Synthesizer Patel

what's a Yorktown? It better be something nice! edit: alright i've googled it. you've hurt my feelings - will you ever forgive us for helping you build your country before savagely turning on your creators?! we know how god feels.

to that!

send me the song and i'll over-dub drums and piano on it and see if it's still just as good then.

How many great songs have bad production? It's all part of the same package - a great song needs great production to make it great.

so you're saying he's not recorded his guitar parts through a pick-up (santa cruz acoustic, i think it is) and the piano is a real piano?

producers definately tell bands to play in different tempos and what instruments to play, of course it's part of production. an engineer is more likely to deal with amps etc.. and then the producer will say yes or no and blah blah blah.

no. when did i say that! stop picking on me! i said that production is very important to whether a song is good or not, solace seemed to be saying that production can't make a good song bad - i was trying to say that it can, but i seemed to do that in reverse!

I can only base that judgement on past experience. Obviously the vinyl or cd version will sound better, but that is the case with all other albums that leak and I think are good or bad production wise. The things that I really don't like about it are the acoustic guitar sound (which I can put money on is recorded through a pick-up like Tweedy plays on stage) - now that is done from what I'd guess, because the people doing the producing want to make life easy. An acoustic guitar recorded through a mic takes up far more frequencies across the sound spectrum than it does using a pick-up, so it's

hmmm. well that's just not true at all. production, in the sense i am talking, also includes choices of instrument, choice of tempo etc... as well - it's not just how they mixed or mastered something. and the production values of motown, sun, stax, atlantic, phil spectors work etc.... is still copied today. listen to Da Do Ron Ron and tell me if that is a good song because of the production or just because the song on paper was so good.

I haven't made my mind up about whether I like the songs on the album yet, all I've said is I don't like the production. It's going to take me a lot more listens to make up my mind about the songs - I always listen to the sound of an album first few listens, and this doesn't float my boat (it almost sounds like it was recorded in the 1990s to me, actaully). Jeff Tweedy is a brilliant song writer, so I've no doubt the songs are good, and I'll come round a bit in the future to the production, i'm sure. But, I was expecting more from them in terms of the sound of the album I guess - I personally

he's doubly at risk there, being an animal and wearing a hat. but, i don't think the bulldog could jump high enough without a helping hand from sly. if he hadn't gone and killed the baboon, he could have got on his shoulders . . . que sera sera . . . (another sneaky sly reference again)

it was just a musical joke, based on the fact that sly stone's bulldog killed and then raped sly's pet baboon, and also would attack anyone that came to the house wearing a hat. i suppose the joke was a little bit silly, but if you are calling it silly cos you didn't get the references - i hope that helps.

i think a lot of chart music is compressed to silly degrees simply to make it sound good on the radio. the type of music we listen to, though, that rarely occurs. i wouldn't say people mix of shitty speakers, and i don't think brian wilson did as such, he certainly checked to make sure it sounded good on them, though. but, what is more amazing - and what makes his productions great - is that it sounds not only good on shitty speaker, but incredible on good speakers too. which is, as i said, a mark of good production.

i'm picturing sly stone's bulldog killing and then raping george's sitar (cos it came to the reception in a hat) at this wedding - is that what you mean?

does the keyboard sound like a piano on headphones and the acoustic guitar sound like it's been recorded through a proper mic? ok that's it, i promise.

ok - i'll stop with the headphones discussion, but music obviously sounds different through headphones than speakers - so it's perfectly reasonable to say that the album works well on one and not on the other. i think that a well produced album should work well on both though.

well - you might think it sounds better on headphones, but that's not what i said. i said an album is mixed badly if it only sounds good on headphones. and headphones do give a false stereo sound, that again is a fact. which is why producers mix using studio monitors and not headphones - eventhough headphones are capable of picking up more flaws in the music.

so do i, and i don't even think i like it that much, but it's very very very catchy.

oh, i burned it to cd and listened to it through my stereo. i don't listen to music through headphones, it doesn't give proper stereo imaging, because the sound is isolated to each ear. if an album only sounds good on headphones then it's been mixed badly.

they need Jim O'Rourke to if they're gonna continue doing this.

i was going to ask that too actually. i just think the production is shockingly bad. the drums sound shit, can't hear any bass, and tweedy clearly played acoustic guitar through those bastard pick-ups he uses on stage (on stage i can understand why, although not totally, however doing so on album is a terrible choice), and the piano sounds like a keyboard (probably because it is - as recording real piano is a real skill, and clearly whoever produced this didn't want the hassle of making things sound good).

i think they like it. i didn't really read what they say to be honest. i was just looking for a leak - they like wilco over there on that forum, i know that (not as much as animal collective, but they like them).

first impression of this is that the production is bad. i don't think that impression is going to change, now it's a case of whether the songs are any good - that'll take a bit of time to find out.

the radiohead forum, atease has loads of links to the leak.

cool, but should i be singing "oh, oh yoko, oh, oh, yoko ...." when the piano is playing?