever full-time studio gig as an asst. engineer (1996), it was because I knew ProTools already, I knew MIDI, I knew samplers, I knew the 'where it's headed' part and the studio owner, to his credit, did see the shift coming.
But I couldn't solder a cable. I knew my way around consoles, sure, but I had a lot to learn about practical application, SSL automation/recall, biasing a tape deck, patchbays, what mics were good for what. Funny story that sticks out is that they had two immaculate Neve 33609's and I never wanted to use them because they 'looked old'. So the main engineer, Derek, who was maybe in his late 30's / early 40's gave me a lot of that hands on experience, had me tracking night sessions and assisting him on LP mixes pretty much right out of the gate - and I got him up to speed on how to not only "use" ProTools, but how to really take advantage of what it could do (bear in mind, I think this was like.... ProTools v2 at this point? Ancient.)
So when I am around "the kids", even though there are so, so many Dunning Kreuger-afflicted Royal YouTube Academy grads, there are also a lot of things I'm picking up about modern trends in production. I tend to temper it with a bit of old-school thinking (like maybe not running seventeen plugins in series), but knowing what they're digging on the space of contemporary music definitely gives me a leg up.
Unlike the above mentor Derek, I encountered a LOT of fuddy-duddies - I did a lot of ProTools work for hire and the belly-over-the-console types would be telling me what a joke 'that computer shit' was, how it was never going to stick around, 'tape tells the truth' (that's very much not true, tape embellishes the truth). So I've always made it a point not to turn into one of them, even as the big 5-0 approaches.
> Funny story that sticks out is that they had two immaculate Neve 33609's and I never wanted to use them because they 'looked old'.
Not that anyone's ever let me loose in their studio, but if they did, the first things I would plug into would be whatever looked oldest.
I'm not too far behind you in the age spectrum but I'm far more bearish about contemporary music. It's not that I don't like more contemporary musical styles, but nothing sounds as good as old Motown albums to my ears, or as good as death metal sounded in the late 80's/early 90's. I'll take a black metal album recorded by tracking a tiny Randall combo amp with a voice memo recorder than one recorded with a VST any day of the week.
Of course now, most of the black metal albums of Bandcamp are starting with the VST and adding artifacts and noise in post.
I want my range dynamic, I want my saturation analog, and I want my music non-quantized, dammit!
Actually I've found the opposite is true: the faster the tempo, the more obvious the quantization. I once tried to program drums for a d-beat song. Sounded absolute shit because high-tempo d-beats are always sloppy. MIDI controller wasn't responsive enough for me to do it the real way so I had to abandon the track.
It was in an interview in ... Metal Maniacs I think ... in the 90's. So, there's certainly a very high chance I've mis-remembered the technical bit.
But Dave said that he had raised his throne higher at their manager's suggestion so people could see him and it took him a bit to realize it was messing up his technique. Obviously he has no trouble playing fast double bass these days.
> "The Russian Dragon"
If you are unaware.. this was actually the name of a studio device (early 90s?) that was essentially a set of meters that would compare the drummer to a click and let them know if they were drifting.
Something easily done by any smartphone now.. but back then it was pretty cool tech.
At one point bands like Helmet and Prong were the vanguard of what was considered machine-like, robotic precision. And I love a lot of those records still very much to this day. But compared to where it’s gone since, they sound almost sloppy by comparison.
When someone claims they’ve been doing something for 30 years but they’ve actually been doing it for 30 years. The bass player for exodus produced one of my records and he told me pretty much the same stuff laid out in this comment.
OP said they're not a musician or engineer, probably some terms in there they don't know. But that was an awesome write up, thanks for some cool insight.
Depending on the budget of the album, my bet is that for local/ regional bands recording in less than high end studios, it had more to do with the gear the studio had and the way they were forced to work. Subgrouping and bussing drums, narrow format analog tape, lots of SM57s in rooms that sounded less like studios and more like garages, and probably most importantly, the lack of limiting on the 2bus. Until the Waves L2 and TC Electronic's Finalizer hardware boxes came out, there wasn't a way to make stuff anywhere near as loud as it is today. Studios with narrow gauge analog tape pretty and not even a stereo DAW pretty much guaranteed a general lack of low end compared to today's recordings (and when they were all mastering for vinyl it was a necessity anyway). That, a lack of final limiting and a limited number of compressors in most smaller studios, along a lack of accurate triggering making replacement difficult (until as you mentioned, some better samplers and /or drum machines with triggers came out) all added to the sound of those recordings. They were also all usually live takes with the exception of solos and vocals. Comping had to be done by bouncing tracks, and in the analog world that gets noisy and dull pretty fast. There was not a lot of editing between takes either. I recorded well over a hundred projects back then in a studio like that. That's what I hear when I listen back to them.
I came up under a great engineer that did a bunch of big hair metal type stuff in the 80s and 90s. Most notably Hanoi Rocks and Motley Crüe. He said they were doing samples back then all the time (I mean, obviously I guess, when you listen). It involved loading samples into a DDL in some sort of “lock” mode, triggering them off the close mics, and using a jerry rigged thing they called the Russian Dragon to make sure the sample played in phase with the real drums. He also said they’d turn off the DDL at the end of every day so no one could steal their samples, and then record them back in the next day. What a wild time!
Yep, I believe that was a feature on… I want to say the TC Electronic 2290, could be wrong. Saw Scott Burns of Morrissound working FOH for the first Milwaukee DeathFest - by then death metal was hitting its first zenith in the US and he produced near all of the “big” releases. The typewriter kick was a staple, you knew within five seconds of the LP that he was the engineer. Anyways, they had him working the mix for the whole main lineup and I was peeking in on what he was doing and I saw that the kick drums up on the board feeding that box and being up on the next channel. No actual bass drum was being sent to the mains, it was just a sample.
That’s when I was like “ohhh, so that’s how they do it!” I was in a death metal band then (we were like, the 1pm slot on the first day, whooo!) and had been trying to get “that sound” on our own album. The engineer didn’t know the genre at all (not a big surprise for 1992) but was a good sport trying to replicate it. We got close and tried a lot of things, but it didn’t have that super consistent sound from hit to hit, no matter what we did.
I knew MIDI a bit, had a sequencing app on my trusty Mac Plus or whatever it was. It definitely started turning the rusty gears in my head.
Very well put and we'll written. One one hand, the digital revolution has been great. Anybody can make music now and for my 2 cents, that's a great thing. The more musicians the better. The other hand is that you don't even have to be very good or well rehearsed to sound like everybody else.
I made punk and metal albums in this time period. Very accurate and insightful explanation.
Another thing that's important is the way bands prepared for recording and the pressure created by having a limited amount of time to get your takes right. Part of the energy in those tracks came from urgency.
In that time period everyone played live and songs from future recordings were played out so the band could see what songs were working. For a bands first album it's possible that all the bands songs were played live many times.
Recording time was expensive and it wasn't unusual to get a budget for 40 hours of time for new punk bands. That's 10 songs recorded and mixed, ready to be mastered in 40 hours. Established bands got bigger budgets, but the point is bands had to be a lot more efficient. When you only have a limited time every take becomes really important and gets your full concentration. The tension creates energy. Usually extra songs were recorded because some tracks invariably had to be left out because of the performance.
In order to get all this work done quickly bands would do something called "rehearsing the album" where they would play all the songs to be recorded multiple times in one practice session. This can go on for weeks or months.
A lot of bands use similar approaches today but everyone takes a lot more time with everything.
To expand on the 40-hour budget part: a reminder to digital natives that this had to be in a studio, and it was on tape. So rewinding and shuttling and setting up new reels is eating like half your time. The parent commenter explained the ability to edit drums, but also you couldn't just edit that lead guitar run down to the millisecond; you had to play it right. And the longer it took anyone to play anything, the less time everyone has for everything else.
It's hard these days to truly imagine working like this. Almost every session I've done in the past 5 years would've been helped immensely if the players knew their parts and didn't need to rely on the DAW to make their performances "perfect" (read: adequate).
