Why the 80s Hate? (Production & Sounds)

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Runicen, Feb 5, 2016.

  1. thxphotog

    thxphotog Camera Nerd Cycling Nerd Guitar Nerd Dietary Nerd

    Location:
    Los Angeles, CA
    What I used to LOVE about some 80s productions was the huge sounds, including the gated drums. Now it's that very thing that makes it impossible for me to really enjoy anymore. Listen to the following track, if only for a moment. And for those of you who see the band and would normally steer clear, they were a GREAT bluesy rock band with an amazing vocalist and guitar player that's as underated as anyone I can think of, so just give it a second. :) This snare sound is like a canon shot, which totally takes away from what otherwise is BRILLIANT production/engineering.

     
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  2. audiotom

    audiotom I can not hear a single sound as you scream

    Location:
    New Orleans La USA
    there were 80s sounds that when incorporated well worked

    Tainted Love by Soft Cell captures a mood greatly with that sparse sound pallet

    Gary Newman's Cars has a similar feel - but it's meant to have a detached element
     
  3. KeithH

    KeithH Success With Honor...then and now

    Location:
    Beaver Stadium
    I'm pretty sure we've done this before.

    I love '80s music. Sorry for the threadcrap.

    I'm pretty sure I've responded as above before.
     
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  4. thxphotog

    thxphotog Camera Nerd Cycling Nerd Guitar Nerd Dietary Nerd

    Location:
    Los Angeles, CA
    Tainted Love is such a gem. What a great job they did on that track. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but now I'm in awe of it's brilliance. Surprised there wasn't more from them that went mainstream because the talent is crazy!
     
  5. Curveboy

    Curveboy Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York City
    Well here is one of the best examples of 80's production:



    Super clean sound, but very well done. Live drums mixed with electronic drums, live horns mixed with keyboards.
    Something like this couldn't be accomplished in the 60's or 70's...it's its own work of art in terms of production.
     
  6. Dhreview16

    Dhreview16 Forum Resident

    Location:
    London UK
    I dont think the 80s deserves all the bad press it gets.

    Sure, there was a lot wrong with a lot of the music, as others have said (over use of synths, Linn drums etc). Sure, a lot sounds "dated", or "thin" or "digital" or whatever the words are.

    But there was a lot of great and great sounding music too, whether it's the Pretenders or the Clash, Prince or Michael Jackson, Kate Bush or Peter Gabriel, Springsteen or early REM, Tom Waits or Suzanne Vega, Steve Earle or Donald Fagen, Sade or Anita Baker, Japan or Tracy Chapman. Bands like the Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, XTC, the Pogues, even Duran Duran or the Eurythmics. Loads of others, from pretty much every genre whether it's rock or soul/funk, electronic or metal, rap or new wave, or whatever.

    Don't write off the decade because it wasn't all good, and a lot wasn't. There's a lot of great stuff too which I'm sure others have captured better in threads on best albums of the 80s or specific individual 80s years.
     
  7. stereoptic

    stereoptic Anaglyphic GORT Staff

    Location:
    NY
    The sound went well with the times. Like the hair-dos and the clothes it was all twinkly and metallic.
     
  8. pantofis

    pantofis Senior Member

    Location:
    Berlin, Germany
    A big problem was the presets that were used on synths and drum machines. The untouched factory presets combined with the then new midi quantisation made everybody sound the same. All at once Tony Banks wound up sounding anonymous, like on a Madonna record.
     
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  9. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    Kind of like today's production on top 40? :D
     
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  10. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    But man I love Anke's short punk'd hair , sexy as hell :)
     
  11. Picca

    Picca Forum Resident

    Location:
    Modena, Italy
    I gotta say that recently I've listened to a lot of 80's bands and a lot of them were really good. Problem is that radios and local Mtvs seemed to care only for british acts with Simmons and Dx7s dressed like Lord Brummel. American and european eighties are two different stories.
     
