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[srfc]

No one's talking about "moral failings".

Sorry if that sounded like I was having a go at you personally, I wasn't referring to your specific response, more a general term to cover all sorts of complaints that I've read on this, and other forums, down through the years.

What I meant by "moral failings", was that when fans don't like something, (and by this, I don't mean just Maiden fans, it's probably the same on every sort of discussion among fans of anything possible), they tend to attribute this to some sort of failing from the band, eg. they're cheap, they didn't work hard enough, they're sell outs, they spent too little time on the work, they spent too much time on the work.

 

[srfc]

Or do you think the solos (I think Dave's?) on the second disc of Senjutsu are clipping on purpose?

Do I think clipping is a desirable thing? No.

Do I think guys who have been in studios for donkey's years like Kevin Shirley and Dave Murray are going to record solos and not have spotted that there was clipping at any stage. Also, no.

I don't think it's good, but they've obviously decided they were happy with it.

 

[GhostofCain]

I mean, yeah, that train has sailed

 

[GhostofCain]

Do I think clipping is a desirable thing? No.

Do I think guys who have been in studios for donkey's years like Kevin Shirley and Dave Murray are going to record solos and not have spotted that there was clipping at any stage. Also, no.

I don't think it's good, but they've obviously decided they were happy with it.

Isn't the clipping a result of the mastering of the album? I would not be surprised if Dave is not even aware of this.

 

[srfc]

Isn't the clipping a result of the mastering of the album? I would not be surprised if Dave is not even aware of this.

I'm no expert, but you could get it at the recording stage too if the input was too loud. Again not an expert on what happens at the mastering stage, but I'd have guessed that if it was individual instruments clipping that would have been at the recording stage????

 

[Vaenyr]

Do I think clipping is a desirable thing? No.

Do I think guys who have been in studios for donkey's years like Kevin Shirley and Dave Murray are going to record solos and not have spotted that there was clipping at any stage. Also, no.

I don't think it's good, but they've obviously decided they were happy with it.

Heavy disagree. I don't think Dave or any of the boys are aware of that in the first place. But there's 0% chance that they kept that in because they liked the sound. Otherwise we'd be hearing that on more releases. And it's not the only time that they released something like that. The live version of SIASL from the current tour is a clipping mess throughout. That's not an artistic decision, that's simply a hastily cobbles together release making amateurish mistakes.

Sorry if that sounded like I was having a go at you personally, I wasn't referring to your specific response, more a general term to cover all sorts of complaints that I've read on this, and other forums, down through the years.

What I meant by "moral failings", was that when fans don't like something, (and by this, I don't mean just Maiden fans, it's probably the same on every sort of discussion among fans of anything possible), they tend to attribute this to some sort of failing from the band, eg. they're cheap, they didn't work hard enough, they're sell outs, they spent too little time on the work, they spent too much time on the work.

That's fair. At the same time it is undeniable that they don't put in as much effort to recording an album as they did in the 80s or the early 2000s. Whether that's a good thing is another matter obviously, but it's not controversial to recognize that we'll never get a "Bruce has to record the opening to TNOTB literal hundreds of times until it's perfect" again. One could argue that they've worked hard to reach such a point and that they deserve being able to approach recording in a more laid back manner, they've earned the freedom to approach it differently. It's also fair for fans to be unhappy about that, precisely because of Maiden's past and their legacy.

 

[srfc]

That's fair. At the same time it is undeniable that they don't put in as much effort to recording an album as they did in the 80s or the early 2000s. Whether that's a good thing is another matter obviously, but it's not controversial to recognize that we'll never get a "Bruce has to record the opening to TNOTB literal hundreds of times until it's perfect" again. One could argue that they've worked hard to reach such a point and that they deserve being able to approach recording in a more laid back manner, they've earned the freedom to approach it differently. It's also fair for fans to be unhappy about that, precisely because of Maiden's past and their legacy.

I don't think it's undeniable, it's documented that Bruce took a load of takes on TNOTB, but the whole album took significantly less time to record than recent albums. The X Factor took the longest of all, and it sounds shit.

I think there's a bit of jumping to conclusions going on that the 80s albums sound good therefore they must have been working harder. They busted some of those albums out in 4 or 5 weeks while drinking banana daqiris with Robert Palmer.

 

[Vaenyr]

I don't think it's undeniable, it's documented that Bruce took a load of takes on TNOTB, but the whole album took significantly less time to record than recent albums. The X Factor took the longest of all, and it sounds shit.

I think there's a bit of jumping to conclusions going on that the 80s albums sound good therefore they must have been working harder. They busted some of those albums out in 4 or 5 weeks while drinking banana daqiris with Robert Palmer.

They started taking longer but the hours worked changed as well. Now they have the luxury to essentially take as much time as they want. During TNOTB they had strict deadlines that they couldn't miss.

If you genuinely can't tell that the performances have become looser (and in some cases sloppier) over time then I don't know what to tell you. They were meticulous during the late 80s and I also explicitly mentioned BNW, DOD and AMOLAD which audibly had much more effort put into them than TBOS or Senjutsu. Hell, BNW in particular has loads of vocal harmonies, elaborate synthwork in Blood Brothers (for Maiden standards) and trigger-enhanced drums. As I said, pretty undeniable and easily heard differences.

