Iron Maiden have announced that their new upcoming album titled "A Matter of Life and Death" will not be mastered in any way. This means that there will be no processing done-best of all NO COMPRESSION.

I hope more and more artists realize the futility of engaging in the "Loudness Race" and start producing some good sounding CDs. As for me, I am ecstatic!!!

UPDATE: You can check out the music video of their first single here. Well, this is a streamed video and the sound might be encoded at very low bitrates, however, I love the way it sounds. You can hear Bruce's amazing voice clearly and I swear Nicko's drums never sounded better on any of their previous albums. If this video is an indication of the sound quality of the upcoming album, I can safely say that we finally have a GREAT sounding Iron Maiden album!

Wow a new Iron Maiden album AND they even say they didn't use dynamic compression. Its like Christmas!

Actually, it means there will be no ADDED EQ, fx, etc beyond what was applied during tracking and mixdown.
This does not rule out compression by any means.

Sounds like a terrible idea. I'm no fan of current commercial CD mastering practices, but that does not mean all mastering is bad. What they should do is just get a good mastering engineer and tell him that he doesn't need compete on volume. Good mastering can make an album gel together and frame an album to make it a cohesive whole. There's a huge gap between what sounds good in the studio and what sounds good at home or in headphones. Good mastering can help make the minute details that are easily resolvable in $25k studio monitors apparent to the boombox listener. I appreciate IM's intent but there are better ways to get where they want to go. And as an engineer, I'll be the first to tell you that heavy compression is one of the cornerstones of the rock n' roll sound. It used to be done with tubes and tape, but nowadays everyone thinks they can run a turd thru a Finalizer and have a golden egg. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy it.

Embarassingly, I've never really heard Iron Maiden. However, I've thought about buying some stuff by them before and this new album will probably be where I start - if only to hear what it sounds like!

About the compression, the page did say: "[. . .] you will get to hear the new album exactly as it sounded in the studio, no added EQ, compression, analog widening, etc. [. . .]"

I guess this means that the automatic compressor devices that all broadcasts are routed through at the radio stations (are there any still play Iron Maiden?) will be working overtime?

-brendan

If you're interested in hearing Iron Maiden, either Number of the Beast or Piece of Mind would be the best place to start IMO, but I like the first two albums just as much. I've had a really hard time getting into anything after Seventh Son although the one before it, Somewhere in Time, has got to be one of their weakest releases.

Cool, thanks for the tip.

ugh, I hope you won't be unpleasantly surprised.
a real unmastered hardrock recording sounds godawful
at best you will get something like The Misfits "Earth A.D." or Black Flag "Wasted.. Again"

To the person who never heard Maiden: listen to "Piece of Mind" or "Powerslave" first
Iron Maiden is not for everyone I guess, it was a kinda 80's youth thing when you hung around with friends drinking beer, where one half wore Maiden T-shirts and the other half Motörhead.
Looking back I wonder how many really liked those bands. I can't stand listening to that "cool" stuff anymore, while real quality acts like Metallica, Sabbath, AC/DC etc still live up.

needs more cowbell

Will this be somehting like live broadcast recordings ? (sorry if this is not the right term) Porcupine Tree's broadcast albums XM, XMII and Warszawa sound very good without mastering. But maybe i'm mistaken and this is a different situation

Hhmm... I hope they mean 'good old quality as it was before the loudness war' and not 'completely uncompressed' or 'completely unmastered'. The latter two usually mean irritating-sound-that-is-very-tiresome-to-hear-for-more-than-15-minutes-and-needs-the-hand-permanently-on-the-volume-knob-during-listening.

Well, that's what replaygain for

No, RG won't help because it doesn't compress. Within the same song intro's will probably be too soft and loud parts too loud if you don't keep adjusting it by hand while playing. Too much dynamics is just as undesirable as too little.

Haha. I doubt it will be as bad as Earth A.D. Thats unlistenable, but mostly because they appear to have recorded it in someone's garage using a casaset tape and a pair of headphones jammed in a mic jack.

I think this will be a little better then that since they have a real studio, better source material, etc.



You ever listen to concert bootlegs? I do and I don't have a real problem with it. Its not that big of a deal for most music.

You can also try listening to their last two albums "Brave New World" and "Dance of Death". The album is supposed to sound more like these two albums than the vintage ones mentioned above. Don't get me wrong-the new albums are different but they are AMAZING imo.

Don't even think of getting "No Prayer for The Dying" and "Fear of the Dark". They are the band's worst albums.



Well, contrary to what you say, Iron Maiden was never about being 'cool'. There was a time when they were famous but the fame was well deserved.

Metallica still lives upto your expectations? Well, they sure didn't live up to anyone's expectations when they released St. Anger. I hope their upcoming album is better than that. However, I have seen more people being fans of Metallica, Sabbath and AC/DC than Iron Maiden although it is difficult to tell which band is better than the rest. Hence for me, 'Cool' is Metallica. We all have a right to our own opinions. No harm intended.

Yeah I'm not sure how 20 minute tracks about Samuel Coleridge poems or other sorts of obscure historical stuff made them cool. It definately made the interesting, but cool doesn't sound right.

