|
|
Post by wombat on Oct 13, 2016 13:41:12 GMT
We took a long drive over the weekend and listened to a lot of Abba. The stereo speakers are in the front and I was sitting in the back.
So I got a sort of "distant listen" to a wide range of Abba songs.
Two things I noticed. The girls' voices are mixed much louder than anything else. If Abba has a defining sound, its the voices of the two girls mixed together.
When listening over headphones or closer speakers, its not so apparent. Remove yourself from the sonic picture a little bit, and what you hear is the voices with "some stuff in the background".
Abbas' drums thru most of their career are mixed so soft and buried so far down, they're at times almost non-existent. Often all you can really hear is a soft, fluffy snare keeping time. However towards the end of their career, especially The Visitors, the drums are much louder in the mix... in my opinion, a welcome change.
As a friend of mine remarked.... "finally they get the drums right... and then they break up."
|
|
|
|
Post by Fafner on Oct 13, 2016 13:59:22 GMT
There are a couple of earlier tracks with loud drums like "rock me", but I agree that the Visitors is easily their best sounding album (I also love prominent drums).
I remember you told me once that you can't mix everything to sound equally loud because of frequency overlap between voices and instruments, and since the girls' voices was their biggest asset they may have decided that it's better to highlight the vocals to the expense of the rest. On the other hand, it's not like the Visitors sounds as if the drums drowning out the vocals, so there may be a way to strike a balance between the two. So perhaps Benny just didn't particularly liked drums or didn't think that they were that important (remember how Tretow was complaining about Benny constantly erasing his drum tracks?). Or it may have been just a technical limitation that they've managed to overcome only when they switched to digital recording in 81 - who knows.
|
|
|
|
Post by wombat on Oct 13, 2016 14:50:12 GMT
The Visitors is unique in so many ways - including the recording and mix.
There are a few things to consider and ponder "why" the drums suddenly jump out on this album.
First off, someone once mentioned that The Visitors has an unusually large number of tracks with just one girl singing or the other, and not so much both singing in harmony all the time. That may have a tiny little bit to do with it.
But probably not. You are right, in mixing, when you start pouring on the vocal overdubs, there's a buttload of middle and middle hi frequencies, the same frequencies as the drums... and they both cant occupy the same limited space. In the immortal words of the goddess Marilyn - "something's got to give".
And Abba certainly poured on the vocal overdubs. They didnt get that sound with just one or two tracks of Frida and Agnetha. You can tell its literally a choir of them at times, even the lead vocal. When you double or triple track, you get a huge, thick sound, just by varying the tiny fluctuations of overtones caused by tiny differences in each take.
This is common in guitar too. Rarely do you get a big time guitar riff that was just played and recorded once. To thicken it up, you'd do it two or three times and then it all gets mixed down together and sounds gigantic.
But back to the point. In the earlier albums, with the huge vocal, I think all three of them (benny bjorn and tretow) made a decision to push the drums in the back, to allow the vocals as much room as possible. In the 70s, there were a lot of acts that pushed the drums back, even hard rock acts did it at times, listen to Blue Oyster Cult. The soft snare thing wasnt Abba's idea either - disco and fleetwood mac were great at using the soft snare attack, altho they pushed it forward in the mix and Abba held it back.
By the 90s, the industry standard was the opposite - the loudest thing in the mix was often this big loud cracking snare drum, and the kick drum, and all the other drums sort of more distant. Even with hard rock.
In the early 80s, the drums were beginning to sound a little louder in many forms of music...and just like synthi-pop, Abba may have just cloned what others were doing. A lot of the early synthi-pop duos used early drum machines for their work, and those were stripped down, easier to mix soundbytes and therefore with a sparcer sound, probably easier to push the drums forward.