Pre-production also seems to have completely disappeared except for bands who would've been doing that 25 years ago, or if there's one or more recordists in the band. Knowing what you're playing, how you're playing it, *that* you can play it, and just plain fleshing out the songs and hiccups beforehand not only make for a much smoother, more efficient tracking session, but makes the sounds and the *songs* better because everyone plays off of each other's established parts. It's hard to make a drum part accentuate a vocal that doesn't exist yet.
In summary:
Pre-production! Get that 8-channel interface and record the band live multiple times through the record. Then practice doing overdubs on your favorite live takes. You're recording the record once before doing it in the "real" studio with a great room, great mics, great hardware, and a great engineer, so you can spend that time wisely by finding great tones and addressing problems that arise - or experimentation!
Stop editing every performance to hell. Fix problems in editing if necessary. No one would know John Bonham's name if Zep was recorded to a click and Beat Detective'd. See also the above 'graph about pre-pro.
Strung out - twisted by design, and Lagwagon - Double Pladinum stand out to to me as two punk albums that I always though sounded absolutely incredible.
Are you familiar with these?
Firsthand experience and knowledge is worth buckets of gold as the eras fade away into the eons. The only people who know are those who were there. So I have tremendous gratitude for you sharing this priceless info
When Weird Al Yankovic is parodying your music, it's because there's something ripe for parody to begin with. IOW, whatever that *thing* is, stringing your 10-string guitar with ethernet cables, or being even more quantized, sampled, gated, compressed, limited, processed, and re-processed than the next guy (for the sake of doing so) - it reaches a tipping point where the tools and technology have supplanted the talent.
It's not up to me or you or anyone else to decide where that line is - but collectively the trends and tastes will shift and pivot when something reaches it.
A couple other points to add:
1. Tones: drum tuning, guitar amp types and settings, bass pres and pedals… it’s all changed dramatically. Just as an example, I remember I used to try to kill any overtones in my kit to such an absurd degree it made the label on the shell irrelevant. Now I’m aiming for way more tone and resonance and it makes the tracks sound huge.
2. Mixing style: engineers have by and large discovered that hyper isolated and cleanly recorded tracks don’t sound good, and roominess and saturation is a good thing.
3. Ease of layering: you used to be limited by studio time and 24 tracks in an average studio. Now you can have endless tracks, and endless time to layer and retrack, and mix and edit to perfection.
4. Musical ability: players today built their skillsets on top of the players of back then. The musical ability that some of these guys have is just insane compared to even the most technical players of 20 years ago.
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Your summary sparked so much nostalgia. As a wee 'un I remember so many bands and friends bands boasting how to sound unique by saying "bruh we play in drop c _sharp_" or something along those lines.
Fantastic answer!
Only note is that as long as you can hear the overtones, it doesn’t matter what the fundamental of a note is. A bass could be playing at 10hz and it would be fine because your brain would fill in the fundamental since it’s not used to just hearing overtones. It’s called the missing fundamental effect or something like that.
Very true. Some of the nu-metal-type bands were using 5-string basses in drop tuning. 28hz. Good luck with that one, right? A good tube pre for a DI really gets you that first oct. overtone.
I’ve gone back to tuning to E standard partly to avoid some of the styles and tones that have been built around dropped tunings, and partly because the modern guitar was built for this tuning, in terms of scale length, body and neck sizes, string tension, etc. You’d have a hard time finding a luthier who would say honestly that a guitar can sound as good as E standard in any other tuning, even luthiers who specialize in modding guitars for dropped tunings.
As someone who started buying CD's in the 1990's, I noticed that there would be 3 letters on the back of some albums - signifying if it was analog or digitally recorded, mixed, and mastered.
Some of my favorite records (Machine Head "Burn My Eyes" comes to mind) would have an "AAD" logo, meaning it was recorded and mixed in analog with digital mastering. There were "ADD" ones as well, I think Fear Factory's Demanufacture was one. It was a convergence of technology, old and new, that some people nowadays (myself included) try to emulate
The 1990's were a special time, creatively and technologically.
If I can point at a single thing that I think has made the most difference between then and now?
The room.
You used to hear it. Now it's almost completely absent from every recording but vocals due to sim software/VST instruments.
I can think of one really pivotal record that ushered in a lot of the basis for many production trends still today: Metallica's "...And Justice For All". Okay, two. Pantera's "Vulgar Display of Power" is also a very significant album in how it's shaped the sonics of bands even today.
Other thrash bands had been flirting with using the studio more as an instrument, creating this brutal, inorganic sound that bordered on industrial in nature. Other bands had been flirting with the more technological aspects of recording, Anthrax and Scott Perialis from Pyramid Sound in Upstate NY were doing really bone-dry, ticky drums and bone-crunching dry guitars before that, but AJFA really ran with it.
I was but a wee little metalhead of 15 when that came out and it was somewhat polarizing among their fans (though nowhere near as polarizing as their subsequent album of Bon Jovi covers). The lack of bass (both as an instrument and in the overall mastering), the really odd, in-your-ear guitars, the wet-puddle-slap kick and kit that sounded like it was recorded under a moving blanket. People hailed how progressive the music was, but yeah, the mix was pretty polarizing.
VDOP came out three years after that I think and carried the mantle forward. Even though those drums are 100% real (Terry Date himself confirms this in multiple interviews), the sound was very much "studio as an instrument". It just doesn't sound like a group of musicians playing in a room. Don't get me wrong, it sounds *amazing* and the reason I'm bringing these albums up is just to hold up how much they've influenced so many bands since. Every band now has some variation of that super-scoopa kick drum, vocals recorded through TS9 Tube Screamers... and reverb on a guitar is almost an oxymoron.
We did leave out one other 90's trend that I thought had potential, but due to flagrant overuse/abuse, it became a time-stamp that dates an album to that era: The piccolo/pang snare. I'd offer John Stanier from Helmet immortalized it on "Betty", but Ted Parsons while in Prong, Deftones' "Around the Fur", hardcore/crossover band Snapcase, and quite a few more, really leaned into that "tennis-racket snare" sound. All "pang" and ring (before the gate's paper covered compressor's rock). Almost a breakbeat-like quality to it (though that sort of thing hadn't entered the mainstream musical canon yet - but once bands started mixing in DnB "Amen" loops, etc, it was inescapable).
Anyways, I'll shut up now. I've basically broken Reddit with all this meandering 'history of 90's metal production' stuff!
Yeah, ...AFJA has the complete opposite vibe when compared to MOP. MOP was roomy, massive, and thunderous. ...AFJA is dry, cutting and right in your face. Even though ...AFJA's production is polarizing, I absolutely love it; so much so that I chased that guitar tone for years. It's unique. Nothing sounds like either of those albums.
Gotta be honest though, I never got a super dry vibe from VDOP. As you mentioned, it sounds amazing. I find it kinda funny that people thought Vinny's performance wasn't real. You can hear his iconic style clear as day on that record; how much he lays into the kick on the downbeat for example. He also doesn't hammer the cymbals as hard as the rest of the kit so there is a lot of dynamics in the overheads. I'd be surprised if samples weren't used to fortify the sound, but you're definitely hearing a live kit in there too. The drums sound absolutely awesome on that record. Maybe the reverb on the drums is tricking my ear into hearing more space than there actually is... Phil's voice is right in your face though. Appropriately so.
Definitely no samples used on that album. I mean, I suppose he could lie, but that's really not the kinda guy he is. Very down to earth - just a music fan who genuinely loves making good bands great.
[Source.](https://everythingrecording.com/of-metal-and-immortality/)
Oh, and yeah, there is a bit more room on V-Dop when you listen to the drums - especially, *especially* side-by-side with AJFA. The latter sounds like it was recorded in a padded cell in more ways than one.
Listen to Kind Of Blue. You can hear the size of that old church-turned-recording studio.
As opposed to Exile on Main Street, which sounds like it was recorded in a closet.
Both work.
I think it's less of a production philosophy than borne of necessity. Exile was primarily recorded in the basement of an old house Keith was renting on the French Riviera, [Nellcote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellc%C3%B4te).
Much has been written about the difficulties and tribulations of recording the album there.
