TGF album on vinyl! Options

[brianblank]

On Facebook...

Kevin Martin > The Gracious Few
What a great day, CT turns 40 & as a special little treat I get the Vinyl masters of our record to approve for production! It sounds AMAZING, get ready for a whole new aural experience!!! Happy Birthday Brother, hope you get everything you have ever dreamed of! KM

Woohoo vinyl!

Edit: On sale update (2/9/11)

Vinyl Album Release Next Tuesday, Feb. 15!

Finally...the way hard-hitting rock n' roll was meant to be heard! The Gracious Few's album will be released on 12" double gatefold vinyl exclusively at independent record stores next Tuesday, February 15th! Please support TGF and head down to your local indie record store next Tuesday to pick it up or find your local indie record store.

This post has been edited by brianblank: Feb 9 2011, 6:42 pm

[+Ed+]

Fuck yessssssssss!

[OutToDry]

THis is nice to see, they said it was coming!!!

[icewaterike]

Awesome!

[dangum]

Kevin Martin IMKM
#thegraciousfew vinyl coming in Feb! Gonna ROCK LOUD!
about 1 hour ago via Twittelator from Washington, US

[mattdm11]

Vinyl would be nice, but you have to find out where it is mastered from. If it is straight from the CD masters and just volume lowered, you're going to be wasting your time. You might as well just buy the CD again and turn the volume knob down a few notches.

If, however, it gets its own, new, mastering, it could sound way better than the CD, as the CD is very brickwalled. Mind you, the CD still sounds fairly good considering the amount of compression, but if mastered properly would sound quite a bit better.

My guess is that the vinyl will be mastered straight from the master CD copy. That's how most vinyls are mastered nowadays. Or we could get lucky and have our own "Stadium Arcadium".

This post has been edited by mattdm11: Dec 4 2010, 11:34 am

[live2cd]

you make a good point, matt -- but i dont know if there is much demand for the vinyl of this album (outside of us) to merit a remix or remaster.

kevin did say "Vinyl masters", tho.
either way, Im in for 1. if they released this thing on 8 track and cassette, id buy those too.

[mattdm11]

you make a good point, matt -- but i dont know if there is much demand for the vinyl of this album (outside of us) to merit a remix or remaster.

kevin did say "Vinyl masters", tho.
either way, Im in for 1. if they released this thing on 8 track and cassette, id buy those too.

agreed....I don't like to be the negative nelly in the TGF forum, as I love them, bought the album, and was within 5 feet of you in Columbus... but let's be real....the band maybe has sold 100K copies of the album? Does anyone care about the vinyl?

Having said that, I agree, I may buy it too. My goal one day is to have a good turntable and "needledrop" (rip) all the albums I buy on vinyl. The problem is that you have to do it the first time you play the album, as from my understanding, vinyl gets worse with each play, not to mention the cracks and pops. (Sorry, I grew up as a CD guy...)

What is frustrating with the whole vinyl process is that a superior sound (sometimes) is put on an inferior medium. All things being equal, CD is better than vinyl, because you do not have the pops and clicks and degredation of the source material. The band (and all other bands) could just master the album properly the FIRST time and give everyone the best possible product then, as opposed to mastering the CD so hot that you are forced to buy the vinyl, which may or may not be an improvement.

The whole hot CD issue has to do with if it sounds good on your iPod or in your car, not to mention with competing with other albums' loudness...instead of just putting a "loudness" feature on the stereo/iPod/etc., they ruin the music, until it is one day re-released with better mastering - something I doubt will happen for all CDs from 1993 on. I would love to hear AoA's album with full dynamic range....but it will never happen, and we are stuck with the horrible sound that is that album.

Everyone knows what I am talking about - you are listening to a track like "Begin the Begin" by REM, then "Nice Guys Finish Last" by Green Day comes on next, and you almost have a heart attack from the loudness difference. I used to think "why did they make the REM album so quiet?".....now I know better, and realize the Green Day CD is a sonic disaster. Thank God for replaygain, but while the volume stays even, it just shows how flat and lifeless modern recordings are compared to anything from pre-1994.