So theres lot of reasons "why". And those I listed might be all wrong. It could be something completely different like "Stig made us fire our old drummer and we like our new one so much that we made him loud". haha
|
|
|
|
Post by Fafner on Oct 13, 2016 15:30:47 GMT
And here's another possible explanation why they made their drum tracks quite  |
|
|
|
Post by wombat on Oct 13, 2016 16:40:57 GMT
haha! Fafner, is that your vocal?
its too bad they didnt release the version of Like An Angel Passing at the end of that video... I much prefer that to the dull version on the album
a tune I'd probably rate as the worst thing they ever did... right behind The Day Before You Came. There's nothing like a dull cut and paste drum line to make me hit "next".
|
|
|
|
Post by Fafner on Oct 13, 2016 16:55:01 GMT
haha! Fafner, is that your vocal? Well that's their drummer. I wonder if he did that on the final recording, or was it just a rehearsal or something. its too bad they didnt release the version of Like An Angel Passing at the end of that video... I much prefer that to the dull version on the album a tune I'd probably rate as the worst thing they ever did... right behind The Day Before You Came. There's nothing like a dull cut and paste drum line to make me hit "next". Do you know the medley for the song that they included in the Visitors deluxe? It has some interesting uptempo early versions of the song which I think more interesting than the final version - but of course you can't beat Mozart here - |
|
|
|
Post by wombat on Oct 14, 2016 14:38:47 GMT
well nobody beats mozart.
I'd heard the track on the visitors reissue, it didnt take long after the CD was released before a bunch of people ripped it and loaded it to youtube. Its quite interesting and shows how they worked.
Anybody who ever worked very hard on a project, and put hours and hours into it... only to find at the end, their work was thrown out or left on the cutting room floor.... I often wonder if thats how the girls in abba felt, singing over and over and over and then finally having whatever song they were working on, discarded.
Maybe they just got used to it. Maybe sometimes it was the girls who decided they didnt like the track and wanted it either changed or discarded.
I did read one story that sometimes they would get mad at Bjorn for making them sing parts over and over.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Oct 19, 2016 8:00:20 GMT
Wombat - from your studio experience, what are the dangers of becoming 'sound blind' (i.e. hearing tracks over and over and over and getting to the point of not knowing whether the changes you're making to them are rendering things better or worse) and how can you best guard against the danger? For instance, when do you know if something has become too perfect, so to speak, and should have just been left alone? And within ABBA, who do you think would have had the final, FINAL say? Benny, Bjorn (or third party)? Surely (in reality) both couldn't have had an equal veto, even if it appeared that way superficially? They must have disagreed quite often - I wonder who would have been more inclined to say 'OK - you win!'.
|
|
|
|
Post by wombat on Oct 19, 2016 13:24:47 GMT
Wombat - from your studio experience, what are the dangers of becoming 'sound blind' (i.e. hearing tracks over and over and over and getting to the point of not knowing whether the changes you're making to them are rendering things better or worse) and how can you best guard against the danger? For instance, when do you know if something has become too perfect, so to speak, and should have just been left alone? And within ABBA, who do you think would have had the final, FINAL say? Benny, Bjorn (or third party)? Surely (in reality) both couldn't have had an equal veto, even if it appeared that way superficially? They must have disagreed quite often - I wonder who would have been more inclined to say 'OK - you win!'. theres an audio phenomena known as "ear fatigue". When you sit in front of a pair of studio monitors for hours, listening to it over and over, it wears your ears out and you may find you make mixing adjustments... and when you finally stop and listen again the next morning, it sounds terrible. Partly due to the way the ears and brain respond to extended deep listening. Basically your ears get tired and you might respond by cranking the upper mids up and up and up because your hearing isnt responding properly, due to fatigue. So good advice is to not work on something for extended periods of time. Take a break, overnight if possible. The second way of combating this is to listen to mixes over various sources. A boombox. A car stereo. Headphones. A crappy little laptop speaker. I have a crapply little boombox I use as a baseline - if it sounds good on that, it has a good chance of sounding good on most playback systems. Bass levels will differ in every single playback and at that point, its up to the user to determine how loud the bass is. Bass is really tricky. I was recommended to pick up "the best" version of Abba's Arrival CD, a german polydor version. I bought it and while the sound was clear, it was very trebly and had almost no bottom end. In terms of arrangement, and where to stop, that gets difficult if you are working by yourself. Its hard to know when to stop fooling with a track. My old art college professor had a saying, "How many artists does it take to do a painting? Two. One to paint and the other to chop the painters arms off when its finished". In the case of Abba, by 1978 or so, they had their own studio and unlimited time on their hands... endlessly toying with every song probably did become an issue, to a certain extent. The problem with them, that huge layering of tracks, is the way they worked, it was how they developed their signature sound. So when the norm of working is to pile on zillions of overdubs, how do you know when to stop? Regardless of how important Tretow was to their sound, and he was, I would think the final decision was always the band. Maybe Benny and Bjorn but possibly all four had to like it before it was released. Who knows. There were possibly songs that were never released or melodies that didnt go anywhere because Bjorn and Benny couldnt agree that they both liked it. Bjorn often spoke about democracy in the band. |
