It's kind of like how I can hear the high pitched "ooooooh's" over the verses in "Hit The Floor" while everyone else looks at me like I made it up. The first one starts at :25 and goes the whole verse. [youtube]yQ_BiMRWahU[/youtube]
I heard it too, in 2003. I didn't know about the In My Remains synth or the damn guitar in Burn it Down until I heard them live. I just don't understand how the band can be comfortable putting their shit out that way. And I bet Meteora would be a great sounding album (I'm not touching the lyrics with what I'm about to say, that's a different subject) if it didn't sound so layered and shitty. If they stripped Meteora down the the level Minutes to Midnight was, or even if it were mixed better, holy shit. Fuck Don Gilmore. He made Lacuna Coil washed up, too.
You didn't hear the guitar in Burn it Down? Weird. It's not like its buried in the mix like the high synth is in In My Remains. You must have been listening though some crappy headphones.
It's definitely buried in the mix. I haven't heard it through any set of speakers I've played it through (except my guitar amp with the high's turned way up, but that's not how it was intended to be played). Unless you know it's there, it's barely audible over the guitars except on nice headphones.
Burn it Down, Lost in the Echo, and The Catalyst sound 10x better live because of the level of the guitars.
Gibleson knows that that lead in "In My Remains" is hard to hear; he's talking about your claim that you can't make out the guitars in "Burn It Down". Different songs suffer from different levelling issues.
That's not the case. Once you hear these parts live, or once I hear them, I then am able to hear them in the studio version.
I love the synth in IMR, but it's more recognizeable on the last chorus of the instrumental version.. (If we're talking about the same synth ) I would have to relisten to Hit the Floor and see if I have heard what Hybrid says. I'll Be Gone though.. No matter how hard I try..
You know what, today I was listening to IMR without headphones, on my phone. Just blasting it. I heard the synth crystal clear. Later, I listened to LT, and was pretty excited when the synth came on, and I barely heard it. How?
Just because a part isn't there doesn't mean you are meant to really notice it, if that makes sense. Sometimes, a part is there simply to enhance/interact with the sound of another instrument or part. It's actually extremely common, and I would bet that just about anyone's favorite albums have all kinds of stuff they have never noticed unless they've really studied it, which admittedly is probably very common here (a music fan site). These types of sounds 90% of people will never notice, but you take it out and they will tell you that something sounds missing or wrong without being able to tell you what. It's definitely a mixing decision, yes, but it goes so far beyond that. If LP and co. had wanted you to hear that synth in IMR up front, or those OOOOOHs, then they would have used a different sound, probably turning up the mids on the synthesizer before recording or something like that. They want the vocal to be the focus, which has some overlap on the frequency spectrum with those synths, as well as the upper harmonics of the guitar distortion. In this case, that synth is why the guitars sound the way they do. Take out the synth and the guitar is more present, make the synth have some meat to it and give it a bigger place in the mix and you take away the oomph of the guitar or make chester sound thin. I'm sure a lot of people would like some of those or other changes, but others wouldn't. It's just the sound the band chose for that track. The same goes for the burn it down chorus guitars, they are there to supplement, not be the focus. They overlap with the distorted bass synth enough that only one is going to be clear without drastically changing the sound. Notice how the live version has a little bit different feel in the choruses. It's not good or bad, just different. It's like the alto part on a choral piece: you only really hear the effect on the harmony on anything past about 2-3 individual parts. Some other examples from LP's other albums: Crawling: chorus sounds pretty different live due to brad's guitar part being much more audible. On the studio version, the octave part is set much lower to blend with the overtones from the powerchords. It brings out parts of the sound of the rhythm part more than anything else and sets up a harmonic background for the vocal to sit in. There's also some extra synths in the second verse/prechorus that aren't very apparent and just serve to separate the verses a bit. In the end: very beginning of the song, there's a downsampled synth behind the piano/strings (also there when they come back in i believe). The guitar harmonics are also pretty damn buried, particularly in the chorus. In pieces: there are a shit ton of parts at the end, but its hard to hear more than the highest and lowest guitars. What I've Done: piano in the chorus Guitar does this in half of ATS, biggest examples being jornada del muerto, burning in the skies (that two string thing mike plays prechoruses and choruses), maybe the catalyst Any music that has a bunch of parts or that you would describe as "layered" is going to have stuff like that all over the place, and it comes down to an artistic decision as to what the "main" part is. Do you think you are supposed to follow every instrument in an orchestra? haha As for why you heard it on your phone and not good speakers/headphones: That tiny phone speaker brings