this guy gets it!

Trag's post is excellent. I will never accept the Lost Dogs version of Drifting. It's an abomination.


Riot Act: Nothing remotely tricky about the mix on this record, but the mastery of the technique is impressive. This is a fabulous recording, and had it been done by T-Bone Burnett rather than Adam Kaspar, I suspect it would get a lot more attention in recording circles.

Listening to it on headphones or very loudly in a car is transcendental.

What happened to B'OB? PJ isn't the only band he's ruined records for over the last decade. How did he go from making some of the best records of the 20th Century to what he is now?

Adam Kasper did a good job for them, They should go back to him if they ever out a new album.

Agreed 100%. Another Tchad Blake record could be amazing, and other producers could take them to some really interesting places (imagine Flood or Alan Moulder?!). But I think Kaspar is the most realistic best-case scenario for modern PJ.

The most realistic, best case scenario for modern pj is for them to never make another album.

I'll point out that BO'B mixed Riot Act, so he's at least partially responsible for the final sound of the album.

That's what I'm talking about. He's made some of my favorite records or worked on a lot of them. I like the Ten remix, too. Just not the production on the last 2 albums. It sounded like there was almost too much going on at times.

Ministry, theres a drumming groove, there's an overall groove, i whould hire that ministry guy for the next pj album, plain and simple

I really can't fault B'OB's production on the last 2 albums, to be honest. A majority of the songs turned out pretty good. Getaway, Yellow Moon, Force Of Nature, etc. I don't like all the extra crap going on during Lightning Bolt, though. It's really the IDEA of them going backwards or not really spending a lot of time in the studio I find depressing. It was a total of what, 5-6 weeks studio time for both records?

It seems like they hit some roadblocks during the making of S/T and decided that they weren't going to overthink the writing process and have went for an easier approach with songwriting and recording. It also seems like they started paying more attention to sales as well. I really don't understand why they recorded the songs that ended up being played live in a flat tuning in standard tuning for the records, either.

That sounds like a crappy version of this:

Good thoughts, guys.

I can't speak to specific recording techniques, but do recognize their mindset change post Riot Act: it seems they became more perfectionists when they were working on the greatest hits/Lost Dogs to "not have a hair out of place" on recordings and did away with the found sounds, coarseness, and spontaneity from everything before that. I remember an article from Matt saying "this is our anti-Pro Tools record" and thought, yeah, that's exactly where I want this band to go. Sadly, they chose the opposite direction and it seems more and more that it is Ed and the producer in a room flipping elements around and inserting better takes into an unnatural frankensong.

Recording is probably done the same way it always has, but with fewer full band takes. Listen to Riot Act on vinyl, it sounds phenomenal. Listen to Binaural with headphones - it's excellent. Avocado sounds like band takes but it's compressed to ear pain. The last two are so crisp it hardly sounds like anything was recorded in the same room.

It would have been interesting to hear a band produced Yield(or was it No Code?) but O'Brien talked them out of it. The vocals are a little high in the mix on that album but obv. still great overall.

I don't know the answer, but my guess is Yield. It seems to have a bit more shine on it.

BOB is the producer on both No Code and Yield...But No Code was cobbled together from many different sessions across the country, while touring; Yield was a "hunker down in the studio" type of record.

Well we can blame Yield on Stone, right? Isn't that what Eddie said?

This was about general problems within the band. Yield was (at the time) seen as their way past all of that.

RIP MP3. I knew about Tom's Diner being used as a primary reference during the development of the mp3, but the embedded video of all the information that was lost in the encoding is new (and fascinating) to me:

Developers of the MP3 Have Officially Killed It
http://gizmodo.com/developers-of-the-mp ... 1795205540

Classic b:

viewtopic.php?p=937160#p937160

Dang it