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  12. Classicrock

    Classicrock Senior Member

    Location:
    South West, UK.
    I don't think it's the '80s sound' or the synths. Albums such as 'So' and 'Hounds Of Love' though very 80s in style and instrumentation are very listenable. In fact Gabriel albums generally sound quite dark. The bad production is just that. Thin and bright balance with drums and synths exaggerated in the mix. 'A Kind Of Magic' is a bad example and almost unlistenable. It's just bad mixing in most cases and possibly added to by poor vinyl or CD mastering. Just happens there was more bad production in the 80s than any other decade but there were also some fine sounding releases. I dislike a lot of the synth pop UK music from the early to mid 80s especially but it would still be bad and sound dated even if better produced.
     
    Last edited: Feb 5, 2016
  13. Lost Monkey

    Lost Monkey Forum Resident


    That whole album is a great example of synth music that sounds good and conveys both emotion and musicality. Soft Cell's sound was closer to the cool 80's new wave sound than the not so cool 80's rock sound.. (see Heart's "Never").

    There were a few 80's albums which stand as great productions, even though they sound like 80's albums: Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Welcome to the Pleasuredome, Propaganda - A Secret Wish.

    Robert Plant's 1st two solo albums nearly escaped unscathed, but Shaken N Stirred gots 80's...
     
    Last edited: Feb 5, 2016
  14. Raunchnroll

    Raunchnroll Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    Like cars, it largely became plastic. Toy-like.
     
  15. Classicrock

    Classicrock Senior Member

    Location:
    South West, UK.
    I recently purchased a copy of Shaken N Stirred - awful sound and bad musically. I binned it in disgust as it also had obvious groove wear. The Propaganda album is an example of 80s synth pop that sounds fine.
     
  16. rockledge

    rockledge Forum Resident

    Location:
    right here
    Aside from 33 1/3 and All Things Must Pass I never cared for the production on Harrison albums period, but that had little to do with the decade they were done in.
    Much as I didn't like that rock was gone and what took its' place was a bunch of rock parody like metal and the hair band stuff , there was a lot of great pop music. But that stuff ( hair, metal, etc) didn't seem to be all that dominant on radio , and was good for loud listening in night clubs. It was party music not to be taken seriously and was fun.
    And some of the leftover rock relics like Pink Floyd were doing some of their best work, sparse as it was, as well as Genesis finally found a very creative sound that was also a hit with the masses as well as serious music fans . That is the best a rock band has to hope for.
    I thought radio stuff was just fine. Some of the stuff that got labeled as new wave was kind of interesting, although I am not a big fan of most of it.
    And of course, Bowie, for example, was prime for the 80s, the 80s grew right into his brand of pop music. He fit right in with groups like Flock Of Seagulls and all that stuff.
    The production then was very nice, I think the stereotype of the "80s sound" is quite overstated and is really mostly based on Genesis' very inventive production which it seems a lot of producers were trying to copy, what with the gated drums and all that.

    80s is certainly far better than what came after, with all the increasing horrid paint by numbers production and gradual drift into compression hell as guys shifted from being audiophiles to preferring computer listening and downloads.

    I think the 80s was a step down from the rock era, but certainly not a throwaway decade.
     
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  17. Lost Monkey

    Lost Monkey Forum Resident


    I think "Skin Trade" falls into the same category. A little bright, but good use of the instruments, both real and synthesized.

    With this 80's "sound", there appear to be 2 factors at play here - (1.)new production toys and (2.) new advances in synthesizers.

    Using each to its strengths produced favourable results. Dabbling, and using these new toys "for the sake of using them" resulted in some bad sounding stuff...

    I seem to recall Def Leppard's "Bringing on the Heartbreak" being reissued as a single with added synthesizer bits about a year after Pyromania's success. <- that is the type of thing I am referring to above...
     
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  18. Curveboy

    Curveboy Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York City
    I get your point, but that synth version of 'Hearbreak isn't so bad...it's just more commercial.
     