|
|
|
Post by jsdyson on Jan 18, 2018 21:54:35 GMT
Gang -- I'd been reading other threads on this board, and noticed a thread 'dear' to my heart -- the abba sound. Even though my 'restoration processor' has been helpful in decoding the ABBA sound, it really isn't the key step. Geesh, even the Carpenters have used some of the processing that my processor can undo -- the compression isn't really the only key to 'the ABBA sound'. I have a formula which is expressible with a SOX/shell script which can be helpful to see what they have done. I am not going to provide it unless there is a lot of interest (it isn't long, but it is technical.) The key has been related to applying a 90deg phase shift and a 10msec time delay. The 90deg phase shift kind of allows mixing the sound in a way that it doesn't cancel, and the 10msec delay causes the very dense sound when summed back to the audio. I haven't derived the exact formula, but I created a decoding version that does work in most cases (as you can hear by some of my examples.) It is important to start with a pristine copy or the math probably won't work -- so the Polar releases or other obscure releases which weren't mis-processed are probably your best bet. I have an ancient, non-english release which contains about the cleanest copies that I have heard -- and that is what I use, very likely because the cost of finalizing that version wasn't deemed to be worthwhile. I haven't tried the Polar release yet for the test. Even though I don't know their exact procedure, it is probably like: (take the signal delayed to match the hilbert 90deg transform -- but don't use the transform), then (take the signal witih hilber transform PLUS 10msec), add the signals together -- and voila -- you have close to the ABBA sound. I haven't checked the 'encoding' procedure, but I am using a similar inverse with good results. These tests and associated scaling parameters take time to find out (by trial and error), so that is the only reason why I haven't provided an exact encoding script. I am willing to share my decoding script, but undoing the general steps above are the way that I have cleared up the voices. It is NOT fun using these tools, but it is nice to be able to hear the voices so clearly. ADDON: Just tried the Polar release -- there are some hiccups, but comes close to working okay. The biggest problems is that they did some enhancement and some compression which messes up some of the math, but the algorithm still seems to apply. So, to sum it up -- the key to that 'denseness' in the ABBA sound APPEARS to be related to careful using of a 90deg phase shift and 10msec delay. In the olden days, the 90deg phase shift circuitry was used in SQ/QS and other quad encoding schemes. So, IT JUST MIGHT have been implemented by using a quad encoder partially. I am not sure, but I do have some very pretty results removing some of that aggressive denseness in some examples. The examples are files that have the word 'clean' in them. I also have a cleaned up Dreamworld that uses some of the same techniques (my original copy is SUPER compressed and very smeary sounding -- challenging to clean up.) spaces.hightail.com/space/pG4t4ZFnyBJohn |
|
|
|
Post by jsdyson on Mar 28, 2018 13:13:03 GMT
I learned some 'interesting' things about some of the technical aspects of ABBA's sound. They apparently used an early model of the Aphex Aural Exciter, where the early version was a phase scrambler which probably gave both the dense sound and the illusion of more intense high frequencies... This is most helpful in the AM radio era, where the BW available was in the range of 4-7kHz in general. Good and fun news: I have been working on a DolbyA decoder (really works, been proven -- sounds better than the Satin and maybe even the real DolbyA!!!), un-Exciter, and also an un-compressor. Some of my results are A LOT of fun. The most technically interesting are the fairly accurate removal of the Exciter processing, and the most fun is when ABBA is expanded by a very unobtrusive uncompressor... (I call it an uncompressor, because it works like no other expander that I have EVER heard about, and I do lots of research.) Technically interesting: spaces.hightail.com/space/nXCmV47em2 Fun sound: spaces.hightail.com/space/pUBEacRM3YNote that this software is not just a toy -- been getting help from a recording engineer who knows his stuff (not at liberty to divulge names yet), and also been doing iterative improvements for quite a while. This is a research project that might just be some fun when hearing the music better and better. Been also working on recordings from other groups, but back working on the ABBA situation for a few days. Really -- ABBA never sounded better. It is still not perfect, but it is doing better and better. PLEASE ENJOY!!! John |
|
