Ok, one complaint I have is they took out some vocals that would add much more to the song. At the end of Heavy (the produced version) you cant hear Kiira's vocals that you can hear in the live version. And of course, the scream in OML.... like what the fuck? This album sounds better live. Pretty rare IMO. (for modern music) What's your take on this?
In that 'Mike Reacts to Teens Reacting' video, at some point Shinoda responds to criticisms of the album being boring as being buried in production, and something along the lines of "When we play them live, all these little elements pop out and you can hear them better". I'm summarizing, but it seemed to be an admission the songs had aspects to them that would admittedly be inaudible without headphones in a quite room on the studio versions. While I agreed, Talking To Myself, One More Light, and Good Goodbye are all better live (these are the only ones I've heard sans Heavy), I couldn't help but think why they would not bring those elements to the forefront on the thing they were charging money for. Someone hear mentioned they saw/heard the band said something about that being a deliberate decision to "bring the vocalization forward", but what a misstep. I was just talking about this earlier with a friend when he asked about the album, and told him if he wanted to get anything from it he had better listen to it with headphones because of the way it's produced. As far as I'm concerned, it's a substantial flaw.
Live arrangements of songs are built upon the finished studio mixes - they're typically not worked out until after the album is finished, so those live set enhancements/adjustments are just accidents or new ideas that would've only come about in rehearsal sessions. It's kind of like asking why Chester doesn't scream in the studio version of "Papercut" the way he does for the live version Aside from that: You say this like the shows are free to attend
There's one interpretation. Another is the theory the album version is, or should be, considered the song in its perfected form. As a product that has been mass produced and advertised, obviously with the expectation it do well commercially? Yes, it makes logical sense that is what's going to be thought of as "where the money comes from". Alternatively; boy was producing this album by burying key elements of the songs with the hopes of drawing people and money to live shows in hopes that they can hear the songs as they "naturally sound" a bad move, since it can reasonably be assumed people pay to go to live shows to hear renditions of songs they enjoy studio versions of.
I think everyone has to understand that a clean mix/production can't have every layer be loud and audible. That turns into a big wall of noise, like lots of stuff on Living Things imo. And the "scream" in OML being nearly inaudible isn't so much a mixing thing as it is being presented in a whole different style live vs studio. In the studio version it's clearly heavily affected to provide atmosphere, live it's a lot more raw and feels like part of the rest of the vocal delivery. Far from the first time they've delivered things vocally different live than on the studio tracks as @minuteforce pointed out. Given how different the production is between their albums, I feel like they have a good idea of what their mixes could sound like with different things being emphasized, so it's safe to say the reason things are buried/prominent isn't anything more than that's what they wanted.
Well, nothing is perfect, especially not Linkin Park songs - they do the best they can in the studio until they decide to stop or until some deadline is reached. Things can always be improved or tailored for live arrangements. Essentially every song the band plays live has had changes made to it, whether straight away because of the constraints of performing live or over time for the fun of it. Besides that, in the live set, "Heavy" has to sit next to "Papercut", so there are inevitably going to be tweaks with that in mind as well.
I recently played the album on super expensive nice speakers at a buddy's house and I noticed that some of the album does sound like shit. Battle Symphony in specific sticks out to me. Some of the tracks even have different volumes, for instance, Good Goodbye sounded good, and then when Talking To Myself came on, it sounded like someone turned down the music. I also don't like the mixing on One More Light at all, I think it sounds MUCH better live for that reason, and I usually never think Linkin Park sounds better live. With that being said, I will hardly ever listen to this album, so I don't really care much, but it would annoy me a lot if it was something I enjoyed and wanted to play regularly.
They had different mixers on different songs, so that may have contributed to what you're talking about. Issues like that would have been corrected during mastering, though
Well, you can't please everybody, though. The album's mixing is fine, you don't need expensive speakers to listen it, all you need is a decent headphones and you're good to go.
I don't have expensive speakers at home, I have average ones, not bad, not good. I also think it's weird that they would have multiple people mix different songs on the album, why not just choose one person to mix the whole thing? Andy Wallace mixed Hybrid Theory and Meteora amazingly and Neal Avron did great with Minutes To Midnight and A Thousand Suns (even though I hate A Thousand Suns, it had solid mixing).
It's not the first case of this I've seen so I wouldn't say it's anything out of the ordinary. Maybe different mix approaches worked better for different songs, or maybe it was a timing issue. We really don't know.
Having different mixers for different songs is about as old an idea as the music industry itself. For LP, it's different but a welcome change. It doesn't change my opinion of the album and is really insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Just let them choose the best mix for whatever song.