 

[MindlessPieces]

At the same time it is undeniable that they don't put in as much effort to recording an album as they did in the 80s or the early 2000s.

There used to be money in selling albums.
Once people started downloading and sharing music for free, then the bands don't make any money from selling music anymore. Spotify pays them peanuts.

So why would a band (a business) (especially a well established band) sink loads of time and money on something that is going to lose them money?
Instead they make money selling merchandise (T-shirts, Trooper Beer, Maiden Monopoly etc) and selling concert tickets.

This is a direct consequence of consumers (us) not buying albums any more. Albums are few and far between and the quality is poor.
Of course bands who are trying to get established see the need for frequent albums and investing in high quality recordings.

 

[MindlessPieces]

The X Factor took the longest of all, and it sounds shit.

My guess as to the X Factor.

It was a victim of the Loudness war. With Compression being overused in the industry as a whole during that period to make the album LOUD in an attempt to increase sales, this caused the natural drums to be less punchy and so they tried to compensate by using some kind of sound effects on the drums which to my ears sounds like a rubber jandle slapping the bottom of a plastic bucket (truly horrible and ruins the studio album).
Plus, the limitation of the singer.
Plus the crazy idea on this album to make parts of the song too quiet so that ultimately you can't hear the songs right on a set volume.

Also probably a lot going on in the members' lives and so the album was overly grim and depressing to the point of "stop your bloody whining guys! enough all ready, I get it, you're feeling down!"

 

[Mosh]

Iron Maiden's decline in production quality predates the piracy era. Arguably the best sounding of all the post-Birch albums is Brave New World and that was released as illegal downloading was just taking off, so I don't really see the correlation there.

The X Factor is not a loud album and kinda predates the loudness wars. As you mentioned, many times the album is too quiet, which some more compression on the master would have actually helped with.
Besdes, there were a couple "loud" rock albums from that time but the loudness war didn't really kick in full swing until digital software became more industry standard in the later 90s/00s. I'm not sure if Maiden were even using digital software on their albums yet.

 

[MindlessPieces]

The X Factor is not a loud album and kinda predates the loudness wars.

X Factor was released in 1995

The Loudness Wars – USC Viterbi School of Engineering

illumin.usc.edu

By the early 1990s, music producers were elevating the peaks of digitally recorded songs to the point where peak levels started to push the loudness limit of 0 dBFS. Once music producers reached this point of no return, the only way to raise the average level of the audio was to compress the peaks. Yet, unlike analog compressors, which were restricted by how much they could reduce the peak levels of tracks, digital compressors were much more powerful [3]. Sound engineers quickly began hyper-compressing audio in order to squeeze in as much loudness as possible, pushing the average level of songs up to as high as -6dBFS through the 1990s and 2000s

In my unqualified opinion, X Factor was a victim of the loudness war. Compression and loudness was new, and bands and producers were learning how to apply it. There are many albums around mid 1990's where the drums are sounding unnatural to give the drums punch given the reduced dynamic range to get overall loudness up in the hopes it would increase sales revenue.

 

[Mosh]

X Factor was released in 1995

The Loudness Wars – USC Viterbi School of Engineering

illumin.usc.edu

By the early 1990s, music producers were elevating the peaks of digitally recorded songs to the point where peak levels started to push the loudness limit of 0 dBFS. Once music producers reached this point of no return, the only way to raise the average level of the audio was to compress the peaks. Yet, unlike analog compressors, which were restricted by how much they could reduce the peak levels of tracks, digital compressors were much more powerful [3]. Sound engineers quickly began hyper-compressing audio in order to squeeze in as much loudness as possible, pushing the average level of songs up to as high as -6dBFS through the 1990s and 2000s

In my unqualified opinion, X Factor was a victim of the loudness war. Compression and loudness was new, and bands and producers were learning how to apply it. There are many albums around mid 1990's where the drums are sounding unnatural to give the drums punch given the reduced dynamic range to get overall loudness up in the hopes it would increase sales revenue.

I did a rough analysis of the audio from X Factor and a couple other songs from around the same time (I'm looking specifically at the RMS reading):

Spoiler: Man on the Edge

Spoiler: Oasis - Roll With It

Spoiler: Metallica - King Nothing

As you can see, Metallica and Oasis (released 1996 and 1995 respectively) were both significantly louder albums (1db can be a big difference) than X Factor. You can even look at the waveforms of the three and see that they a lot more compressed:

Spoiler: Waveforms

This is to say that Maiden were not really participating in the "loudness" war at this time. Metallica is a comparison of another Metal band from around the same time. Oasis is used as an example because they were using the latest digital compressors to really push their music. Again, something I'm not sure Iron Maiden was doing at this point.