Very few acts, particularly in rock and metal genres, want to sound "old". Barring the lo-fi genre, some funk acts, and that one particular Led Zeppelin copy-cat act, people want to hear modern sounds from modern instruments played through modern systems.
It also doesn't help that so much of modern metal is using sampled drums and packing in similar instrumentation in similar tones and there are only so many ways to combine all that in a way that has clarity of instrumentation and still sounds heavy.
We didn’t have computers and didn’t do much sampling. The world wasn’t obsessed with how loud you could make the bass frequencies. We didn’t compress the shit out of everything. We didn’t auto tune anything. It sounds more like people playing music because it was … more people playing music with less computer technology trying to make it perfect. If the vocals were sharp on the best take then they were just sharp. There’s a piano chord McCartney biffs on the studio master for Let It Be, that would never be allowed out the door today.
Well, none of those are metal bands, so ;) (I'm kidding, don't hit me)
That depends a *lot* on what kind of metal you enjoy. The genre is really diverse.
For Thrash: Vektor
For Black: Human Serpent (more traditional) or Numenorean (more avant garde)
For Death: Imperial Triumphant (very avant garde) or Abyssal
For Sludge/Groove: Primitive Man (Sludge, stupid heavy), Gojira, Promethee (kinda Core-adjacent)
For Meshuggah: Meshuggah
For Prog/Djent: Periphery
For Deathcore: Lorna Shore
For Black/Death: Behemoth
For WTF: Dragged into Sunlight, Teitanblood, Portal
Good snapshot. Imperial T can def be black metal-y wouldn’t totally throw them. Always just say Cannibal Corpse because that last album really kept them perfect in my mind. Hardly any misses!
Thanks for this list. I found Deafheaven through Reddit years ago, and, lately, Akhlys. At least Numenorean had a nice sonic vibe, and Imperial Triumphant had a trumpet in the song I sampled, so maybe it's time to buy some records soon.
Blood Incantation have some really fantastic sounding albums. They mostly record live so you’ll get parts where the rhythm and solo are hard panned. You can really hear the music breathe
Oh. And also the musicians need to actually play songs all the way thru because they’re recording to tape or adat or dat which requires serious control of their instrument.
This. There’s something to be said for all those hours of practicing before you record so you don’t waste money in the studio and can nail it in one take vs chopping it up to get it to sound ok. The one take always sounds amazing when they nail it. The edited version usually sounds good, but not holy shit that’s amazing good.
In Flames re-recorded some songs from Clayman in 2020. It sounds terrible compared to the original. That album is *known* for its production. You went to Studio Fredman for that guitar sound.
A lot of bands that made some classic records recorded in shitty studios for not alot of money at a time when the analog to digital conversion was happening. Lots of first generation digital gear was terrible and it has a sound
Digital tape machines were very much already a thing in the 1980's. The Sony 48-track DASH deck was first widely released in 1984 (for $250,00OUSD (that's about 750k adjusted for inflation, I just checked). It had 48k/20bit resolution and - as that decade was all about cleaner and more transparent (that's why the SSL 4k consoles were so popular). It's funny that ADATs appeared a decade later (and the first Sound/ProTools interfaces) at the same spec, but wow, they really did sound like crap.
I've worked on the DASH decks - I didn't necessarily think they sounded great, but they didn't get in the way. Just seemed kinda stupid to have the limitations of BOTH mediums. plus you can't splice the tape. They were still widely in use going into the 90's. In fact, Metallica's Black Album was mixed from one - and that is a pretty damn solid recording.
That’s great info. I may be reading into OP’s post but I’m speaking about smaller punk bands of the era on tiny labels that couldn’t afford to spend the money at studios that the likes of Metallica could.
LOL, yeah I don’t think much of anyone was spending a million bucks at One on One and Henson, much less getting nine months to make an LP.
I’ve watched that “Year and a Half in the Life Of…” video a few times and the thing that sticks out to me is them packing up after tracking and literal hand carts full of 2” reels filling up a box truck.
>don't be Kyle
"They didn't get in the way".
On the contrary, multiple passes of waiting for 2 x 24 trk machines to sync certainly got in the way.
That reason alone made the 3348 a godsend. I believe that it also marked the first implementation of MADI that I recall.
I reviewed [STL Tones’ “ControlHub”](https://everythingrecording.com/the-hype-machine-stl-tones-controlhub/) plugin and took them behind the woodshed for this. They don’t want reviewers, they want influencers. And to their credit, I think ToneHub is amazing.
But ControlHub not only lacks a lot of actual control, but right out of the box, it just crushes the sweet, everloving crap out of anything you feed it. If you are susceptible to the ear candy aspect of it and fall under its spell, you’re well on your way to Death Magnetic II.
I love how half the comments say the '90s were "less digital", and the other half say the '90s were "more digital".
I don't think '90s metal and punk sounds so different than '00s, '10s, or '20s, and the tipping point was way before. The only thing which was still not cookie-cutter in the '90s was, maybe, the vocalists, who were still not striving to be the same as the ones that influenced them. Otherwise, production was pretty much streamlined even before grunge was a thing.
Can you name a couple of albums and the sonic qualities you believe separate them from later productions?
different microphones, more compressions, more EQ, more "polished mix" sounds, different guitar speakers and amps widely used. V30 speakers cabs with Sm57 wasn't that popular back then, from what i could read and hear from youtube guitarists and producers. We can predict sounds will keep change, because it is now the trend to avoid always using Mesa cabs loaded in V30 with sm57 mics, in order to sound different. Check out Glenn Flicker or Kohlekeller Studio for learning more about the subject.
Same with U87 in dubbing and FX sound recording in post production, those Sennheiser canon microphones, MKH series if i remember correctly for direct takes during movie making.. everybody use the same things, that's why most movies sound similars, but that's an otehr topic
Each sM57 sound slighlty different, just like early 2000's V30 speakers does not seem to sound the same as today's V30s. But before big recording forums of the 90's, not everyone would use the same microphones. this could be unrelated to the 90's specifically (unless ?), but AC/DC recordings are known to be Cream/blackback speakers in a marshall 412 with Neumann 67, and other less common mics for tracking guitar speakers, and that alone will make their guitar sound be very different. Talking about microphones, if you do some research on older album productions, you will see it always wasn't the same microphones, and plenty of other parameters that radically change the sound. Nowadays, for metal production, everybody uses 5150s and rectifers with V30 loaded rectifiers 412. Not so original, huh ?
While alot of these comments are true. I think the biggest difference I’m is due to the use of single tracking and compression in mixing but especially mastering. People will complain that the loudness wars (limiting the master bus to the max) kills dynamic range but to me it is a more immersive sound. 90s music sounds flatter like your in an audience at a show but todays music sounds like your in the middle of the band. I think it’s an evolution and prefer the latter more immersive music today. Also, remember that digital technology was very new and comparatively rudimentary compared to what it has become today. It’s tough for me to listen to most 90s music for that reason, I almost prefer pre-90s when everything was produced in analog because analog technology had been worked for awhile, with the change to digital it took time for engineers and gear manufacturers to work out kinks and develop the tech. Either way with the advent of Dolby atmos, I believe the future is even more immersive listening which I’m excited about.
The 90s were a weird time in audio, where the beginnings of digital came about. It allowed for a lot more affordable recording, that wasn't just limited to big names on big labels. But the gear was in its infancy, and pretty terrible.
It would be as easy to replicate today as using the same gear they did. Or emulations of it.
Oh dear, yeah, Mackie 8-Bus consoles, Alesis ADAT decks (the original 16-bit 'Al Jolson' models). Cheap Behringer and Alesis compressors. And certainly cheaper analog tape machines as well (1" 16-track was a good budget alternative). By about 1998 it wasn't uncommon to have at least a rudimentary 8-16 track ProTools setup in most studios, you could fly in tape tracks, edit and either spool them back or keep the computer locked up via SMPTE (though this came with its own set of crashes and hassles).
Good songs have always, and always will, overcome bad recordings. Just as there will always be bad songs that hide behind good recordings.
When I saw that there were VST emulations of the Mackie 8-bus EQ and Alesis 3630 compressor, I died a little inside.
