stompy wrote: Wed Mar 02, 2022 1:22 pm - obvious synthesizer presets

Speaking of Wesley Willis, he gets a pass on this one.

stompy wrote: Wed Mar 02, 2022 1:22 pm- obvious synthesizer presets

With reservations. There are hundreds of stock samples floating around on countless tracks which I take no issue with. And Billions by Caroline Polachek opens with the "Ski jam" patch on the Korg Wavestation, which is so ridiculously identifiable as to be unusable, because the whole song would sound like the patch. Works though.

I like the Fairlight bass too. But that one qualifies as cheese.

Krev wrote: Wed Mar 02, 2022 1:38 pm

stompy wrote: Wed Mar 02, 2022 1:22 pm - "producer tags" (every modern rap song has these. imagine if steve screamed his name on every song he engineered, lmao)

i have a lot more to complain about, but i've already got a headache.

Man, having Steve do a Funkmaster Flex on every In Utero song would really have made it.

Fearsome and mammoth, only allowable air horn miking thread

That distorted telephone voice on the singer, especially in quiet parts.

Outright abuse of side chain compression in dance music, I'm not talking Daft Punk Homework era, I mean where the release is set to the point in milliseconds that your ear is playing catch up.

I just wanna share with you all that I heard this song earlier today.

It checks a lot of the previously mentioned boxes, including queefing bass.

Out of sheer boredom I looked into who might be behind this sound and it appears that (at least) one particular session player seems to specialize in queef bass. I recognized the name since he played live with The Who, but was unaware of how many other records he played on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pino_Palladino

80s pop music... yuck.

"Pino Palladino" rofl that's the name equivalent of that sound.

Pino Palladino's playing on D'Angelo's Black Messiah and Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun kicks ass. Just sayin.

My biggest modern production gripes are the use of synths to pad guitar parts to the point that it sounds like it's just pumped full of air. That, coupled with the overuse of compression, loss of dynamics, and insistence that every modern studio recording be scrubbed of the slightest hint of human error makes for a finished product that sounds devoid of life. I think that this trend is dying, along with the flower crown and the "whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-ohhoaah" chorus, but it made for a big empty plume of truly vapid music. Everything sounds like a Humira commercial. Mainstream 'rock' music is rarely The Thing, but I feel like the last 10 or 15 years of it were particularly annoying.

Tom Wanderer wrote: Thu Mar 10, 2022 10:07 am Pino Palladino's playing on D'Angelo's Black Messiah and Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun kicks ass. Just sayin.

I think it’s fair to say, given his résumé, that Pino is one hell of an accomplished bass player, and well-respected, too, given that he was asked to play John Entwistle’s parts by the surviving members of The Who. Just want to clarify that I am certainly not doubting that.

EDIT: misspelled John Entwistle's name. Shame on me.

There's a give and take, I think, in that without some form of competence and a decent sense of structure, something often won't fly, but without any irregularities, music is easier to tune out. Autotune, quantizing drum beats, cutting and pasting riffs and vocals--rather than strengthening a piece, it can result in it being in one ear and out the other.