Funniest skit in the last decade.

Robert

True, but mixing is the stage where that issue should be addressed. As long as it was mixed properly, the intersong dyanmics should be ok.

I guess I'm the only one here that really loves Earth A.D. despite the flawed quality of the recording.

No.
You would be surprised how many Ghouls there are everywhere you go

About Iron Maiden and Metallica etc.
I can still listen to Kill 'em All or ...Justice and enjoy them today after 20 years.

Just a little ago I really tried to listen to Maiden again after years so I re-ripped Piece of Mind.

"where eagles dare" is some cheesy hooray England world war 2 song (I think)
"revelations" is an even more cheesy Christian song
"flight of icarus" is decent, some fanatasy/greek mythology stuff
"die with your boots on", "the trooper" more hooray for England militaria
after that I remember there were some juvenile fantasy songs, one about the movie Dune, and aborted the mission back into my youth. What was I thinking back then

I would agree with you. I think Iron Maiden were quite good. I still listen to their albums quite often (Powerslave, Number Of The Beast, Piece Of Mind, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son are faves). Metallica were great, but lately their albums really haven't been much to write home about. Metallica by Metallica and ...And Justice For All can be listened to without ever getting bored

audiomars

edit: typo (as usual)

Actually it's about the book Dune, which I believe is still appraised by many. Otherwise you are right, of course

I actually think I might enjoy the upcoming Iron Maiden release. I've listened so much unmastered black metal that no mere Iron Maiden recording can scare me.

I don't agree that unmastered hard rock/metal sounds horrible. I rather enjoyed the overall sound when I played guitar in a metal band and found our rehearsal tape recorded with one room mic to have superior sound to 90% of my metal collection. Not superior sound quality, but superior sound. The kind of stuff you find on the Burzum/Aske album or Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy. It's a sound I might characterize "organic" or "ambient"

It's kind of fun to think that nowadays they have high-sampling rate, high-resolution multitrack digital recording gear, powerful postprocessing computers and advanced microphone technology and still 30 years ago with their ancient gear they made rock albums that sounded infinitely better than today. Yay to technology!

Edit:

I forgot to mention: it seems that Iron Maiden is now officially the first (and hopefully not the last) pop/rock band that used the lack of mastering as a marketing gimmick. These guys always surprise me, you'd think that this band would be dead by now but still year after year they always come up with something to keep them on the charts. It's the Band That Wouldn't Die.

Yay to the jackasses who don't know how to use it properly!

Funny that you should mention this. A lot of beginner bands in my neighbourhood actually used The Mighty Earbuds Hanging From The Ceiling technique. Some stuff that they came up with actually sounds better than modern studio albums

Does anyone aside from me find it absolutely ironic that of all bands, Iron Maiden is the one doing this?



N.B. That is not to say I dislike them. I'm saying that of all bands to finally lose it with the "make it louder" race ...

Having recorded and produced several CDs of various types of pop (rock, folk, country, etc.) I have a hard time believeing that this is actually a very good idea.

While I do agree that much modern pop music is excessively compressed, this is hardly a reason to ditch all that "mastering" entails. There are so many reasons for this, where to begin?

1. Live music happens on a different scale than playback allows
A real metal band (OK, not my favorite type of music but it illustrates the point) plays at pretty darn high levels, which is a large part of the "charm" as it were. They are also playing in some location that is larger than your bedroom. They are also delivering energy into the air via a multitude of means: mics, drums directly into the space, guitar/bass amps, etc.

At home, you are listening at a much smaller scale, and this changes EVERYTHING about the perception of the music. Part of the reason for mastering (and compression) is to provide a musical experience on the appropriate scale so that listeners don't have to blast the doors off to get the message.

2. Recorded music is often "unperformable"
How many times have I overdubbed guitar parts? Thousands. Maybe the first pass is acoustic rhythm, then another, then some electric fills, then half the solo on a mandolin and the other half on a Telecaster. All of these things are loads of fun to do, but the truth is that a) I can't play all those parts at once b) the volume levels of these instruments are wildly different c) the dynamics of these instruments are wildly different

Without quite a bit of studio trickery, these parts simply wouldn't mesh at all. Our modern ears have become accustomed to these "unnatural" combinations of instruments, but in truth they can only coexist with a lot of help from very unnatural sources - like compression.

3. Older recordings use compression, too!
While there may be a rash of "irrational exhuberance" regarding the modern use of heavy compression, compressors have been a stable of recording studios since the 1950's. All those Beatles records - compression and EQ tricks abound. Stephen Still's acoustic guitar work with CSNY - compressed to death to give it a "sound". The list goes on and on, but the upshot is that dynamics compression has been a fundamental part of recorded pop for a long, long time.

Flame shields up: Metal is often quite compressed by the very nature of instruments used. Distorted guitar is by definition heavily compressed in a way that has clearly pleased players and audiences for decades, which is part of the charm of an overdriven amp/guitar combination. Metal players push the distortion way up, resulting in even less natural dynamic range.

