Thanks guys, I really appriciate it. Let me tell you something about recording, in the early nineties there wasn't anything more than analog recording. Digital recording came a little later and ten years later almost every studio is recording digitally. The sound isn't exactly the same, but close and digital has it's convenience, is much cheaper (a reel of two inch tape costs $300 and contains 32 minutes of music at 15 inch per second, thus 16 minutes at 30 ips).
In a digital workstation like ProTools one can make many more tracks than the 24 of an analog machine and editing is a piece of cake. And there are plugins like beat detective and soundreplacer. Beat detective can make every crappy drummer sound like a hero and sound replacer replaces all drumsounds for samples.
This may sound like God, but in fact is the devil and imagine a drummer like Hans, with his unique own style of drumming. Imagine Hans' drumming being quantised within 1/1000th of a second an his typical own sound being replaced bij samples of Metallica, can you imagine that?
This is the modern art of recording, music being less important than technique, which I personally hate.
The Gathering is a band that has it's strength because of playing together and so creating it's unique soundscape, this cannot be done bij computer, only by humans.
About the sound: in my former post I've put a hyperlink to something we call 'loudness war'.
http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dyn ... namics.htm
We, as a community of engineers are complaining about this for more than 10 years now on forums like gearslutz and prosoundweb, but we actually have lost this war a long time ago. What's happening, imagine you play yer CD after 'Californication' by Red Hot Cili Peppers and yer CD sound a lot better, with more dimension, but half as loud as RHCP.
You don't want hat do you? so you ask the mastering engineer to make it sound louder.
But in digital there is an absolute maximum, lets call it zero. A CD can have a dynamic range of more than 90dB, which is fantastic, but I've been listening to CD's that have a dynamic range of less than 1 dB, one single deciBell.
Let's take Hans' drumming for an example, if you record this it will have a gigantic dynamic range. Cymbal hits will reach zero, but the dynamics will be within more than 20/25 dB. Now add the guitars, bass, keyboards and vocals and mix this. It will still have a huge dynamic range, but the peaks (transients) will reach the maximum of zero dB. You can't go any louder because the convertors won't be able to recreate the original sound waves and it will end up as crackle and nasty sounding distortion.
Okay, we don't wat that so we won't make any 'overs' and the mix will sound great, an open sound with lost of dynamics, lots of space, deepness and width, a so called three dimensional sound.
But it'll sound not as loud as RHCP, so what we can do is compress it, push the overall level towards zero and if we do this with care it will still sound great. You can see this in the link I've put here. But there comes a point where we go too far or much too far, where dynamics gets lost completely and the sound ends up as flat and lifeless. Look at the link and you'll see what I mean.
Almost a Dance was made before the loudness war started and it was recorded with hi end gear, so it sounds great in my humble opinion. If you put a song of AaD in your editor like Adobe Audition, Cubase, Nuendo, ProTools, Logic, Sonar or whatever and put a maximizer plugin on it, push the level and it will sound loud, louder and loudest, but also flat, more flat and most flat and most of all lifeless, which we don't want, do we?
Sorry for the long rant.
Peace, han
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