Ok, so it’s been a while since I first heard this on the radio, but pitchfork reviewed it for their singles feature lately and it reminded me of how poorly this was engineered.

Aside from the complaint that Paul Wall mumbles a bit too much here and loses his flow on some phrases, the vocal level is uneven - likely not compressed enough for a rap track like this - and as a result certain phrases get obscured by the backing track. A competent engineer familiar with rap production should have a) been able to hear this b) put additional compression - or even manual fader riding - on the vocal to preserve intelligibility, and possibly c) eq the vocal up by 1-2db around 2.5k or so, in the range where the human ear extracts the most information from speech.

So, yeah, I’m assuming this was engineered by an amateur*, and probably didn’t go through the mastering process either - any mastering engineer would have heard the things I outlined above and taken steps to minimize them.

*Which is not to say amateur engineers are all bad, it’s just so many are relatively inexperienced and often have poor monitoring environments. Which is why, of any recording, work coming out of home studios arguably needs the mastering process more than professional work in a good monitoring environment.

Ok, so a co-worker got an advance copy of the Nelly Furtado cd that comes out…a week from today, it looks like. I can’t help but love the single getting radio play - it’s just, well, catchy as hell.

I listened to the rest of the album, though, and nothing really stuck out like the single, except a production/mastering decision that was made. It’s hard to differentiate at this point because of the current trend in hip-hop (and now some poppier, top 40 stuff as well) to use drums/percussion/samples, particularly the bass drum, that are distorted - usually low-order, just grungy distortion in the midbass/lower midrange region.

Anyway, this style is in use throughout the album to various extents. One track in particular, though, “Say It Right”, takes the effect to a bit of an extreme. At first I thought the mastering engineer clipped the converters for peak control (a common practice for certain types of music, though controversial among mastering engineers), fairly heavily in this instance, creating less of the dirty kick distortion and more of a harsh, digital clipping sound. Very unpleasant, to say the least.

But further examination in an audio editor indicates the clipping has taken place well below the 0dbfs - -0.5dbfs region where peak limiting/control usually would be, which makes me think it’s a production decision.

For the sake of anybody who likes to listen to music that’s not extremely harsh and fatiguing, I hope not.

I’ll be putting up content and making this site actually work over the course of the next couple weeks… come back soon.