From a technical standpoint, dynamic mics started to get used less on vocals and replaced a bit more by condenser mics which pick up a lot more nuance in a compressed sort of way... but it captivates the listener. Sure, both kinds have been used for a long time, but...

I posit that the problem is that the music rendering took a backseat to the vocal layerings in a tangible way... and neither one properly supports the other in the track mastering anymore. Also, recording artists aren't engineers to the degree they once were so they don't know what a compressor for brickwall limiter is actually doing to the waveform. They know what it sounds like, but they don't know that they're toasting their tracks. It drives me nuts how many albums I have with limiting problems and distortion. Somebody doesn't babysit the transfer to CD or the recording artist is deaf because I have a hard time believing that it actually sounded that bad in the studio and still made it to press that way.

Anyway, I'm going to record some organ music this weekend and I just did a test in the environment I'll be recording in, and I had a very hard time getting the choir, organ and piano all to balance. The masters of old with their limited gear and limited use of backing tracks really had to work hard to get it right and I have a lot of respect for what they pulled off.

hello,

as i posted in another thread started by Original_Ken, i listened exclusively to The Complete Riverside Recordings of Thelonius Monk while in graduate school. so i pretty much missed everything from the 80's.

this is not a good thing as the GYTW is totally into Sting. (and i am not, really.  )

the comment about a 70's dj following things up with something out of sync is spot on. there was, once upon a time, the leave to actually choose and play tunes that at first blush would seem out of context.

radio, however, is dead and its totally impossible to know why.

(as an example of the loss of freedom for a dj i offer this: one afternoon i was listening to the commercial "progressive" rock station in my market <sigh> when i heard a killer cover of "Casey Jones". the voice sounded familiar and the tune kicked ass! at the end of the set the dj came on to apologize for playing the cut as it was Dwight Yokum and not on his approved playlist.)

one could argue that there was a consensus of what was good music back in the day and that "album oriented FM stations" allowed their jocks to play it.

when the Beatles broke up, that ended.

the problem with this analysis is that at the same time there was a soul station to listen to (and groove on) and a low powered (commercial !!!) jazz station to tune into as well. both of which were playing sh*t i'd never heard before and started to really get into.

nowadays, i rely on my teenaged kids to point me towards stuff that isn't 50 years old. and i like some of it very much. but my son is into Black Sabbath so i guess it is a lost cause.

As a metal fan, I'll say this. Heavy metal is FAR better in 2013 than it was in 2003, and it's on a different planet than it was in 1998. Twenty or so years ago some of the best metal in American history was being produced by the Bay Area thrashers and Floridian death bands. Metallica and Megadeth were debuting at #1 and #2, and you had albums like Seasons In The Abyss and Unquestionable Presence.

Then something happened, and metal kind of died for awhile. It became uncool to know how to play the guitar or have long hair. Once great bands released albums like Load and Risk, and rap metal became a thing that people did. That was the last time that metal would have broad mainstream appeal, and things got much better because of it. The metal that's remotely popular today is garbage like pretty much all other forms of music targeted towards mainstream audiences, but it doesn't matter. An Agalloch album will never reach anything like the kind of sales that the Black Album or Countdown To Extinction managed, but thanks to the way people discover music today, they don't have to worry about where their CD is going to be on the shelf at Tower Records or the Virgin Megastore, and they certainly don't need any radio play or MTV videos.

I would have no way of knowing through magazines back then about metal from countries like Jordan and Chile and Greece. From what I recall of '80s and early '90s metal it was the US and UK and to a much lesser extent Canada and Germany, with a select few like Vader from Poland and Mercyful Fate from Denmark getting any attention at all. Now the fact that American metal is largely not that good is irrelevant. It's global. And while admittedly there are a ton of bands right now trying to sound like Black Sabbath and Pentagram did in the '70s, there's still a lot of innovation happening as well.

Gothenburg melodic metal was best in the 90s. It's amazing how much influence it had on metal around the world starting around the late 90s, early 2000s, but it was never quite up to par with the pioneers of that sound.

In Flames pre-"Reroute to Remain"...wow.

I do not like the growing trend of Djent. I think it is boring. It can and has been done and implemented well at times.

I think this kind of statement is made in every generation. 

The good music is still there.  You just need to know where to look.

Bingo.