As a music fan, it is very, very frustrating.

Edit - BTW, "vinyl masters" means nothing. It could mean exactly what I described. Again, I hope for the best too, because while the CD doesn't sound bad, it could sound better.

This post has been edited by mattdm11: Dec 4 2010, 12:57 pm

[OutToDry]

I was personally told that they are doing a mastering session for the vynil record.

If the record sold 100K consider that a success. I think over time it will be a classic seller!!!!

I don't agree with your synopsis that the record can sound better. They had the best engineers working on it.

This post has been edited by OutToDry: Dec 5 2010, 9:17 am

[Nobody Knows]

Ye, sadly they are far from selling 100K copies. Week of release about 2,500 in the US, if my memory serves.

[Pokey]

I think that The Few could have sounded better ... it just sounds a little restricted or something on the album. Especially after Guilty Fever which sonically really packs a punch, The Few really needed to absolutely tear the house down and I don't think the mixing exactly let it do that, which is a shame. I remember a few others pointed this out too.

[thefunkyredcaboose]

Yah, I broke down the mix of The Few in my album review, but I am too lazy to pull it up. I think the bigger problem is that Guilty Fever is a little too bright as it is actually louder than all the other album tracks.

I also don't think this album is brick walled from a mastering standpoint. The dynamics come through as well as they should in these songs, which aren't overly dynamic in the first place. It is a loud master, but this album SHOULD have a loud master!

I wonder if OTD remembers that it was mastered by the same guy who did Awake?

[OutToDry]

All the Mastering was done by the guy at Sterling in NYC. Name escapes me..(edit Ted jensen)..there is a thread I posted about it. I will concede that the Few & Guilty Fever has a little off the heavier edge in the very beggining of the songs.

This post has been edited by OutToDry: Dec 5 2010, 10:55 am

[mattdm11]

I was personally told that they are doing a mastering session for the vynil record.

If the record sold 100K consider that a success. I think over time it will be a classic seller!!!!

I don't agree with your synopsis that the record can sound better. They had the best engineers working on it.

Of course the record can sound better. So can the CD, if they remastered it. Here is the wavefom of Crying Time:



It doesn't look (or sound) that terrible, but look at the compression. The quiet parts are almost as loud as the loud parts. The dynamic range is gone.

A comparison....here is "The Chain" by Fleetwood Mac. Look at the quiet parts and the loud parts...you can see the difference, and you know the loud parts will actually sound loud.





Another comparison....White, Discussion off of Throwing Copper. I love TC, but sonically, the album is atrocious. White Discussion sounds horrendous. When the "loud" parts kick in, all it is is a compressed mess. On anything other than in your car or on your MP3 player, it sounds like crap.



I understand the whole addage that you can't judge sound by looking at the waveform, and that's true. Radiohead's In Rainbows LOOKS compressed, but sounds pretty damn good. But by and large, most albums today could sound significantly better if the compression was eliminated.

My point is that when albums get remastered for vinyl, they cannot be that compressed or the needle would literally fly off of the record. So there are two options....keep it compressed and lower the volume, or spend more money to remaster it for vinyl, which is a niche market. You tell me what option you think most bands will choose.

Again, this is not a bash on TGF. I am amazed at how good their album sounds considering all of the compression. It is a bash on how mastering is ruining all my favorite music.

[thefunkyredcaboose]

I think though that the mastering (and thus the wav form) of Crying Time is accurate to what they wanted to do with the song. When they play the song live there isn't a huge dynamic distinction made between the chorus and the verse. That goes for every other TGF song I've heard, except for What's Wrong.

It may be also to helpful to know that differentiating between the verse and the chorus dynamically in Crying Time is a mixing issue, not a mastering one.

As a producer, I veer away from compression at all cost in my mixes and thus from brick-wall masters, but the TGF album doesn't offend me in any way, shape, or form. I think it is literally how the music is supposed to sound.

This post has been edited by thefunkyredcaboose: Dec 5 2010, 11:30 pm