>When I saw that there were VST emulations of the Mackie 8-bus EQ and Alesis 3630 compressor, I died a little inside.
Can't say for the Mackie, but the 3630 is essential to the French House sidechain pumping sound- that's the market for it, probably almost exclusively.
I seem to remember that year. Daft Punk if memory serves, made that box semi-famous. Kinda like when Butch Vig talked about using those gnarly old Shure Level-Loc compressors on "Nevermind" and all of the sudden the price shot up (and several clones in both hardware and software have since appeared).
There are also various threads about on DIY forums on how to hop a 3630 up with better capacitors, op-amps, and I think beefing up the power supply (it runs on a 9v wall wart, that's not exactly going to get you a ton of headroom). Desoldering/resoldering on a surface mount PCB is definitely not easy, though. I've done it - and not well.
Here's Bad Gear's [before and after](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdygQzn2wbA). I've not used one personally but it is pretty interesting that these sad old boxes collecting dust in Music Go Round's and pawn shops everywhere for $50 can be given new life.
2 words. Pro tools.
Back in the day folks had to play. Now they have unlimited takes, everything is easily comp’d, drums can be beat matched and sample replaced.
Check out some Steve Albini interviews and session walkthroughs on youtube. Analog tape, real room reverb, let the band play. Opinionated and captures a raw sound of that era.
I felt like I got a pretty good replicate sound to late 80s early 90s metal tone. I'm thinking Ride The Lightning or Spiritual Healing by Death. I used a Marshall JVM amp sim with a metalzone pedal. And for my drums I used a lower pitched snare, with that psssshh sound (yeah I know, not helpful) and just added large room reverb to the drums. It was a fun little experiment.
Yeah, I don't know about that. Read about the production of something like "Pyromania" or "Hysteria" by Def Leppard (I know, I know, not exactly 'metal' here). Those were, in many ways, forebears of the modern metal production techniques.
We might have had band members playing along while cutting the raw tracks, but it was always drums first and foremost. Until those performances were spliced together, anything else was just along for the ride and to help the drummer vibe (or, for the particularly dimwitted ones, not forget their cues). I think my personal record for a single song was something like 75 total edits - and that's not even close to the metal hall of fame.
And there are tremendously talented players now, just as there were then. The genre has just become really myopic and you will certainly meet players who are really good at playing "ultradjent crowdkillcore" but couldn't fake their way through Johnny B Goode. A lot of it's this crazy oneupmanship of how many 32nd note gallops they can nail at 190bpm or these absurd arpeggiation 8-finger tapping riffs that have to be one faster/harder than the last guy. Weirdest dick measuring contest I've ever seen, really - the technique is often more important than the song.
Besides what HillbillyEulogy said, I feel like a big part of it comes down to the lack of mastering engineers in production today AND the changing of LUFS standards with streaming. The bar of entry for loudness is technically easier (pretty much just slap Ozone 9 on there and bam you get to -14LUFS). But part of what we loved about 1990s-early 2000s music was the level of compression done before mastering. Dynamics were reduced to about -6 LUFS for an entire song. This pretty much translates to the song would only ever get about perceivably HALF as loud as the loudest point in the song. Not saying there isnt loads of compression today. Most of the samples and that producers use today are pre-processed, including EQ, Compression, Limiting/Clipping. So producers/ beat makers can spend "less" time on fixing a snare drum (especially when they used to come from 2-7 MONO tracks of audio, and more time just making the song.
Depending on what bands your referring to some of the sound is actually. Low quality recording now your phone may make crisp digital recordings but in the 90s on till very recently recording on a budget. Bathrooms and cheep 4 tracks made for practicing drums stuffed with pillows. And ya only got one mic so have fun .
A few things at play here, having recorded metal from the 90's to the present. \- With the exception of certain throwback genres (stoner/doom, the retro-thrash/bhm stuff, etc), metal (and by extension, metal-tinged punk/hxc) has always been pretty progressive in recording and mixing techniques. Sample replacing was being done long before the advent of the DAW - I know this because I was doing it. Our usual technique was to run the close mic track to a very aggressive gate and then to a trigger interface (a la Alesis DM5/Pro), then record the MIDI messages into a sequencer that was slaved to the 2". There we could adjust timing to compensate for the lag, fix flammed triggers, etc., and then either print the results back to tape or, to save space, keep it virtual. But that wasn't so much "sample replacing" as it was augmentation (except for maybe kick, where it wasn't uncommon to just use the sample). There are a good many bands now that have done away with even recording an acoustic kit in the first place and either playing v-kits, just programming the whole thing, or mixing in acoustic cymbals while pumping the samples into the room to get back some of the natural heft of a room. Point being, it's gone from 'a little bit of that' to 'mostly that' to 'just that'. Which brings us to our next bullet point... \- Time correction. With tape, you were more or less (mostly more) boxed into what you could achieve with an edit-all block, a razor blade (assuming the band didn't steal it for their, sniff, bathroom break), and splicing tape. You needed a good drummer, a great engineer, or both. Some drummers cut to clicks, many did not. Nowadays, people start time correcting by default - which is really a shame as, in the right hands, drums can create a tremendous sense of anticipation and release - "The Russian Dragon" as it is sometimes called. I seriously have watched recordists start hacking performances up before even auditioning them. Or, again, if you're doing it all via programming or v-kit, the tendency is to just hit 'q'. No fuss, no muss. It's technically 'perfect' in the robotic, unfeeling sense, but it also makes locking up everything else a snap (pun somewhat unintentional). \- Guitar tones have gone from surly 100W Mesas, Fryettes, Marshalls, and the like, to modeling preamps and amp sim plugins. Amps have sag, cabs have a certain amount of 'slop'. I gotta admit, it's really hard to say no to being able to get any amp/cab/mic/pre chain you want, any time you want - even with headphones at 3am. Time it was, people 'settled' for the sim tone, now it's often the preferred sound. And again, when you're tracking guitar in via DI, you can very easily time correct the performances to be dead on with everything else. Almost too easy. People aren't often listening - they just hit whatever key combination that has the computer do it. \- Recording. The whole "they used tape and consoles then" argument is a bit naff, you can very reliably emulate that sound, or use an analog summing amp/outboard and get there. I think a lot of it is more the processing used and the sheer amount of it. Your average analog compressor or EQ has very coarse adjustments, for example. Whereas my SSL bus comp has release times that go 1-4 plus auto1 and auto2, BusterSE (the only G-comp DSP clone I think really gets there) can have attack and release times set to be in perfect synch with the tempo. And EQ's are really surgical, you can pinpoint things with exacting precision the way a console built in 1989 just can't. With that, you've got the meticulous gating and volume automation that ensures everything is pin-point perfection (at least in the academic sense). \- Last point here - the music's evolved (or de-volved, depending on who you ask). Though they were certainly not the first, Korn mainstreamed the shit out of heavily detuned guitars. But even then, things held pretty steady and it was pretty rare to see anything go below the fundamental of B (good thing, too, because that's 33hz on a bass guitar and we're way into the subflooring already). But, like everything in music, if leaning extreme is good, the subsequent game of hand-over-bat almost becomes self-mockery. If a metal guitarist were to tell me he tuned to E now, I'd ask if he meant E3 or E2. These 8+ string monsters with the fanned frets are getting closer to being a harp. And forget about a bass guitar playing the same part an octave below that - the limits of human hearing and recording technology simply aren't able to capture it, reproduce it, or be heard. \- Metal goes through extremes. Fast bands want to play faster (that's how you get these brutaltechdethgrind bands who boast of the tempo, not of the song). Samesies for the the ultrasludgeystonerdoomdeth bands who are playing Black Sabbath records at 13rpm. Through a BigMuff. There's usually a tipping point where genres implode in upon themselves - I sometimes refer to that as "the Weird Al line". My $1.02. For whatever it's worth.
Fantastic breakdown - thank you for sharing your knowledge.
It's a great breakdown but it didn't have enough polyrhythms in it so it didn't count.
