Kevin Shirley’s production of Senjutsu

There's nothing lame or unprofessional about using MIDI. Millions of artists do so including professional one's and done properly the results can be superb. The issue is that Maiden don't record to a click so MIDI triggering is impossible. Therefore, it made little sense for Bruce to use a MIDI keyboard over a real piano.

Fact is they should have hired a pro pianist as Bruce is no Chopin.
I respectfully disagree. I do agree MIDi can be used tastefully in the right way but I hear so many instances where it's not. The MIDI piano on Empire of the Clouds isn't so bad because piano is a timbre that can be replicated without sounding terrible, but the fake cello and the fake horns are really cringe and there's no reason not to hire actual musicians to play these parts when you have the budget to do so.

Listen to the fake cello on this Bruce Springsteen song. It sounds embarassing. Are they really too cheap to just hire an actual cellist?

 
MIDI is a communication standard. It describes musical events. E.g. "C2 has been played".


Here's how a $300 orchestration suite sounds.
I believe you wouldn't pass a blind test if I played you a orchestral section recording from IRL and one done in studio via MIDI+orchestration plugin.

Agreed with siliconmessiah that Maiden is very lazy and they should've used better plugins and do more engineering work around it.
 
What Bruce did with the Deep Purple guys and orchestra was really great. But: I very much dislike the concept of Iron Maiden + orchestra, because it would most probably turn out terrible and ridiculous, like it almost always does with these things. Scorpions + Berlin Philharmonic or Yngwie spring to mind... IMO, Maiden have three guitars to orchestrate.
 
Absolutely. On second verse of Senjutsu Smith starts playing this double tempo riff and it reminds me of doodles violins occasionally do in arrangement. They should do this thing with guitars more. Also Smith used MIDI pickup on the AMOLAD/tour. You will quickly notice that when he samples a baritone string sound out of it, using the very riff he plays for BTATS intro, it sounds real and lively.

MIDI can still describe 256 levels of velocity that the note has been hit with. You can find quality samplers that use many layers of different recordings for regions in that 256 value space. And if you have keyboards with piano keys and if you have a pianist, he'll get a good sound out of it.

Dickinson/Harris/Keeney are beginner level. Beginner level players can't max out the gear.


I'm not 100% certain but JMJ is using controllers here too. The sound quality of each synth patch is unbelievably high.
 
I never got all the Shirley hate as I also believe it’s Steve who mostly calls the shots. I do think that Shirley had the most input/control on BNW and Senjutsu, which I believe are the 2 best sounding reunion era albums, to my ears anyway. One of Bruce’s conditions to returning to the band was to hire an established producer. I think Steve had to loosen the reins here and what we get is Maiden’s best sounding reunion album in BNW. With Senjutsu we get a lot of what was lacking in the previous albums: vocal layering, more effects, etc. I believe this is more from Shirley. Of course I could be all wrong but it makes sense to me.
 
Here's how a $300 orchestration suite sounds.
I believe you wouldn't pass a blind test if I played you a orchestral section recording from IRL and one done in studio via MIDI+orchestration plugin.

Being a mainly classical listener, I can very easily tell the difference, but that plugin sound is very tasteful. That's a good sound library.

Here's the thing though: even if the plugins are really good, what's so wrong with hiring actual musicians? They have the budget for it and the authentic sound of real instruments will always beat even the best plugin.
 
Being a mainly classical listener, I can very easily tell the difference, but that plugin sound is very tasteful. That's a good sound library.

Here's the thing though: even if the plugins are really good, what's so wrong with hiring actual musicians? They have the budget for it and the authentic sound of real instruments will always beat even the best plugin.
In the case of Empire of the Clouds, you need to consider that no one in the band really even knew what Bruce was writing until it was mostly done and needed to be put together. He’d been tinkering on his keyboard when not doing vocal takes and towards the end of recording, worked with Steve and the guys to put it together. At that point the band is likely trying to stick to a schedule and budget. So they recorded Bruce’s song and sent it to a third party to get some extra instrumentation in. It’s not like they can just drop what they’re doing and grab an orchestra off the street. Their time is very tightly managed, as is their money.
 
Empire would be ruined with a real piano player, instead of Maiden melodies you'ld have some ponce playing Elton John/November Rain shit.
 
They have the budget for it

You've said this a few times, but I wonder if this is actually the case. We're not talking about Drake or even AC/DC here, and some of Maiden's decisions outside the stage production have been, let's say, quite cheap lately. I'm not saying they're on a shoestring budget, but I do think they don't have all that much money to freely allocate.

