The art of insinuation

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I have noticed that most of my favorite songs have one thing in common: they have pleasant but kind of subdued instrumentation. Like with women's clothing, much modern music kind of lets it all hang out, while with good productions instruments are often more insinuated than audible. So the listener has to imagine and complete the parts where for instance the pad is hidden by other instruments, yet still there. Like a woman wearing a dress that is closed but made of shiny fabric which indicates the beauty hidden within via light and shadow, if you get what I mean :hihi:

An example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4j670RGwag

When you listen closely on the headphones, there is a nice floating background pad on the left side, but only occasionally does it surface, while it is there most of the time, just not in your face. The same goes for the bass, it is very muted, but still there doing its thing, indicating the bass line, not impressing with the bass sound as such. The bass drum is also flat, just a shallow plop, no bass in it as such.
Actually, that song is very dense, full of different instrument sounds, elegantly woven into a fabric.

Is that one of the secrets of the compact sound of 80s music? And also one of the reasons modern music is so irritating?

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You should listen to 'Come on Die Young' by Mogwai - it is a masterpiece of restraint and release. Recorded in a forest in upstate New York, you can even hear the external electric fence interference pulsing through the guitar amps on some tracks. So many subtleties. Not a single layer or recorded channel shouldn't be there - and the dynamic range is practically supernatural.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_noyE0K4UmY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3en9Mkx86k

I know it's my namesake... I'm kind of a fan :)

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Okay, so you can't clearly and distinctly hear the pad, the bass, or the kick drum? Is it possible that it just wasn't mixed very well? :P
Incomplete list of my gear: 1/8" audio input jack.

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the 80's sound was all in the reverbs and sense of space. today it's mostly all dry and in your face. that's why it's so irritating. plus the dynamic range thing.
I don't know what to write here that won't be censored, as I can only speak in profanity.

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Seems to me that we are talking about when you listen to a piece of music fourteen times and notice finally that the one single percussive or synth noise you previously were aware of is actually three separate elements put together so well as to have made a unique-feeling part that had previously seemed like it was its own thing. ??

This is a skill and a production technique. Creating complex sound layering that results in letting you hear more details and discover new things the longer you listen to it.

(That's why I enjoy NIN, personally)

I don't personally feel that it's as interesting when everything is so bare and obvious that I have no further sonic discovery to make after the first listen (though I certainly still appreciate excellent yet simply-structured songs). This is why I don't much enjoy traditional bands (singer, lead guitar, bassist, rhythm guitar, drummer, recorded and mixed "traditionally"). I prefer the inclusion of anything and everything else that's interesting-sounding and complimentary, with very detailed production and polish.

Too much polish makes things dull, so I'm certainly not aiming for that. I enjoy a roughness and imperfection to my music listening experience, but it has to be somewhat intentional, rather than incidental resulting from lack of skill.

But what this has to do with women's clothing I have no idea. Maybe a better analogy would be helpful here?
- dysamoria.com
my music @ SoundCloud

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Yes, some genres are very dry, little reverb.

Regarding my analogy: some women wear vulgar clothes that expose a lot of their bodies, others wear much more conservative clothes, which don't reveal as much at first glance, but rather insinuate what is underneath the dress for instance.
With music it seems to be the same: some music is very in your face, everything can be clearly heard, which however to me means that the music does not appear to be one unit, it's more like a set of independent tracks.
With the music I like it is the other way round, the individual tracks are fused together, which often means that not every track can be clearly heard at all times. Often a pad just surfaces during quieter moments, which makes it much more interesting than a pad that is always audible and thus soon ignored by my brain.

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fluffy_little_something wrote:Yes, some genres are very dry, little reverb.
I hadn't thought reverb was part of the discussion. That changes my impression of what you're talking about. Are you comparing ambient to its opposite? One example of this, from my personal music library, would be comparing REM to Slowdive. REM's instrumentation is generally pretty clear and distinct, with little reverb, whereas Slowdive's instrumentation is soaked in ambiance via reverb, echo/delay, and filtering (as well as using synths, where REM generally doesn't). The transients of REM are probably much more distinct, whereas the transients in Slowdive are .... Mushy? Sometimes I have no idea what sound I'm hearing in a Slowdive song (is that a synth or is it guitar feedback drenched in reverb and echo?).
fluffy_little_something wrote:Regarding my analogy: some women wear vulgar clothes that expose a lot of their bodies,
Why do you characterize it as vulgar? Men can go entirely shirtless in public. Is that vulgar?
fluffy_little_something wrote:others wear much more conservative clothes, which don't reveal as much at first glance, but rather insinuate what is underneath the dress for instance.
Insinuate? The function of practical clothing is to cover the body in cultures with nudity taboos (typically weighted heavily against women, both in demanding them to be sexual objects AND refusing their sexual autonomy). It is not the function of such clothing to "insinuate". It is to cover, however practical or impractical. I wonder if you're interpreting clothing from the perspective of women as sex objects (bad) or art objects (less bad, still not good). Women wear clothes for the same reasons men wear clothes. Are men not doing the same thing as women in this regard, in choosing clothing for practicality and/or presentation? Some people dress to fit in, some people dress to stand out, and some people don't try to do one thing or the other. While some clothing is designed to accentuate the shapes of the body of the wearer without exposing it, other clothing is designed to hide the shapes. This clothing exists for both genders.

