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What’s with the desire to make music sound old?
Don’t get me wrong, I love old music and instruments.
But why all the desire for apps that make your music sound old? Will we be forever trying to make our music sound like the golden era?
This isn’t criticism. I am listening to The Man (album) by Barry White and want my music to sound like that. 🙂
Comments
Texture is part of it for me.
Helps get away from some of the shininess I had an allergic reaction to in the 80s, from FM synths with overused presets, to early CD players with too much top end. Things have improved more recently, but overly-perfected, over produced music can become exceedingly wearing.
I guess there’s also a hunt for authenticity in some genres, eg hip-hop, that used to rely on sampling vinyl, but increasingly doesn’t due to copyright issues. So you make clean beats and add fake vinyl noise and scratches to sound as if you’ve sampled it? But I freely admit I don’t really know what I’m talking about on this one.
As a recovering audiophile, I do get frustrated at some of the lo-fi mania from time to time, especially people who think that cassettes sounded so horribly bad back in the day - a good cassette deck could give a CD player a run for its money if set up and used properly. Likewise people thinking that vinyl always sounded scratched up and distorted, and think those horrid plastic suitcase record “players” (destroyers, more like) are giving them some sort of authentic experience.
It just isn’t the case that we all spent our youth listening to wobbly, distorted parodies of music reproduction. Both formats could and did sound great if used properly.
You certainly have a point!. 😂
Funny thing is that “old” is not limited to vinyl crackles and tape flutter. The UA Lo-fit plugin has mp3 artifacts… makes me feel like a dinosaur.
I think for certain kinds of music or soundscape the crackle of vinyl or the wobble and hiss of tape actively imparts a character and meaning beyond the material.
Think of the way the Fallout computer game series used old songs to evoke an aching, arch nostalgia for a world which has gone - “I don’t want to set the world on fire”, etcetera. There’s even a word for it: Anemoia: Nostalgia for a time you didn’t experience:
https://cntrcltr.me/cntr/2018/8/10/w1szswdchocexdw5u8yhqaz4giwk23
Yeah and the 80’s sound is very popular right now as well… nostalgia is in. I personally like sounds that have some grit, warmth and vibes. Snap, crackle, pop and warp has its place for me if it “comes to me” as the way to go to color a song, but that is not very often. I do feel it’s become a crutch for some, but there is a large group of lofi fans that prefer nostalgia.
I like the sound of the older hardware, both synths and samplers but it's got more to do with the way the sound is processed in them so slapping on a decimator or bit-quantizer at the end of the processing chain doesn't really cut it...
As an example, there's a HUGE difference in the over all sound if the source sample is first sampled thru a decimator and then treated as a regular sample to play chords, pads, leads etc. instead of sampling the source at maximum quality and then feeding everything tru a decimator...
I do get the charm of wobbly un-even tape motors etc. but to me it sounds plain 'wrong' if just some of the sounds have the wobbliness when back in the old days if affected 'everything' and in some cases there was 'double wobbliness' (mellotron tapes wobbling with the added wobbliness of the tape they are recorded to) and 'looping' vinyl crackle samples drive me nuts, real vinyl crackles do NOT loop in a somewhat obviously repeatable pattern...
As for 'old-school' gear I love the real lo-fi samplers and Paulo from Synthmania has started to play thru the original Mirage libraries... (All the floppies amount to roughly 30MB which was a LOT back in the days!).
I mean it takes quite a lot of work to 'trash' modern samples to sound and behave like that...
(Like overdriving the AD converter, reducing the sample-rate when sampling (ie. sample thru a decimator), filter out unwanted frequencies to control aliasing artifacts etc. etc.).
And well, considering I'm a 'chip junkie' that's a genre that definitely is more about actual chip-abuse to se how far they can be taken
Doesn’t nostalgia literally mean the pain of separation from the past? I’m sure I read that somewhere…
400+ page treatise on the topic here!:
https://www.academia.edu/14978906/Lo_Fi_Aesthetics_in_Popular_Music_Discourse
Main things -
Trends / cycles:
I think generally everything goes in cycles. Same with fashion. Lofi is having a bit of a moment, and will at some point probably become less popular.
Nostalgia:
I do think that a lot of it is powered by nostalgia. BoC were - and remain - deeply influential. A lot of us were born in the analogue era and dislike many aspects of digital life. While I love the iPad, I'd quite happily go back to a time before mobile phones were a thing. A lot of people in their 40s and 50s are feeling their best years may already be behind them and listening to lofi stuff is a way to get back a sense of those lost years - even though, as John mentions, media we consumed in our childhood were not necessarily actually all that lofi at all. However, watching say, 70s or early 80s TV programs today,
the news for example, you can hear that the recordings and the images do have a distinctly lofi sound compared to what TV news sounds like now.
Character:
Things like wow and flutter provide an easy way to make music have a bit more variety and nuance, keeping the listener more engaged. (Is this starting to sound like a bot, 😂)
Escape / destressing:
White / pink noise etc help to mask out the sounds of everyday life - important when we're surrounded by so many stimuli
There are a lot more aspects probably, but those I think are the main ones. John made a very interesting point also about how the lofi sample sound may be an attempt at faking authenticity.
Yeah It's ancient greek for "going home pain" I think
Bitjuggler also a great tool for low quality mp3 sounds!
🙏🏻
nostalgia
a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past: “was overcome with acute nostalgia for my days at university.”
• something done or presented in order to evoke feelings of nostalgia: “an evening of TV nostalgia.”
Awesome points!