There might be another reason for the relatively low quality of the production (I say relatively because it is still head and shoulders above most metal releases these days). A few years ago I read an interview with Nemtheanga of Primordial (no link, don't ask) where he said that he can't be arsed to put real effort into the production because most people are going to listen to his music on their phones with cheap headphones anyway, so what's the point. This has been the norm for at least a decade now, do I'm pretty sure a lot of music productions these days is done to sound good on a streaming platform with headphones, not on an expensive stereo equipment. We can surely lament this development, but we can't really change the circumstances.
 
I agree with the guys above that the album sound might have some issues (I liked @Mosh 's take on that), but considering it's 'Arry + Shirley, it's surprisingly good and for me personally in the upper half of reunion albums in that regard.

Which brings me to:

Shirley is Maiden's engineer, not producer. He did his job very well, as he does. He doesn't have a say (for 20+ years, since day 1) in sound or arrangements. By his own addmission, he's there to "mic up guitarist's cabinets" and let them be themselves, he tweaked drum sound only in BNW and has opinion that if Nicko tunes his drums correctly they're going to sound good.

As an engineer he's there to capture their sound.

Steve Harris is chiefly Maiden's producer but on this album we can see that Smith has got some leverage when it comes to his tracks.
If you recall the interviews, it's Steve that wanted guitarists to play specific kind of solos and worked with them on it. That's absolutely the job that producer does.

Maiden sounds the way Maiden wants to sound, Shirley is just the means to get that on tape. If you have problem with the way Maiden sounds it's down to Harris in most cases.

Maiden never had a Bob Rock - certainly not that down in career when Metallica hired him.
He totally changed the way band does things and introduced a 'big name producer' to the band (and to the genre I'd say).

Birch was more of a big name engineer. Apart from the TNOTB scream story with Dickinson, and Murray/Smith saying he gave them a hard time with solo recording (they say that about Shirley too), where are his big name producer interventions to the albums?

He wasn't the type and eventually Maiden found a replacement in the same kind of a professional.

Maiden is in essence self produced since the mid 80s.
The things you need to look for if you like 80s but dislike newer stuff. The 80s haven't got a thick guitar sound and they haven't got an orchestration going and the drums usually sound like shit. I think albums such as Piece of Mind or Powerslave have been recorded very organically, L-R separation of guitars, multitrack here and there, very wide sound. I think album such as AMOLAD has been done the same. The difference in sound is the difference in amps, drums, instruments and arrangements, nothing more to it. You will find that the greatest difference between typical 'hard rock' amp sound is between early 80s and early 90s. The early 90s amps are what we consider 'modern metal sound' today.

The definition of Statocaster into Marshall remains but the sound is different. Back in 70s/early 80s, those were low gain pups and low gain amps. After mid 80s those were high gain hums and high gain amps.
Correct again but that's missing my point completely.
Again, the style of solos is hardly something that people throw a criticism at.

People critique
- the very sound - mostly of guitars and drums
- the production scope - too dry, "live in studio", lack of vocal layering, etc.
- the arrangements - length of songs and Harris' songwriting tendencies

People tie Shirley to all three points because #1 and #2 are "production" and he's "the producer" while at #3 "the producer" should do more than engineering job and force arrangement. Average Shirley critic believes that he should cut the Harris arrangement into shorter package and force the executive role of the producer in the band.

And intriguing take, however, why would you say Dance of Death is almost unlistenable (the sound is atrocious to a terrible degree and I'm really not an audiophile) and it never happened again since (at least not quite like there)?
 
And intriguing take, however, why would you say Dance of Death is almost unlistenable (the sound is atrocious to a terrible degree and I'm really not an audiophile) and it never happened again since (at least not quite like there)?

Not answering for Zare obviously, but I always thought that the DOD mix sounds so bad because it was done with 5.1 in mind thinking that's the way of the future. I seem to remember someone on the board made a strong arhument against that though, but I don't remember when and where and I couldn't find the post in a quarter-arsed 5 second search, so we'll probably never know.
 
This is all true and I will still question the amount of final say that Smith or Dickinson have on anything (other than the arrangement and overdubs on songs that they've written).
  • Steve is to blame for the manner of recording - i.e. tracking as "live" as possible with minimal overdubs and often minimal actual practicing of the song as a unit. Could Kevin Shirley get a better guitar sound? Maybe, but probably not with a bunch of people playing at the same time because of bleed, etc. He could try to re-amp in post production, but something tells me Steve is probably against that.
    • Bruce and Smith (and the other guys) seem to mostly be okay with this (lazy) manner of recording.
  • Steve is to blame for the mixing as he has all final say on the mixes. Could Kevin Shirley fight Steve on the mixes? Sure, but why in the hell would he? Maiden is probably his biggest paycheck, his biggest name drop and his easiest gig!
    • Bruce and Smith (and the other guys) seem to mostly be okay with this (muddy) manner of mixing.
  • Steve is to blame for the lack of mastering. As for Shirley, see above, re: collecting a paycheck.
    • Bruce and Smith (and the other guys) seem to mostly be okay with this (lazy) manner of final production.