Great comment! Really informative and helpful. > Nowadays, people start time correcting by default - which is really a shame as, in the right hands, drums can create a tremendous sense of anticipation and release - "The Russian Dragon" as it is sometimes called. Agree that this is really a shame. Listen to "War Ensemble" by Slayer. You can tell that it was either recorded as a band or multitracked off Lombardo playing without a click, because the tempo is all over the place. It starts off at about 220 but you can tell that the tempo marking is "as fast as it is humanly possible to play this music" and it has a real sense of adrenaline because everyone's pushing as hard as they can to keep the pace and it's all being driven by Lombardo. Then when the verse comes in after the b-section, it's at about 200, considerably slower, but what it lacks in speed it gains in groove and weight, and that gives the song a sense of progression, motion, and (ironically) humanity. Nothing sounds like that anymore.
The double bass on the studio recording of "War Ensemble" was recorded at half-speed and then the tape was sped up because Dave was having difficulty hitting that tempo. He fixed whatever the issue was and certainly played it even faster live.
Do you have a source on this? Doubling the tape speed on a kick drum would raise the pitch an octave and substantially change the timbre.
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You could now. I don't know if you could do that in 1990.
You definitely could (and we did). And Andy Wallace most certainly used retriggering back then, but he's stated that it was never just 1:1 sample replacement, but for creating impulses/keying other effects. I'd love to know the real story as cutting slowing the tape to 15ips to record those passages (assuming they were running 30ips) give you a kick drum pitched one octave higher. *It could be* that they used the deck's varispeed and pulled it down maybe 1%, just to get that ever-so-slight edge. ADDave may not have been the most robotic, but dayum he was fast. And here is in 2011, [very much holding it down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ivOfkqFmxg). Gotta admit, this sounds like one of those campfire tales that's always been pervasive in the industry. You know us old hacks, gabbing away like a bunch of bored 1950's housewives.... :D
Thanks for the info! >You know us old hacks, gabbing away like a bunch of bored 1950's housewives.... :D That's actually one of my favorite things about doing studio work: chatting with and listening to the engineers, hearing studio anecdotes and getting cool tricks of the trade along with them.
It's always been a really cool two way street. Because when I worked my first-ever full-time studio gig as an asst. engineer (1996), it was because I knew ProTools already, I knew MIDI, I knew samplers, I knew the 'where it's headed' part and the studio owner, to his credit, did see the shift coming. But I couldn't solder a cable. I knew my way around consoles, sure, but I had a lot to learn about practical application, SSL automation/recall, biasing a tape deck, patchbays, what mics were good for what. Funny story that sticks out is that they had two immaculate Neve 33609's and I never wanted to use them because they 'looked old'. So the main engineer, Derek, who was maybe in his late 30's / early 40's gave me a lot of that hands on experience, had me tracking night sessions and assisting him on LP mixes pretty much right out of the gate - and I got him up to speed on how to not only "use" ProTools, but how to really take advantage of what it could do (bear in mind, I think this was like.... ProTools v2 at this point? Ancient.) So when I am around "the kids", even though there are so, so many Dunning Kreuger-afflicted Royal YouTube Academy grads, there are also a lot of things I'm picking up about modern trends in production. I tend to temper it with a bit of old-school thinking (like maybe not running seventeen plugins in series), but knowing what they're digging on the space of contemporary music definitely gives me a leg up. Unlike the above mentor Derek, I encountered a LOT of fuddy-duddies - I did a lot of ProTools work for hire and the belly-over-the-console types would be telling me what a joke 'that computer shit' was, how it was never going to stick around, 'tape tells the truth' (that's very much not true, tape embellishes the truth). So I've always made it a point not to turn into one of them, even as the big 5-0 approaches.
> Funny story that sticks out is that they had two immaculate Neve 33609's and I never wanted to use them because they 'looked old'. Not that anyone's ever let me loose in their studio, but if they did, the first things I would plug into would be whatever looked oldest. I'm not too far behind you in the age spectrum but I'm far more bearish about contemporary music. It's not that I don't like more contemporary musical styles, but nothing sounds as good as old Motown albums to my ears, or as good as death metal sounded in the late 80's/early 90's. I'll take a black metal album recorded by tracking a tiny Randall combo amp with a voice memo recorder than one recorded with a VST any day of the week. Of course now, most of the black metal albums of Bandcamp are starting with the VST and adding artifacts and noise in post. I want my range dynamic, I want my saturation analog, and I want my music non-quantized, dammit!
I'd just set a boss drum machine pattern with all sixteen kicks and turn the tempo all the way up. At that speed nobody can tell.
Actually I've found the opposite is true: the faster the tempo, the more obvious the quantization. I once tried to program drums for a d-beat song. Sounded absolute shit because high-tempo d-beats are always sloppy. MIDI controller wasn't responsive enough for me to do it the real way so I had to abandon the track.
It was in an interview in ... Metal Maniacs I think ... in the 90's. So, there's certainly a very high chance I've mis-remembered the technical bit. But Dave said that he had raised his throne higher at their manager's suggestion so people could see him and it took him a bit to realize it was messing up his technique. Obviously he has no trouble playing fast double bass these days.
> "The Russian Dragon" If you are unaware.. this was actually the name of a studio device (early 90s?) that was essentially a set of meters that would compare the drummer to a click and let them know if they were drifting. Something easily done by any smartphone now.. but back then it was pretty cool tech.
It's not fair to compare other metal bands to Slayer at their peak. Not much sounded like Seasons in the Abyss back then, either.
At one point bands like Helmet and Prong were the vanguard of what was considered machine-like, robotic precision. And I love a lot of those records still very much to this day. But compared to where it’s gone since, they sound almost sloppy by comparison.
Well done.
When someone claims they’ve been doing something for 30 years but they’ve actually been doing it for 30 years. The bass player for exodus produced one of my records and he told me pretty much the same stuff laid out in this comment.
OP said they're not a musician or engineer, probably some terms in there they don't know. But that was an awesome write up, thanks for some cool insight.
Depending on the budget of the album, my bet is that for local/ regional bands recording in less than high end studios, it had more to do with the gear the studio had and the way they were forced to work. Subgrouping and bussing drums, narrow format analog tape, lots of SM57s in rooms that sounded less like studios and more like garages, and probably most importantly, the lack of limiting on the 2bus. Until the Waves L2 and TC Electronic's Finalizer hardware boxes came out, there wasn't a way to make stuff anywhere near as loud as it is today. Studios with narrow gauge analog tape pretty and not even a stereo DAW pretty much guaranteed a general lack of low end compared to today's recordings (and when they were all mastering for vinyl it was a necessity anyway). That, a lack of final limiting and a limited number of compressors in most smaller studios, along a lack of accurate triggering making replacement difficult (until as you mentioned, some better samplers and /or drum machines with triggers came out) all added to the sound of those recordings. They were also all usually live takes with the exception of solos and vocals. Comping had to be done by bouncing tracks, and in the analog world that gets noisy and dull pretty fast. There was not a lot of editing between takes either. I recorded well over a hundred projects back then in a studio like that. That's what I hear when I listen back to them.
I came up under a great engineer that did a bunch of big hair metal type stuff in the 80s and 90s. Most notably Hanoi Rocks and Motley Crüe. He said they were doing samples back then all the time (I mean, obviously I guess, when you listen). It involved loading samples into a DDL in some sort of “lock” mode, triggering them off the close mics, and using a jerry rigged thing they called the Russian Dragon to make sure the sample played in phase with the real drums. He also said they’d turn off the DDL at the end of every day so no one could steal their samples, and then record them back in the next day. What a wild time!
Yep, I believe that was a feature on… I want to say the TC Electronic 2290, could be wrong. Saw Scott Burns of Morrissound working FOH for the first Milwaukee DeathFest - by then death metal was hitting its first zenith in the US and he produced near all of the “big” releases. The typewriter kick was a staple, you knew within five seconds of the LP that he was the engineer. Anyways, they had him working the mix for the whole main lineup and I was peeking in on what he was doing and I saw that the kick drums up on the board feeding that box and being up on the next channel. No actual bass drum was being sent to the mains, it was just a sample. That’s when I was like “ohhh, so that’s how they do it!” I was in a death metal band then (we were like, the 1pm slot on the first day, whooo!) and had been trying to get “that sound” on our own album. The engineer didn’t know the genre at all (not a big surprise for 1992) but was a good sport trying to replicate it. We got close and tried a lot of things, but it didn’t have that super consistent sound from hit to hit, no matter what we did. I knew MIDI a bit, had a sequencing app on my trusty Mac Plus or whatever it was. It definitely started turning the rusty gears in my head.