Maybe your analogy is that some clothing (gender irrelivant) is designed to display the body while other clothing is designed to hide it. The result of the first type is to give a clear visual of the body shape (either via less coverage or by being tight fitting), while the result of the second type is to create a shape that doesn't necessarily exist in reality (shoulder pads and ties make people look more angular, for example).

In music, therefore, a song with a lot of layering and effects would be the clothing that covers the body and creates an unnatural shape... while the music that is a bare-bones traditional band recorded without effects or layering is the clothing that exposes the body as much as possible... ?
fluffy_little_something wrote:With music it seems to be the same: some music is very in your face, everything can be clearly heard, which however to me means that the music does not appear to be one unit, it's more like a set of independent tracks.
Meaning, the overal sonic feel is sparse; you are easily aware of the individual sonic components (guitar, bass, vocal, snare, kick, hihat), rather than perceiving it as one sonic whole that is made up of component parts you cannot easily describe? "Seeing the trees" vs "seeing the forest"?
fluffy_little_something wrote:With the music I like it is the other way round, the individual tracks are fused together, which often means that not every track can be clearly heard at all times. Often a pad just surfaces during quieter moments, which makes it much more interesting than a pad that is always audible and thus soon ignored by my brain.
So you enjoy music that feels like a solid/dense whole, without clearly showcasing its individual component parts (those parts creating a whole via fusion of less-distinct components)? If so, I'm with you and I prefer this myself. I think of it as ear candy; pleasurable sonic content. Texture. It is quite fascinating to me when I get access to the component parts of such music and observe what they are like when naked/raw (like the multi track packages made available in remix contests for big name acts like Depeche Mode, or NIN's raw tracks as made available in a couple of the album releases like "With Teeth", "Ghosts", and "The Slip"). I wish I could inspect the raw sources of a lot more finished professional "dense and richly produced" music.
- dysamoria.com
my music @ SoundCloud

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As for the 80s and the music being irritating... It really depends on the individual product and which part of the 80s. Depeche Mode's early works (1980-82) are very sparse, focus on melody and rhythm more than texture, and can seem cheesy and whatnot, but it's definitely catchy and a lot of people love it (I have to be in a certain mood for it, since I prefer their later works). REM at the same time sounded totally different, using no digital sounds, recorded in a standard band configuration. Both bands in 1988 sounded rather different again.

I think Burillo's spot-on with the reference to the dynamic range problem (loudness wars) and the reduction in reverb usage. Reverb softens sonic soundscapes and homogenizes the output slightly. It's like blurring details in a photograph, but I would think that leads to a less bare sound, not an irritating sparse one. In the 80s, there was a lot of reverb used because it was suddenly cheap to add to music (advent of digital reverbs) and was new. Then it became "too common" and "very 80s" and people backed off on it to escape a dated feel. But there's also the way in which it is used. Some music in the 80s used reverb well and some did not.

I think things were more bare in the 70s, personally. Harder for me to listen to, at least. Especially with the sonic limitations of the recording equipment (drum sets in the 70s have stylistic similarities in recording technique, but are also homogenized by lower fidelity).
- dysamoria.com
my music @ SoundCloud

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Maybe you're talking about using subtle instrumentation to fill in holes in the frequency part of the soundstage. In the 80s and earlier, with less analysis tools in use and less engineering experience, there were more pieces of music that didn't successfully utilize the whole frequency spectrum of human hearing in a pleasing manner. Then again.. Some stuff did. The Beetles "A Day in the Life" was recorded in 1967 and I find it to be sonically very rich. When I first heard it, I was stunned at how old it was (my first hearing was around 1992-93). It has both sparse instrumentation and "wall of sound" parts.
- dysamoria.com
my music @ SoundCloud

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Well, in Arabic countries yes, but in the West women's clothes are often not there to hide the body, but to show it off indirectly. Why else would women wear dresses made of shiny black leather, they know exactly what they are doing. They play with light and shadow and expose their figure depending on perspectives and angles.
I think even in the West it varies, within Europe for instance.
In many countries men are also expected to wear at least an undershirt in public.

No, I was not talking about shoulder pads etc. :hihi: Loved the 80s :hihi:

The video Mogwaiboy linked down there is strange, it is actually not what I mean. It is rather modern in that everything can be heard clearly, it sounds rather loose to me, not like one unit, almost like a live performance. The drums are very dominant.

Maybe it also depends on whether it is instrumental music or songs. With songs it might make more sense to "compress" the music in order to focus on the singer.

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There was an interesting comment earlier, suggesting that if not everything can be heard all the time, maybe it was poorly mixed.

I don't think the Anita Baker song for instance is poorly mixed.

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I find the OP insinuates quite frequently.
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IMO the whoel track shoudl be clearly heard (and understood) even at brief listen in poor conditions. Then, the more focus and the better sound system, the more details should be revealed. At least how I see it in EDM (in original meaning). There must be big bang for clubs, but also details and unfolding layers for audiophiles.
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Tricky-Loops wrote: (...)someone like Armin van Buuren who claims to make a track in half an hour and all his songs sound somewhat boring(...)

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This is an instrumental piece from the late 70s even, which I like a lot, because it is full of details, yet at the same time compact:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BP1_1DpeBE

The center part is rather dense and interwoven, the low string are there most of the time, but barely audible much of the time, and when they do come to the forefront, they sounds like something special. The bass drum is weak again, the bass also, yet the bass line as such is there without being in your face or preventing you from turning up the volume :hihi:

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Perhaps suggestion rather than insinuation? Insinuation tends to have negative connotations.

And I hope there aren't any ladies present with all this saucy talk about revealing clothing. :wink:

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