While the above is brilliant the bolded text is not correct. Kevin by his own admission has typically hard times when working with Maiden (i.e. check his recent interview to Bonamassa) and Senjutsu is the most difficult work in his career, also by his own admission.

This is Steve's band, if you don't like what he does then you're listening to the wrong band.

This was the case in 1981. 10 years later we saw what Maiden became without Adrian and shortly later we saw new all time lows without Bruce as well. So no, successful post 2000s Maiden is not Steve's band.

He got the reins alright, he's the boss with a little help from Rod, Nicko and all, but the level of control he applies is proportionally way too much for the value he can bring to Maiden only by himself.
 
Yeah I don't think Dance of Death or even AMOLAD sound particularly bad. It does have some of meh loudness and but I personally think it's way better than Book of Souls or Senjutsu, which are really muddy and headache inducing.

I actually really like the how The Final Frontier sounds. I think it strikes a great balance between Martin Birch and modern production values.
 
AMOLAD and BNW are among the best-sounding Maiden albums, but I do agree that DOD sounds muddy.
 
And intriguing take, however, why would you say Dance of Death is almost unlistenable (the sound is atrocious to a terrible degree and I'm really not an audiophile) and it never happened again since (at least not quite like there)?

Isn't the story that Shirley bounced entire project for Harris, so that he can listen to it in the car, and Steve just passed on the CD to mgmt and said release this.

I don't know. I mean Lars also proofed Black and Death Magnetic. Claims there's no problems with the latter. So go figure.

As amusing that might be, I don't have their ears or systems and I don't know what goes into their brain.

Here's the thing though: even if the plugins are really good, what's so wrong with hiring actual musicians? They have the budget for it and the authentic sound of real instruments will always beat even the best plugin.

Well for me, I'd lose orchestration in Maiden and day and that would be it. There's no point in chasing quality classic orchestration if the said pieces weren't exactly written for it. It's just that effort that goes into MIDI tracking and samplers/sequencers used to render the sound out - really very low.

With hiring actual musicians you shaft the live piece because you won't take them on tour and you won't play to a clicktrack so pre-recording syncs properly...

Mentioned many times before, Floyd took orchestra out on Atom Heart Mother tour, they still didn't return the investment at well into Wish you were here days.
 
You've said this a few times, but I wonder if this is actually the case. We're not talking about Drake or even AC/DC here, and some of Maiden's decisions outside the stage production have been, let's say, quite cheap lately. I'm not saying they're on a shoestring budget, but I do think they don't have all that much money to freely allocate.

There might be another reason for the relatively low quality of the production (I say relatively because it is still head and shoulders above most metal releases these days). A few years ago I read an interview with Nemtheanga of Primordial (no link, don't ask) where he said that he can't be arsed to put real effort into the production because most people are going to listen to his music on their phones with cheap headphones anyway, so what's the point. This has been the norm for at least a decade now, do I'm pretty sure a lot of music productions these days is done to sound good on a streaming platform with headphones, not on an expensive stereo equipment. We can surely lament this development, but we can't really change the circumstances.
I'm not sure what exactly the difference is in approaching how an album is produced or mixed. Which effort, which process is different?
Spending less time? Using cheaper equipment? Not using an expensive producer?
I guess a band still wants to have a certain sound, a decent recording, and a good balanced mixed (to their taste)?
That aspect is never going to change, when a (professional) creator cares for their own work.
 
If I’m being honest, it still seems bonkers to me that anyone could complain about the Shirley produced Maiden albums. I think they all sound good. They sound like Maiden, I can hear all the instruments clear as a bell, and they make me happy in my pants.

The only albums I’d criticize sound on is the debut, which is a known quantity, X Factor, where the production adds to the record’s atmosphere and Virtual XI….which could stand to sound a lot better. Granted, the new 2017 vinyl remaster sounds quite good to me, though still a bit thin.
 
I'm not sure what exactly the difference is in approaching how an album is produced or mixed. Which effort, which process is different?
Spending less time? Using cheaper equipment? Not using an expensive producer?
I guess a band still wants to have a certain sound, a decent recording, and a good balanced mixed (to their taste)?
That aspect is never going to change, when a (professional) creator cares for their own work.

I don't know what the difference in approach is. All I can tell you is I hear a different outcome with my ears.
 
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