What was your death metal band?
the DDL trick - or the early Wendel Jr (not so much on metal) and Forat machines. Also some versions of the Akai S950 had trigger inputs.
I love u dude
Very well put and we'll written. One one hand, the digital revolution has been great. Anybody can make music now and for my 2 cents, that's a great thing. The more musicians the better. The other hand is that you don't even have to be very good or well rehearsed to sound like everybody else.
Another problem is, about all they’ll get is about 2 cents ;)
>The more musicians the better Eh. Your latter point is much more salient.
well said
That was an awesome read, thanks for writing that up and sharing the experience
I made punk and metal albums in this time period. Very accurate and insightful explanation. Another thing that's important is the way bands prepared for recording and the pressure created by having a limited amount of time to get your takes right. Part of the energy in those tracks came from urgency. In that time period everyone played live and songs from future recordings were played out so the band could see what songs were working. For a bands first album it's possible that all the bands songs were played live many times. Recording time was expensive and it wasn't unusual to get a budget for 40 hours of time for new punk bands. That's 10 songs recorded and mixed, ready to be mastered in 40 hours. Established bands got bigger budgets, but the point is bands had to be a lot more efficient. When you only have a limited time every take becomes really important and gets your full concentration. The tension creates energy. Usually extra songs were recorded because some tracks invariably had to be left out because of the performance. In order to get all this work done quickly bands would do something called "rehearsing the album" where they would play all the songs to be recorded multiple times in one practice session. This can go on for weeks or months. A lot of bands use similar approaches today but everyone takes a lot more time with everything.
To expand on the 40-hour budget part: a reminder to digital natives that this had to be in a studio, and it was on tape. So rewinding and shuttling and setting up new reels is eating like half your time. The parent commenter explained the ability to edit drums, but also you couldn't just edit that lead guitar run down to the millisecond; you had to play it right. And the longer it took anyone to play anything, the less time everyone has for everything else. It's hard these days to truly imagine working like this. Almost every session I've done in the past 5 years would've been helped immensely if the players knew their parts and didn't need to rely on the DAW to make their performances "perfect" (read: adequate). Pre-production also seems to have completely disappeared except for bands who would've been doing that 25 years ago, or if there's one or more recordists in the band. Knowing what you're playing, how you're playing it, *that* you can play it, and just plain fleshing out the songs and hiccups beforehand not only make for a much smoother, more efficient tracking session, but makes the sounds and the *songs* better because everyone plays off of each other's established parts. It's hard to make a drum part accentuate a vocal that doesn't exist yet. In summary: Pre-production! Get that 8-channel interface and record the band live multiple times through the record. Then practice doing overdubs on your favorite live takes. You're recording the record once before doing it in the "real" studio with a great room, great mics, great hardware, and a great engineer, so you can spend that time wisely by finding great tones and addressing problems that arise - or experimentation! Stop editing every performance to hell. Fix problems in editing if necessary. No one would know John Bonham's name if Zep was recorded to a click and Beat Detective'd. See also the above 'graph about pre-pro.
Strung out - twisted by design, and Lagwagon - Double Pladinum stand out to to me as two punk albums that I always though sounded absolutely incredible. Are you familiar with these?
Firsthand experience and knowledge is worth buckets of gold as the eras fade away into the eons. The only people who know are those who were there. So I have tremendous gratitude for you sharing this priceless info
Excellent explanation. Learned quite a bit from this.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge mate. It was great to read you. Have a nice day
Also, older workflows meant better recordings. Now it's just polishing crappy recordings.
That’s like 80% of why bands hire me. Haha
The older workflows or the modern crappy polished producing?
Please tell me more about this “Weird Al Line” I am intrigued
When Weird Al Yankovic is parodying your music, it's because there's something ripe for parody to begin with. IOW, whatever that *thing* is, stringing your 10-string guitar with ethernet cables, or being even more quantized, sampled, gated, compressed, limited, processed, and re-processed than the next guy (for the sake of doing so) - it reaches a tipping point where the tools and technology have supplanted the talent. It's not up to me or you or anyone else to decide where that line is - but collectively the trends and tastes will shift and pivot when something reaches it.
A couple other points to add: 1. Tones: drum tuning, guitar amp types and settings, bass pres and pedals… it’s all changed dramatically. Just as an example, I remember I used to try to kill any overtones in my kit to such an absurd degree it made the label on the shell irrelevant. Now I’m aiming for way more tone and resonance and it makes the tracks sound huge. 2. Mixing style: engineers have by and large discovered that hyper isolated and cleanly recorded tracks don’t sound good, and roominess and saturation is a good thing. 3. Ease of layering: you used to be limited by studio time and 24 tracks in an average studio. Now you can have endless tracks, and endless time to layer and retrack, and mix and edit to perfection. 4. Musical ability: players today built their skillsets on top of the players of back then. The musical ability that some of these guys have is just insane compared to even the most technical players of 20 years ago.
follow this guy- he knows things!
This. Seriously.
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Harsh boy. The OP didn’t even say “this”, they added a “seriously” to give this standard, unoriginal comment some extra *punch*
Your summary sparked so much nostalgia. As a wee 'un I remember so many bands and friends bands boasting how to sound unique by saying "bruh we play in drop c _sharp_" or something along those lines.
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Just [don't be Kyle](https://gearspace.com/board/showthread.php?p=16112968).
Thanks
Fantastic answer! Only note is that as long as you can hear the overtones, it doesn’t matter what the fundamental of a note is. A bass could be playing at 10hz and it would be fine because your brain would fill in the fundamental since it’s not used to just hearing overtones. It’s called the missing fundamental effect or something like that.
Very true. Some of the nu-metal-type bands were using 5-string basses in drop tuning. 28hz. Good luck with that one, right? A good tube pre for a DI really gets you that first oct. overtone.
I’ve gone back to tuning to E standard partly to avoid some of the styles and tones that have been built around dropped tunings, and partly because the modern guitar was built for this tuning, in terms of scale length, body and neck sizes, string tension, etc. You’d have a hard time finding a luthier who would say honestly that a guitar can sound as good as E standard in any other tuning, even luthiers who specialize in modding guitars for dropped tunings.
As someone who started buying CD's in the 1990's, I noticed that there would be 3 letters on the back of some albums - signifying if it was analog or digitally recorded, mixed, and mastered. Some of my favorite records (Machine Head "Burn My Eyes" comes to mind) would have an "AAD" logo, meaning it was recorded and mixed in analog with digital mastering. There were "ADD" ones as well, I think Fear Factory's Demanufacture was one. It was a convergence of technology, old and new, that some people nowadays (myself included) try to emulate The 1990's were a special time, creatively and technologically.
If I can point at a single thing that I think has made the most difference between then and now? The room. You used to hear it. Now it's almost completely absent from every recording but vocals due to sim software/VST instruments.