Which brings me to the issue of when the loudness war starts. There has always been some sort of loudness war in the sense that audio engineers are always pushing the format that they're on. You could argue that it started to take off with the CD in the 80s, but the use of digital compression to really push things beyond the limits of hardware compression didn't really become a thing until the mid 90s and even then not everybody was using it. A way different situation than in the 00s and beyond when this sort of thing becomes industry standard. So when I say "kinda predates" I mean in the sense that yes, there's a big spike in loudness around this time, but not all artists (including Maiden) were really there yet.

 

[redandtheblack92]

There used to be money in selling albums.
Once people started downloading and sharing music for free, then the bands don't make any money from selling music anymore. Spotify pays them peanuts.

So why would a band (a business) (especially a well established band) sink loads of time and money on something that is going to lose them money?
Instead they make money selling merchandise (T-shirts, Trooper Beer, Maiden Monopoly etc) and selling concert tickets.

This is a direct consequence of consumers (us) not buying albums any more. Albums are few and far between and the quality is poor.
Of course bands who are trying to get established see the need for frequent albums and investing in high quality recordings.

I agree. Specifically in Asian countries (specific India) there’s lot of emphasis on having free or super low cost music. Like Spotify in my country is so wide spread cause of the membership fees. Record shops have completely shut shop in my country due to what you just pointed. I do hope though that records don’t get completely decommissioned globally cause certain old school people like us enjoy buying a CD/LP than streaming it.

It also makes me wonder if that’s why Maidens been coming out with the deluxe versions of their albums. They make more there & plus the look & feel is just far better than that of the standard edition.

 

[Vaenyr]

There used to be money in selling albums.
Once people started downloading and sharing music for free, then the bands don't make any money from selling music anymore. Spotify pays them peanuts.

So why would a band (a business) (especially a well established band) sink loads of time and money on something that is going to lose them money?
Instead they make money selling merchandise (T-shirts, Trooper Beer, Maiden Monopoly etc) and selling concert tickets.

This is a direct consequence of consumers (us) not buying albums any more. Albums are few and far between and the quality is poor.
Of course bands who are trying to get established see the need for frequent albums and investing in high quality recordings.

Because they are still musicians who are creating art, not just a product. There are millions of musicians out there to this day who are giving their all to create the best sounding albums that they can, despite living in the streaming age and not selling many albums. That argument does not hold up to scrutiny and I fail to see the relevance.

My guess as to the X Factor.

It was a victim of the Loudness war. With Compression being overused in the industry as a whole during that period to make the album LOUD in an attempt to increase sales, this caused the natural drums to be less punchy and so they tried to compensate by using some kind of sound effects on the drums which to my ears sounds like a rubber jandle slapping the bottom of a plastic bucket (truly horrible and ruins the studio album).
Plus, the limitation of the singer.
Plus the crazy idea on this album to make parts of the song too quiet so that ultimately you can't hear the songs right on a set volume.

Also probably a lot going on in the members' lives and so the album was overly grim and depressing to the point of "stop your bloody whining guys! enough all ready, I get it, you're feeling down!"

That's not what the loudness war was. Compression existed before that point as well, and the point of the loudness war was to push the volume of the entire record. You said yourself that there are points that are incredibly quiet which directly contradicts your own argument and proves that TXF simply has a poor production, unrelated to the loudness wars. Furthermore, the real victims of that practice were a decade later with Metallica's Death Magnetic, a clipping mess, being the infamous example.

 

[Trevoire]

Daves solo's clipping are almost certainly a result of the mastering process.

X Factor isn't a loudness war casualty, it's simply poorly mixed.

 

[Vaenyr]

Daves solo's clipping are almost certainly a result of the mastering process.

X Factor isn't a loudness war casualty, it's simply poorly mixed.

Precisely.

 

[Melony]

The same "live magic" that results in literal mistakes, like one of the guitars changing chords a couple of measures too early, switching to the earlier chord in the next measure and then finally playing the expected change in the measure afterwards after the second chorus in TBOS?

I have always thought it was something that happened and then they thought it would make an interesting effect.
Not that they didn't realize it, were too lazy to correct it or didn't have the time.
Can we really know that?

 

[Melony]

Because they are still musicians who are creating art, not just a product. There are millions of musicians out there to this day who are giving their all to create the best sounding albums that they can, despite living in the streaming age and not selling many albums. That argument does not hold up to scrutiny and I fail to see the relevance.
...

That's true. Recently I asked the guitarist of a moderately well-known band if he thought that everything he showed me was even noticed by the fans (with a few exceptions), and he said: "It's for myself."

 

[Vaenyr]

I have always thought it was something that happened and then they thought it would make an interesting effect.
Not that they didn't realize it, were too lazy to correct it or didn't have the time.
Can we really know that?

If they noticed and liked it enough to deliberately keep it on the record they would've recreated it live. This didn't happen, which is pretty telling, don't you think?

Also, that's just one of multiple examples to illustrate a wider point.

That's true. Recently I asked the guitarist of a moderately well-known band if he thought that everything he showed me was even noticed by the fans (with a few exceptions), and he said: "It's for myself."

This I agree with. I'm not particularly successful with my own musical endeavors, but I still do everything for myself. If other people check it out and like it that's gravy and I'm grateful of course. Still, the person who has to be happy with every decision is myself.