Does production even matter?

[dark_virus]

Sound quality doesn't matter to me. Expression is everything. Of course, if the expression touches me and it's a good quality production, it's more than welcome.

The quality obsession serves to impress the average listener and shift the focus from the fact that there may be a bad song beneath all the technology.

[Googly Smythe]

I know songs from the 30s or so up to today, and the funny thing is that the sound quality barely matters. A song that has that special something does so regardless of the production quality, and a boring song will never get beyond that no matter how great production is.

For instance I was just listening to an old Duke Ellington tune, Solitude, it is simply touching and beautiful no matter how poor the sound quality is.
Same with modern music, none of my favorite songs would probably get anything above a C if rated for production.

In short, aren't people spending too much time and effort on trying to produce the heck out of music that basically just isn't worth it?

Poor as the sound/production quality is, for the 1930s it was probably cutting edge.
Also, wouldn't it be nice if a performance/song was great and had a great production as well?

[Nielzie]

The other way around: Sometimes I can really enjoy listening to a good production (to my ears) over the overal song arrangement itself. Although my wife looks really strange at me when I say "hey this song sucks, but it has great dynamics and is well produced"

[vurt]

not if youre deaf.

[herodotus]

Try Metallica's "…And Justice for All" album. Man did they f**k up the production on that one. Despite some songs being pretty good (if you like that style of course), I just can't listen to it without thinking how they would sound if they where properly produced.

Perhaps. But compared to "St. Anger" it was positively an audiophile level production. Talk about wasted money.

[yellowmix]

As odd as it might seem, with a tune from the 30's, I indeed prefer an inferior sound quality. It seems odd to have such an old recording sound as bright and perfect as music sounds today. I suppose it is also why some R&B and HipHop artists deliberately add vinyl noise to their songs.
It's like with black and white movies, some of their charm lies in not being color. It works like a time machine.

Sounds like "lack of production" is inherently an important production style of its own.

[vurt]

Try Metallica's "…And Justice for All" album. Man did they f**k up the production on that one. Despite some songs being pretty good (if you like that style of course), I just can't listen to it without thinking how they would sound if they where properly produced.

Perhaps. But compared to "St. Anger" it was positively an audiophile level production. Talk about wasted money.

and don't forget, the songs on jfa where worth recording.
pretty much anything else after that, nope.

[VariKusBrainZ]

Try Metallica's "…And Justice for All" album. Man did they f**k up the production on that one. Despite some songs being pretty good (if you like that style of course), I just can't listen to it without thinking how they would sound if they where properly produced.

Perhaps. But compared to "St. Anger" it was positively an audiophile level production. Talk about wasted money.

and don't forget, the songs on jfa where worth recording.
pretty much anything else after that, nope.

Yeah, back when I cared about Metallica I wondered what Justice would have sounded like if produced like MOP, my favourite album of theirs.

But it came out when tech metal was a thing and so probably needed a cleaner approach.

[Synthman2000]

As a very quick thought. Production does not quite mean what it used to mean. A producer was a third party, often a highly technical/creative musician with a track record of making good sounds and having good ideas, so very significant sonic input into a bands studio work, someone with a vision and concept who could directly realize those visions using equipment available (or unavailable and rented in specifically) or have sufficient technical knowledge to instruct an engineer to implement the ideas.

These days "production quality" is somewhat tied into sound quality and sonic trends and relates to genre, usually 1 dude doing everything behind a screen, especially so with dance music genres.

It tends to matter cause if it did not great tracks could be very much lost and never discovered due to poor quality execution demo tape quality.

And super produced stuff with relatively little musical journey can just fit into "minimal" sub genres and still get respected.

[herodotus]

Try Metallica's "…And Justice for All" album. Man did they f**k up the production on that one. Despite some songs being pretty good (if you like that style of course), I just can't listen to it without thinking how they would sound if they where properly produced.

Perhaps. But compared to "St. Anger" it was positively an audiophile level production. Talk about wasted money.

and don't forget, the songs on jfa where worth recording.
pretty much anything else after that, nope.

Quite.

For me, the most frustrating production I have heard was Mars Volta's "Frances the Mute". I love the music, but it sounds like the whole thing was run through a compressor with the ratio set to 50:1 and the threshold set to -40 db.

[vurt]

thatll be to keep juan in check
the way he plays that bass through pedals, especially when hes dropping sub bass on it

[Tj Shredder]

I forgot which, but there are releases where they finally choose to take the demo instead of the fully produced piece. You can easily destroy the music by listening to it too often and loose the original connection.
I mostly prefer music which is recorded life in one take over constructed music...
Even big productions can benefit from simplification. I once had to rescue a mix the original engineers gave up on. An opera recorded on to 48 tracks. Finally I took the stereo room recording they also had, and only here and there mixed in some of the direct mics to aid problematic parts... The room mic had the perfect reverb aleady...

[herodotus]

I forgot which, but there are releases where they finally choose to take the demo instead of the fully produced piece. You can easily destroy the music by listening to it too often and loose the original connection.
I mostly prefer music which is recorded life in one take over constructed music...
Even big productions can benefit from simplification. I once had to rescue a mix the original engineers gave up on. An opera recorded on to 48 tracks. Finally I took the stereo room recording they also had, and only here and there mixed in some of the direct mics to aid problematic parts... The room mic had the perfect reverb aleady...

All of my favorite orchestral or choral recordings use one of the classic 2 Mic arrays (xy, ORTF, Blumlein pair, etc).

The only multitrack orchestral recording I have heard that I liked was Zappa's first LSO recording, which also used compression and other effects. But I like it more as a curiosity than anything else.

[Scotty]

The actual room itself in these classical recordings is a marvel of technology ... a kind of passive production but important nonetheless.

All of my favorite orchestral or choral recordings use one of the classic 2 Mic arrays (xy, ORTF, Blumlein pair, etc).

[Unaspected]

Production even matters when poor sound quality is an artistic choice, as with early black metal.