out highs more than anything else. It also reduces it to mono which completely changes how everything sits in a mix. You have all kinds of interesting phase reactions that bring up some things and take down others. For example, rhythm guitars are commonly mixed to be in the very sides of the sound stage, sometimes with one part only on the left and a doubled part only on the right. These kinds of things make for great stereo separation and let you have super strong rhythm parts without them drowning other stuff out, but they tend to go away a bit when you collapse the mix to mono. You can think of there being two sets of channels in a stereo mix: L/R and C/S(side), where C = L+R and S = L-R. L+R doesn't always just add all the parts up, and it's possible for a part to be entirely on the side. Thing if L=-R (Left channel is the right channel turned upside down). Then the center (mono) is empty and everything is in the side channel. This is why you see people in studios using the meter that looks like a grid with the squiggles flying all over it. The vertical axis is center, horizontal is the side, and the diagonals are the left and right channels. Any part that is wider than it is tall will mostly go away in mono, and everything that is taller than it is wide will mostly stay there. The total area is stereo volume, but only the vertical is mono volume. Interesting side note: radio stations and a lot of other streams broadcast center and side channels instead of left and right, allowing mono radios or whatever to just pick up the center channel or a stream to save data if stereo is unnecessary. Most of the time the side channel has a lot less amplitude and is less important than the center, and can therefore be compressed (data compression not dynamic compression) more to save space.
Am I the only one who can listen a strange noise in LITE right in the part "I DONT CARE WHERE THE ENEMIES ARE (AAAAAAOOWW)" that sounds like a distorded Chester screaming? Well I listen to LT in a apple lossless format (1000kbps average), using the tradicional iPod headphones. I don't know if this phone is really good, but I like it. I can hear the strings in I'll Be Gone, but ONLY when a pay attention to them, and the guitar is horrible. In My Remains synths in the verses are pretty hard to notice, and LGM has lots of noises I just discovered after listening the instrumental. The other songs are all ok. In BID I can hear Synths, guitars, bass, everything at the same time.
Nope. Take Minutes to Midnight. Look at the waveforms. No song is even NEAR clipping. I love it. If it needs to be louder, turn your system up. Unfortunately most mixes and masters are so you can compete on the radio. As far as balance and levels are concerned, MTM is probably the best out of the bunch. Living Things.... ugh.... Give us the pre-mix multi-tracks and let the fans mix that. RCM034 is definitely right, but I still think their mixing is crap. People like Trent Reznor have amazing mixes packed with things you can find if you listen where most times Linkin Park layers things so much they blend into one sound and could probably replace 2 or 3 sounds with one superior sound. As the band mentioned, when you make a song out of 5 parts instead of 30, those 5 have to be quality. And sometimes mixers just mess up. When my band's CD was mixed there was stuff I was very unhappy and parts I KNOW I played that I couldn't hear or were just mixed wrong. RCM034 is also right about equipment. People talk about listening to Lossless audio on iPod headphones?? Get out of here! If you say that, not to be rude, you really don't know what a quality listening experience is and hearing some things (even LPs worst) sounds better on a quality system through quality monitors or cans. In the end sometimes the mastering engineer takes his cues from radio and the label and just goes super loud. Trent Reznor even released an alternate master of Hesitation Marks just because of that. He knew one had to please one crowd and he made another to please the audiophile crowd.
@RCM034, Yes, that's true. But that's not the case with the Synth on 'In My Remains'. These layers we're talking about don't usually have a main melody of their own, like the part on IMR does. The song is a victim to compression. Plus, if they intended it to be 'buried' in the mix, they would have maintained the same level while playing it live, like they do with the other layers. But instead, it's much louder and clearly audible when they play it live, like it's intended to be the main hook. The audiophile version was a failure. There's virtually no difference between the audiophile version and the normal mix of Hesitation Marks, which is why it was criticized. Look it up.
I never said it was good haha.I just know he tried to rebalance the other master a bit as a lot of the low end info gets lost when they try to squash the crap out of it. I did read on echoingthesound that it wasn't terribly different. And for those that don't know: mixing is balancing the parts of a song so they sound nice together while mastering focuses on the balance of the entire, already mixed, song and the balance of the songs to each other. Simplified answer. On mastering the parts of a song are done and sealed. If the guitar is way too loud then you go back to mixing. Mastering gets much more complicated than that and a good mastering engineer is worth it. Hearing the mixed version of my band's cd versus the mixed and mastered version, holy crap. Big difference. It wasn't squashed to hell but it sounded like a cohesive album after mastering.