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Saw the Police tonight.......................Sting sang his ass off.
He sounds better than he did when I saw him in 79!
The subsonics were so loud at the Oakland Coliseum, however, that
much of his subtle reggae inflected bass lines were lost in a soup
of subsonics. Every big stadium show I"ve seen recently (Bjork being the worst)
have had just stupid amounts of subsonics in the mixing muddying up everything.
At a live show in San Jose (noone famous) I asked the mixer if he could please
turn down 60 hurts by about 10 db. He said, "why, I think it sounds good".
Am I nuts?????? When you can't hear the pitch of the bass guitar the subsonics
have been turned up too loud, imho.
Andy Summers played beautiful parts and some of the worst, disjointed
wanking guitar solos I"ve ever heard (and I'm a big fan of his work)
Stewart Copeland was on it and much more disciplined and keeping much better time than
in the past. This is off topic as hell but I felt like writing a quickie review.
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Unsu...
Re: OT: saw the POLICE tonight in Oakland and wanted to gush and rant
Fri, June 15, 2007 - 2:11 PMwhy was bjork the worst? -
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Re: OT: saw the POLICE tonight in Oakland and wanted to gush and rant
Sat, June 16, 2007 - 3:43 AMThe subsonics in her mix were so loud and overpowering that my wife and
I were literally nauseous and finally left about 2/3 the way through the set.
We were seated close to the Bass bins but even when I went out in front
of the whole auditorium the bass was just killing.
Too bad, she sang her ass off (as did Sting the other evening) and had a fascinating
band (with two computer musicians, a fantastic classically trained keyboardist, a percussionist
(who was really superfluous and overplayed like hell..........all the foundational drumming being
in the computer mixes already) and a rad 10 woman Vocal Choir who also double (!) on Brass instruments
from trumpets to trombones to french horns to euphoniums)....................It was really cool from that
standpoint................just really wrecked by the oversaturation of bass frequencies.
Also, I don't think her new record is nearly as strong as a record like Vespertine as an example and
she favored it entirely, playing only two or three of her 'hits'.
The bass was so loud that it was about 30 seconds into 'Army of One' (a song that I adore and dance to
almost weekly at our local goth club) before I could tell what it was.........just a sea of amorphous throbbing
indeterminent pitched subsonics.
I just don't get it. We have the best sound equipment in history and the
large shows are almost always horribly mixed.
There is this aesthetic that everything has to have overwhelming subsonics.
Add to that the fact that they compress the fuck out of everything means that a drummer as
exciting and dynamic as Stewart Copeland is just compressed to hell.
I'm sorry but Sting's bass lines in the Police did not have any loud subsonic frequencies,
either when he played live or on albums.
There is a lot of bass information that is not below 50 cycles.
Adding tons of subsonics reall has the tendency of terrible masking of bass frequencies
between the kick drum and the bass guitar.............it all just becomes mush, albeit
pretty loud and powerful mush.
Okay, I'll quit ranting, but has anyone else noticed this disturbing trend in modern
large festival mixing?
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