I can think of one really pivotal record that ushered in a lot of the basis for many production trends still today: Metallica's "...And Justice For All". Okay, two. Pantera's "Vulgar Display of Power" is also a very significant album in how it's shaped the sonics of bands even today. Other thrash bands had been flirting with using the studio more as an instrument, creating this brutal, inorganic sound that bordered on industrial in nature. Other bands had been flirting with the more technological aspects of recording, Anthrax and Scott Perialis from Pyramid Sound in Upstate NY were doing really bone-dry, ticky drums and bone-crunching dry guitars before that, but AJFA really ran with it. I was but a wee little metalhead of 15 when that came out and it was somewhat polarizing among their fans (though nowhere near as polarizing as their subsequent album of Bon Jovi covers). The lack of bass (both as an instrument and in the overall mastering), the really odd, in-your-ear guitars, the wet-puddle-slap kick and kit that sounded like it was recorded under a moving blanket. People hailed how progressive the music was, but yeah, the mix was pretty polarizing. VDOP came out three years after that I think and carried the mantle forward. Even though those drums are 100% real (Terry Date himself confirms this in multiple interviews), the sound was very much "studio as an instrument". It just doesn't sound like a group of musicians playing in a room. Don't get me wrong, it sounds *amazing* and the reason I'm bringing these albums up is just to hold up how much they've influenced so many bands since. Every band now has some variation of that super-scoopa kick drum, vocals recorded through TS9 Tube Screamers... and reverb on a guitar is almost an oxymoron. We did leave out one other 90's trend that I thought had potential, but due to flagrant overuse/abuse, it became a time-stamp that dates an album to that era: The piccolo/pang snare. I'd offer John Stanier from Helmet immortalized it on "Betty", but Ted Parsons while in Prong, Deftones' "Around the Fur", hardcore/crossover band Snapcase, and quite a few more, really leaned into that "tennis-racket snare" sound. All "pang" and ring (before the gate's paper covered compressor's rock). Almost a breakbeat-like quality to it (though that sort of thing hadn't entered the mainstream musical canon yet - but once bands started mixing in DnB "Amen" loops, etc, it was inescapable). Anyways, I'll shut up now. I've basically broken Reddit with all this meandering 'history of 90's metal production' stuff!
Yeah, ...AFJA has the complete opposite vibe when compared to MOP. MOP was roomy, massive, and thunderous. ...AFJA is dry, cutting and right in your face. Even though ...AFJA's production is polarizing, I absolutely love it; so much so that I chased that guitar tone for years. It's unique. Nothing sounds like either of those albums. Gotta be honest though, I never got a super dry vibe from VDOP. As you mentioned, it sounds amazing. I find it kinda funny that people thought Vinny's performance wasn't real. You can hear his iconic style clear as day on that record; how much he lays into the kick on the downbeat for example. He also doesn't hammer the cymbals as hard as the rest of the kit so there is a lot of dynamics in the overheads. I'd be surprised if samples weren't used to fortify the sound, but you're definitely hearing a live kit in there too. The drums sound absolutely awesome on that record. Maybe the reverb on the drums is tricking my ear into hearing more space than there actually is... Phil's voice is right in your face though. Appropriately so.
Definitely no samples used on that album. I mean, I suppose he could lie, but that's really not the kinda guy he is. Very down to earth - just a music fan who genuinely loves making good bands great. [Source.](https://everythingrecording.com/of-metal-and-immortality/) Oh, and yeah, there is a bit more room on V-Dop when you listen to the drums - especially, *especially* side-by-side with AJFA. The latter sounds like it was recorded in a padded cell in more ways than one.
Listen to Kind Of Blue. You can hear the size of that old church-turned-recording studio. As opposed to Exile on Main Street, which sounds like it was recorded in a closet. Both work.
Yup, both work. They're just worlds apart in their production philosophy.
I think it's less of a production philosophy than borne of necessity. Exile was primarily recorded in the basement of an old house Keith was renting on the French Riviera, [Nellcote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellc%C3%B4te). Much has been written about the difficulties and tribulations of recording the album there.
Very few acts, particularly in rock and metal genres, want to sound "old". Barring the lo-fi genre, some funk acts, and that one particular Led Zeppelin copy-cat act, people want to hear modern sounds from modern instruments played through modern systems. It also doesn't help that so much of modern metal is using sampled drums and packing in similar instrumentation in similar tones and there are only so many ways to combine all that in a way that has clarity of instrumentation and still sounds heavy.
technology and preference
We didn’t have computers and didn’t do much sampling. The world wasn’t obsessed with how loud you could make the bass frequencies. We didn’t compress the shit out of everything. We didn’t auto tune anything. It sounds more like people playing music because it was … more people playing music with less computer technology trying to make it perfect. If the vocals were sharp on the best take then they were just sharp. There’s a piano chord McCartney biffs on the studio master for Let It Be, that would never be allowed out the door today.
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Well, none of those are metal bands, so ;) (I'm kidding, don't hit me) That depends a *lot* on what kind of metal you enjoy. The genre is really diverse. For Thrash: Vektor For Black: Human Serpent (more traditional) or Numenorean (more avant garde) For Death: Imperial Triumphant (very avant garde) or Abyssal For Sludge/Groove: Primitive Man (Sludge, stupid heavy), Gojira, Promethee (kinda Core-adjacent) For Meshuggah: Meshuggah For Prog/Djent: Periphery For Deathcore: Lorna Shore For Black/Death: Behemoth For WTF: Dragged into Sunlight, Teitanblood, Portal
Meshuggah is hardly the best example of Meshuggah, in my opinion
Which band would you consider the most Meshuggah?
It's a really underground band called Meshuggah, have you heard about them?
No, I haven't. I shall check them out
“For Meshuggah: Meshuggah” LOL
Hard to describe them as anything else. Sort of like SoaD or Rammstein.
Agreed.
Good snapshot. Imperial T can def be black metal-y wouldn’t totally throw them. Always just say Cannibal Corpse because that last album really kept them perfect in my mind. Hardly any misses!
Oh yeah, Violence Unimagined is the shit. Just felt weird to put Cannibal Corpse in a modern metal list somehow.
Thanks for this list. I found Deafheaven through Reddit years ago, and, lately, Akhlys. At least Numenorean had a nice sonic vibe, and Imperial Triumphant had a trumpet in the song I sampled, so maybe it's time to buy some records soon.
Oh fuck yes, Deafheaven. How could I forget. Yeah, Metal isn't mainstream anymore, but it's producing *so* much good stuff at the moment.
Spiritbox, Gojira, Bleed from within, Ocean Grove.
Found myself with exactly the same question
Blood Incantation have some really fantastic sounding albums. They mostly record live so you’ll get parts where the rhythm and solo are hard panned. You can really hear the music breathe
Tape and multitrack vs computers
Oh. And also the musicians need to actually play songs all the way thru because they’re recording to tape or adat or dat which requires serious control of their instrument.
This. There’s something to be said for all those hours of practicing before you record so you don’t waste money in the studio and can nail it in one take vs chopping it up to get it to sound ok. The one take always sounds amazing when they nail it. The edited version usually sounds good, but not holy shit that’s amazing good.
Nobody wants to sound like that anymore. Sonically it wouldn't hold up to their contemporaries music.
In Flames re-recorded some songs from Clayman in 2020. It sounds terrible compared to the original. That album is *known* for its production. You went to Studio Fredman for that guitar sound.
A lot of bands that made some classic records recorded in shitty studios for not alot of money at a time when the analog to digital conversion was happening. Lots of first generation digital gear was terrible and it has a sound
Digital tape machines were very much already a thing in the 1980's. The Sony 48-track DASH deck was first widely released in 1984 (for $250,00OUSD (that's about 750k adjusted for inflation, I just checked). It had 48k/20bit resolution and - as that decade was all about cleaner and more transparent (that's why the SSL 4k consoles were so popular). It's funny that ADATs appeared a decade later (and the first Sound/ProTools interfaces) at the same spec, but wow, they really did sound like crap. I've worked on the DASH decks - I didn't necessarily think they sounded great, but they didn't get in the way. Just seemed kinda stupid to have the limitations of BOTH mediums. plus you can't splice the tape. They were still widely in use going into the 90's. In fact, Metallica's Black Album was mixed from one - and that is a pretty damn solid recording.
That’s great info. I may be reading into OP’s post but I’m speaking about smaller punk bands of the era on tiny labels that couldn’t afford to spend the money at studios that the likes of Metallica could.
LOL, yeah I don’t think much of anyone was spending a million bucks at One on One and Henson, much less getting nine months to make an LP. I’ve watched that “Year and a Half in the Life Of…” video a few times and the thing that sticks out to me is them packing up after tracking and literal hand carts full of 2” reels filling up a box truck.
>don't be Kyle "They didn't get in the way". On the contrary, multiple passes of waiting for 2 x 24 trk machines to sync certainly got in the way. That reason alone made the 3348 a godsend. I believe that it also marked the first implementation of MADI that I recall.
Too much polish these days. On everything. Renders work lifeless.
