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is it just me, new Steely Dan cd's too brite snare

I've had this debate on a Steely Dan webpage

several of the latest dan albums
Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go
and the new Donald Fagen album
seem to be recorded beautifully, all the nuances, close mixed horns, incredibly lush mix

everything perfect except for the snare drum which is way up in the mix and headache inducing

it isn't my sytem and it's worse on Two Against Nature
especially the title track and West of Hollywood
it's so bad I have to listen in the next room

EMG recorded in analog is a little less bright
and Don's new spectacular Morph the Cat (MtC) has some hot snare in the mix

the last two albums feature Keith Carlock who is an incredible drummer, but Don has him in tight snare timekeeping with little room for fills on most of MtC

has Fagen lost his upper frequency end of his hearing?
is he mixing things hot for jumpy mid fi reproduction?
or am I hallucinating?
128x128audiotomb

Showing 2 responses by onhwy61

onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,137 posts
 
As far as modern pop/rock recordings go, "Morph the Cat", "Everything Must Go" and "Two Against Nature" are real good sounding, but compared to "Nightfly" or even "11 Tracks of Whack" they pale. If you download a track from "Morph" into a waveform editing program you'll see that in order to get the high overall level they heavily compressed and/or limited the signal. I don't know exactly how or what signal processor they used, but the effect is to sharply round off the signal peaks, especially the snare drum hits. It's not the gross distortion you get from going over digital full signal, but it is noticeable.

Regardless of the sound, "Morph the Cat" is a marvelous album. It makes me want to go the an airport and have my luggage checked.
onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,137 posts
 
In a recent issue of Recording magazine they had an interview with Keith Carlock about recording "Morph the Cat". He states that Fagen distributes a demo track for each song to the musicians a few days before the recording session. The demo is either a DAT or CDR with Fagen doing all the parts via computer software. Carlock says he's expected to humanize the computer generated drum parts. He also says that Fagen is open to the musicians' input, but that he has a strong sense of what he wants before the session starts and is quick to say what he doesn't like. In an article sidebar the recording engineering says that the drums were minimally processed during tracking to 2" analog tape which was then transferred to ProTools for mixing and song assembling.
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