If You Love Music...

If you love music, PLEASE READ THIS LINKED ARTICLE.

One thing you might notice about my recordings: they are noticeably quieter than most 'store-bought' discs. That's on purpose. I put a lot of time into writing and recording these songs. I put a lot of effort, practice, education, and frustration into mixing and mastering these songs. I don't want to waste it by squashing my product to death.

There's an industry-wide process that squashes the life out of music, for the sake of making it louder. If you make the loud bits quieter, and the quieter bits louder (also known as compression), this lessens the dynamic range of the track. With less dynamic range, you can then boost the volume so that the quiet parts are loud, and the loud parts are LOUD! The louder the song is, the more noticeable it will be, the more likely it will be to make money.

This has been going on for over a decade, progressing more and more until reaching a point last year where (rumour says) Metallica's mastering engineer requested to be omitted from the credits. He was so ashamed of what he had been forced to do by the labels. The album was all over the news as fans returned discs either thinking they were defective, or out of disappointment from the quality of the product.

Unfortunately this overcompressing, "Brick Wall" mastering ruins the sound. What it doesn't tell you (and even this article doesn't address this) is that it also causes ear fatigue, increased migraines and headaches, and eventually hearing-loss.

Enjoy whatever you want to listen to, but please - protect your ears and give the musicians some respect. It's probably too late to get back to where the quality was in the Nineties, but hopefully it won't get much worse...

For more information, google "Loudness War" and see what comes up.