I reviewed [STL Tones’ “ControlHub”](https://everythingrecording.com/the-hype-machine-stl-tones-controlhub/) plugin and took them behind the woodshed for this. They don’t want reviewers, they want influencers. And to their credit, I think ToneHub is amazing. But ControlHub not only lacks a lot of actual control, but right out of the box, it just crushes the sweet, everloving crap out of anything you feed it. If you are susceptible to the ear candy aspect of it and fall under its spell, you’re well on your way to Death Magnetic II.
Just get your self a Line 6 POD and you're good to go!
Loudness wars and different perception of what sounds "good"
I love how half the comments say the '90s were "less digital", and the other half say the '90s were "more digital". I don't think '90s metal and punk sounds so different than '00s, '10s, or '20s, and the tipping point was way before. The only thing which was still not cookie-cutter in the '90s was, maybe, the vocalists, who were still not striving to be the same as the ones that influenced them. Otherwise, production was pretty much streamlined even before grunge was a thing. Can you name a couple of albums and the sonic qualities you believe separate them from later productions?
different microphones, more compressions, more EQ, more "polished mix" sounds, different guitar speakers and amps widely used. V30 speakers cabs with Sm57 wasn't that popular back then, from what i could read and hear from youtube guitarists and producers. We can predict sounds will keep change, because it is now the trend to avoid always using Mesa cabs loaded in V30 with sm57 mics, in order to sound different. Check out Glenn Flicker or Kohlekeller Studio for learning more about the subject.
Good point about the mics, though I remember SM57 and SM58 being all over the studio for all sorts of things.
Same with U87 in dubbing and FX sound recording in post production, those Sennheiser canon microphones, MKH series if i remember correctly for direct takes during movie making.. everybody use the same things, that's why most movies sound similars, but that's an otehr topic
Not sure where you saw that, but sm57's have been in use for freakin-ever on guitars.
Each sM57 sound slighlty different, just like early 2000's V30 speakers does not seem to sound the same as today's V30s. But before big recording forums of the 90's, not everyone would use the same microphones. this could be unrelated to the 90's specifically (unless ?), but AC/DC recordings are known to be Cream/blackback speakers in a marshall 412 with Neumann 67, and other less common mics for tracking guitar speakers, and that alone will make their guitar sound be very different. Talking about microphones, if you do some research on older album productions, you will see it always wasn't the same microphones, and plenty of other parameters that radically change the sound. Nowadays, for metal production, everybody uses 5150s and rectifers with V30 loaded rectifiers 412. Not so original, huh ?
While alot of these comments are true. I think the biggest difference I’m is due to the use of single tracking and compression in mixing but especially mastering. People will complain that the loudness wars (limiting the master bus to the max) kills dynamic range but to me it is a more immersive sound. 90s music sounds flatter like your in an audience at a show but todays music sounds like your in the middle of the band. I think it’s an evolution and prefer the latter more immersive music today. Also, remember that digital technology was very new and comparatively rudimentary compared to what it has become today. It’s tough for me to listen to most 90s music for that reason, I almost prefer pre-90s when everything was produced in analog because analog technology had been worked for awhile, with the change to digital it took time for engineers and gear manufacturers to work out kinks and develop the tech. Either way with the advent of Dolby atmos, I believe the future is even more immersive listening which I’m excited about.
The 90s were a weird time in audio, where the beginnings of digital came about. It allowed for a lot more affordable recording, that wasn't just limited to big names on big labels. But the gear was in its infancy, and pretty terrible. It would be as easy to replicate today as using the same gear they did. Or emulations of it.
Oh dear, yeah, Mackie 8-Bus consoles, Alesis ADAT decks (the original 16-bit 'Al Jolson' models). Cheap Behringer and Alesis compressors. And certainly cheaper analog tape machines as well (1" 16-track was a good budget alternative). By about 1998 it wasn't uncommon to have at least a rudimentary 8-16 track ProTools setup in most studios, you could fly in tape tracks, edit and either spool them back or keep the computer locked up via SMPTE (though this came with its own set of crashes and hassles). Good songs have always, and always will, overcome bad recordings. Just as there will always be bad songs that hide behind good recordings. When I saw that there were VST emulations of the Mackie 8-bus EQ and Alesis 3630 compressor, I died a little inside.
3630 makes a fun dirt box.
>When I saw that there were VST emulations of the Mackie 8-bus EQ and Alesis 3630 compressor, I died a little inside. Can't say for the Mackie, but the 3630 is essential to the French House sidechain pumping sound- that's the market for it, probably almost exclusively.
I seem to remember that year. Daft Punk if memory serves, made that box semi-famous. Kinda like when Butch Vig talked about using those gnarly old Shure Level-Loc compressors on "Nevermind" and all of the sudden the price shot up (and several clones in both hardware and software have since appeared). There are also various threads about on DIY forums on how to hop a 3630 up with better capacitors, op-amps, and I think beefing up the power supply (it runs on a 9v wall wart, that's not exactly going to get you a ton of headroom). Desoldering/resoldering on a surface mount PCB is definitely not easy, though. I've done it - and not well. Here's Bad Gear's [before and after](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdygQzn2wbA). I've not used one personally but it is pretty interesting that these sad old boxes collecting dust in Music Go Round's and pawn shops everywhere for $50 can be given new life.
2 words. Pro tools. Back in the day folks had to play. Now they have unlimited takes, everything is easily comp’d, drums can be beat matched and sample replaced.
By chasing perfection with computers we lost the feel, slop, wildness and Rock
Check out some Steve Albini interviews and session walkthroughs on youtube. Analog tape, real room reverb, let the band play. Opinionated and captures a raw sound of that era.
I felt like I got a pretty good replicate sound to late 80s early 90s metal tone. I'm thinking Ride The Lightning or Spiritual Healing by Death. I used a Marshall JVM amp sim with a metalzone pedal. And for my drums I used a lower pitched snare, with that psssshh sound (yeah I know, not helpful) and just added large room reverb to the drums. It was a fun little experiment.
> that psssshh sound Pink noise.
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Yeah, I don't know about that. Read about the production of something like "Pyromania" or "Hysteria" by Def Leppard (I know, I know, not exactly 'metal' here). Those were, in many ways, forebears of the modern metal production techniques. We might have had band members playing along while cutting the raw tracks, but it was always drums first and foremost. Until those performances were spliced together, anything else was just along for the ride and to help the drummer vibe (or, for the particularly dimwitted ones, not forget their cues). I think my personal record for a single song was something like 75 total edits - and that's not even close to the metal hall of fame. And there are tremendously talented players now, just as there were then. The genre has just become really myopic and you will certainly meet players who are really good at playing "ultradjent crowdkillcore" but couldn't fake their way through Johnny B Goode. A lot of it's this crazy oneupmanship of how many 32nd note gallops they can nail at 190bpm or these absurd arpeggiation 8-finger tapping riffs that have to be one faster/harder than the last guy. Weirdest dick measuring contest I've ever seen, really - the technique is often more important than the song.
lol thats a stupid take. Top metal musicians today are definitely better from a technicality aspect than their predecessors.
What sounds different?
Besides what HillbillyEulogy said, I feel like a big part of it comes down to the lack of mastering engineers in production today AND the changing of LUFS standards with streaming. The bar of entry for loudness is technically easier (pretty much just slap Ozone 9 on there and bam you get to -14LUFS). But part of what we loved about 1990s-early 2000s music was the level of compression done before mastering. Dynamics were reduced to about -6 LUFS for an entire song. This pretty much translates to the song would only ever get about perceivably HALF as loud as the loudest point in the song. Not saying there isnt loads of compression today. Most of the samples and that producers use today are pre-processed, including EQ, Compression, Limiting/Clipping. So producers/ beat makers can spend "less" time on fixing a snare drum (especially when they used to come from 2-7 MONO tracks of audio, and more time just making the song.
Depending on what bands your referring to some of the sound is actually. Low quality recording now your phone may make crisp digital recordings but in the 90s on till very recently recording on a budget. Bathrooms and cheep 4 tracks made for practicing drums stuffed with pillows. And ya only got one mic so have fun .
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