Compare this with, say, bluegrass - all acoustic, meant to be played and heard a a low level, with lots of transients and natural dynamics in the stringed instruments. The nature of this music makes it impossible to play very loud, and thus the use of compression has a different meaning. In practice, one must apply some compression because the dynamics of the instruments are quite extreme - otherwise, listeners will have to play the music at live levels to hear it well. Fortunately, I probably can play a bluegrass CD at "live levels" without having the police visit my house.

I believe that some mastering and compression can greatly benefit the delivery of music to real-world playback systems, when done properly. To ditch it completely is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Couldn't agree with you more. The band will know this too and if they don't they'll find out as soon as they try to play some 'rough' edits at other places than the studio.

What I think they actually mean is that the album will not be compressed to death like so many modern CD's are, not that there will be no mastering or compression at all.

I'm not sure their move has something to do with the "loudness race". Maybe they just want the CD sound more faithful to the original, or deliver a "dirtier" sound....

What I read there means that there just won't be any mastering, which doesn't imply that there will be no compression at all, they'll just do everything in the mixing stage.
Maiden won't record in a bad studio so I guess you won't hear too much difference to a 'mastered' album.

I don't really understand you. Iron Maiden albums of the 80's and early 90's were very "silent" (RG values around 0) and very dynamic indeed, as were other recordings of that era. Maiden really started overcompressing their albums pretty late, in the 00's.

For live performances, well, that's a different story. But I know that Metallica, Manowar and possibly Spinal Tap have always been louder


True. I once made a metal recording that, much to my astonishment, had a flat dynamics profile before I had even gotten a chance to mess with the dynamics! That's RG value of -9 with just plain normalizing!

You are of course right. Distorted electric guitar has basically zero dynamic range. But what makes dynamics in metal is, of course, drums. A standard drumkit has a huge dynamic range, I would imagine around 0-120 dB. How much dynamics is apparent in a metal recording is largely dicated by how loud the guitar track is mixed and how loud the drummer beats the drums.

Most 80's metal recordings by bands such as Iron Maiden, Metallica and Slayer exhibit considerable dynamic range because the drums are given a lot of space to breathe. Nowadays the guitar is mixed so that it's about the same level as the peak levels of the drums, so that the dynamic range of drums is limited to the upper couple of decibels.

Also, even more sadly, the de facto standard of today is to use a trigger with drums, that is, replacing actual drum hits by a sample from a drum machine. This allows for zero variance in dynamic range between consecutive drum hits and it basically reduces the drummer to a mere metronome. This is by far the worst thing ever happened to music (at least to metal) and I religiously refuse to use triggers whenever I get the change.

For mp3 VBR (~210 kbps) replaygain Album Gain = -6.73 dB, Album Peak = 1.059981. Much better then Dance of Death with -10.10 dB and 1.243614 (for ogg q3).

No mastering? This is either a lie or the worst idea I've heard in a long time. There's a very good reason that record companies spend thousands upon thousands of dollars mastering record, and it's not just to make them loud. Good mastering will wean out any problems occurring in the mix and ensure it is 'listenable' on a varied amount of playback systems. Non electronic records require a great deal of mastering before sounding pleasing.

The Number Of The Beast (1982) = -4.12 dB
Piece Of Mind (1983) = -4.20 dB
Powerslave (1984) = -3.46 dB
Live After Death (1985) = -2.86 dB
Somewhere In Time (1986) = 3.18 dB
Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son (1988) = -2.13 dB
No Prayer For The Dying (1990) = -4.70 dB

Not quite around 0 here. These are pretty much all the original UK releases I have.

Hmm, the sound of latest/hotest album is really... "raw" may say. But I can't say "bad", just a bit unordinary.

Iron Maiden - A Matter of Life and Death
RG = -6.71 dB

OK, I'll set this whole thread straight.

1. There is obviously a difference between the "mastering" they speak of not having, and downmixing which is of course required to get 2 channel 44.1kHz 16 bit CD Audio out of the many individual studio tracks.
2. Last few Maiden albums, the band has recorded some tracks live as a whole unit.
3. The only thing satanic here is the mere mention of drum triggers, which are from the devil (or perhaps invented by Sony).
4. PowerSlave is the all time best metal album ever, so of course is the first Maiden album one should purchase. After that, Brave New World, Somewhere in Time, Dance of Death, & Piece of Mind would give you all the different (and good) types of music that Maiden can create.

/thread

I have the album, and it sounds *really* good. Album replaygain is around -6dB. Finally a heavy metal album with dynamics!

PD: if you like Maiden, get this, you won't be dissapointed

What is the difference between the two? ;-)

- Lyx

OT posts removed. Lyx's can stay to show I'm not totally devoid of humour.

Please continue on topic.

What the guys are trying to do, in effect, is emulate the 'direct to disc' vinyl that has occasionally been used for all kinds of music - classical, rock, jazz.

I remember back in the early 80's, "Warsaw Pakt" cut a session direct to laquer (an EP, IIRC) on a Saturday, the disc was pressed over night and into Sunday, and was in the shops by Monday.

edit>> it was actually an entire album, and it was in 1977. The quote below isn't quite correct - the sessions were defintely cut 'direct to disc', not recorded or 'mastered'.