  19. I like a lot of music of the 80s in spite of the production.
     
  20. stodgers

    stodgers Forum Resident

    Location:
    Montana
    Oh, I disagree that Queen was one of the ones who got lazy with it. I'm likely in the minority on this opinion, but I really enjoy The Works and feel like they embraced a new technology after being quite staunchly opposed to it. But I agree with your premise that some artists knew what to do with it, and others just thought of it as a gimmick. For me, it is curious to hear a band like Rush now discount the sound of that era when they were among those defining it. I love the 80s Rush album, and a lot of other 80s music, and those people who are just generally trashing the entire decade are being obtuse and deliberate. Its like the people who trashed Dylan for going electric.

    Except Phil Collins.
     
  21. Duke Fame

    Duke Fame Sold out the Enormodome

    Location:
    Tampa, FL
    I see where you're coming from and we might possibly be on the same page since I did say early 80's. In my original post I was going to give the example of the difference in Warren DeMartini's guitar tone between 'Out of the Cellar', which I didn't like at all, and the very next album 'Invasion of Your Privacy', which I really liked. It seems like somewhere around 1985 is where the tone started to add a bit of "Crunch" but not too much.

    Scott Ian's early stuff with Anthrax would be a prime example of that tone that I think sounds super dated. Just my .02
     
  22. Squealy

    Squealy Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    Vancouver
    There are plenty of horrible sounding songs from the 80s but around here, it seems like all a record has to have is a date with an eight as the third digit and there will be someone who'll cry about its "awful 80s production," no matter what it sounds like.

    I was looking at the Wikipedia page about gated reverb and read this:
    ...and I'm thinking, I like the drums on all these songs!
     
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  23. Curveboy

    Curveboy Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York City
    Another favorite of mine:



    Can you imagine mixing this totally by hand?

    Here is what producer Neil Kernon said in an interview:
    http://www.mixonline.com/news/profiles/producers-desk-neil-kernon/366221

    Rage is still is one of my absolute favorites and might still be my favorite collaboration. The thing about that record was the timing of computers becoming really a part of music. I was really big into computers anyway and carried my own Mac around back in those days and was getting into the integration of MIDI with live stuff, and sequencing. With Rage for Order, we were really able to experiment and explore those lines by integrating all of that stuff into pre-pro. That whole album was heavily sequenced—not in terms of the way to do it these days because everything was played live—but we had underpinnings of sequencing.

    That was the beginning of a very optimistic phase for me in the sense that I’d always wanted music and computers to somehow align or help each other. I wasn’t really a fan of using computers for mixing, just because they were really underpowered back in those days, and I wasn’t convinced that they were replaying all my moves correctly. I would rather have done it manually because I knew it would be right. Of course, slowly as systems became more powerful, it was obvious that it was doing exactly what I’d put in. It was a very exciting time in that we were able to embrace the new technology.

    When we met before working together, Queensrÿche had wanted to make a record that was essentially cold sounding: cold and high-tech and cyber. It was before that really existed in music. There was a certain amount with Gary Numan and artists like that, but that all really sounded programmed. They had the drum machines, and we wanted to do it with live drums and still have sequenced elements that meshed with that. With Rage, everything we tried worked. It was incredibly positive. We would try it, and it would work. So the whole thing went from strength to strength.
     
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  24. overdrivethree

    overdrivethree Forum Resident

    The *actual* gated drum sound - as pioneered by Phil Collins and Bowie (on Low, even though that was also the Eventide) - is pretty cool. It was basically taking that big John Bonham sound to an extreme. Phil even tried to get there on the Duke album - didn't quite pull it off all the way, but it was still a good sound.

    I think it's when drums started to resemble the sound of toy Hit Stix (remember those?) on generic pop productions that it became this bad thing. As far as I could tell, Phil did it pretty tastefully.
     
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  25. jpmosu

    jpmosu a.k.a. Mr. Jones

    Location:
    Ohio, USA
    I'm pretty sure I've "liked" posts like this before!
     
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