Boards of Canada definitely has a strong influence on lofi as well. Their sound has a 70’s movie score vibe to it that was and still is catnip to many listeners. BOC has been going strong since the 90’s!
“The music of Boards of Canada has been described as ‘evocative, mournful, sample-laden downtempo music often sounding as though produced on malfunctioning equipment excavated from the ruins of an early-'70s computer lab.’ Critic Simon Reynolds described their style as ’a hazy sound of smeared synth-tones and analog-decayed production, carried by patient, sleepwalking beats, and aching with nostalgia’ while crediting them with ‘reinvent[ing]’ elements of psychedelia through the deliberate misuse of technology.”
+1
In my musical lexicon there’s definitely before BoC, and after BoC 😅
I wonder if I have nostalgia for BoC, like metanostalgia
@Krupa most definitely! That first Warp album was just massive - nothing at the time sounded remotely like it.
Btw: to understand the effect of lofi, read the comments on YouTube under the BOC video above. Remarkable 😇
A few examples:
When you shoot on 8K you can see all the imperfections, when you use a VHS filter, suddenly your shitty take is artsy xD
Modern technology is too perfect, it start to feel out of place.
Whenever I see “BOC,” I think of Blue Oyster Cult. But back to the thread topic. In a sense we got what we wished for. Who among us that had to use a monophonic synth in the 70s didn’t wish for more sounds and patch memories? No one. But then the pendulum swung back in the early 1990s when the classic synth nostalgia really hit. And then to show up at a gig with a workstation and an Emu Classic keys module. Lots of snickering back then.
Now, there’s so many choices and directions any of us can use. Way more possibilities; too many at times. Kind of like effects pedals. Do you want a multieffects with tons of different sounds or just one pedal that does one sound really well? Everyone has their preferences.
New things, made with new gear, meant to sound like they have old production values do not really appeal to me. If someone is using old gear and techniques throughout the process I find that interesting for sure but to just slap plugins on and mimic it seems lame to me. Tape hiss and crackles were the enemy to me when I started making music and I just don't really hear the whole 'warmth' thing people talk about. But yah, pull out some old tape loops and start messing with them hands on and I may get into it.
Those apps never quite work but they almost get you there... almost but not really.
Yeah, probably more accessible if the mindset is there kinda like @Samu said: “…sounds plain 'wrong' if just some of the sounds have the wobbliness”. If your mindset with the plugins is to “record” like people did long ago, perhaps you run the whole mix through a suite of degradation plugins to give your mix an analogue vibe.
Reminds of Eno’s quote:
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
― Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices
I always loved this quote.
Mark Fisher was an academic who was interested in this stuff. I found this paper online
The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntologyhttps://dj.dancecult.net › article › download
and in one of his books (I think Ghosts of my Life) has some chapters about crackle, hiss, and nostalgia. He was a very big fan of crackle-meisters like Burial and The Caretaker.
Isn't the "nostalgia means pain from an old wound" idea made up? I know someone says it in Mad Men, but I think I read somewhere that it's not actually true? I could be wrong.
Beautiful
Interesting read...thanks for the link...
…
I’ve been recording with my group since 2001, and I find it darkly hilarious that people are willing to spend a small fortune to sound like what I spent a medium sized fortune to NOT sound like.
Hi Boomers and Xers, it's me your "wise" (-arsed) Millenial coming at you live from my "music dungeon" (bedroom). 😂
I think the best way to think about this isn't from a music producer's perspective but rather that of the consumer's. I think nostalgia DOES play a huge factor into the whole Lofi scene. See, not all of our families could afford those amazing monster-sized Hi-Fi sound systems that would take up a load of space in our living rooms (the systems with Hi-Fi vinyl, cassette, and CD playback).
So a majority of us Millenials and younger grew up with music played on lower-quality systems, portable boomboxes and walkmans, etc. The type of playback systems that, if not careful, could chew up your cassettes quicker than an obese person (me) chomping down low-grade food at a buffet. 😆 (Okay, I haven't been to a buffet since before the pandemic, so shut it. 🤣)
I remember this one boombox I used to have that played both CDs and cassettes that costed $20 at Walmart (Asda). Took it to the beach on a family outing and played this Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons "Greatest Hits" album on cassette while laying back on a towel in the sand back in '95.
I also have the opinion that Lofi is a movement against the (now former?) loudness wars, at least for me. When I'd master EDM, I felt I had to master the tracks to -8 LuFS to compete with other commercially released EDM tracks in hopes it'd be performed in a DJ set. I figured out how to make the mastering as clear and punchy as humanly possible without squashing the bejesus out of it too much, but even so the process would suck out some of the punch of the drums and leave no space for the mix to breathe properly. When listening back to EDM (both commercial releases and my own releases) at super low levels through my headphones, the tracks sound rather flimsy and weak, requiring more volume to sound halfway decent.
Also, most modern EDM tracks have sharp highs and nervous mids as well to make people get up and start dancing, make their heartrates go up, and party all night. An overabudance of mids and highs. Most modern music in the Billboard Top 40 is overcompressed/overlimited, even though it's definitely not necessary anymore ever since -14 LuFS became the standard.
Anyways back to Lofi, there seems to be an odd sense of comfort and peace within those crackles, pops, hisses, warbles, off-kilter timings of notes and drums nudged slightly "off grid", etc. I also like how punchy my drums are and how my mixes breathe safely and comfortably at between -15 and -14 LuFS.
... "OMG, music nerd alert! 🤓" 🤣😂
Well, that's enough banter out of me. Back to music production I go.
It’s just the latest “thing”. Something else is on the way. Maybe singing robots…