On my The Reason why page you can find this piece:

Reason was different with its great sounding and superbly integrated rack devices. Reason didn’t include the super clean sounds of Chinese Romplers but had quite a lot of naughty sounds on board, included in its Factory SoundBank. I’m glad it didn’t because I have always hated those lifeless plastic not-so fantastic Rompler sounds.

Many music people nowadays take the academic route. Some of them are overly concerned imo about the sound quality of a DAW system. They often start comparing DAW software, using spectrum analysers, talking about digital summing and stuff like that.

Most modern music nowadays has less dynamic range than older music. MP3 will kill a lot of dynamics and frequencies too. And what do you think the players of SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or Spotify and Rdio do for sound quality? They’re not capable of playing full range music but are rather limited in sound. When you’re buying songs at Bandcamp you can of course choose for high quality formats which is great. But I guess that many people don’t mind. Most YouTube videos on the web are shown in 480p quality offering 128kbps sound quality.

Any DAW has way more to offer that the modern formats for listening we’re using. This has always been the case, the sound in the studio was better than when pressed on vinyl. When the CD came, same thing happened. And nowadays we record everything in super high quality, just to kill all dynamics using brick wall limiters and compress it into mp3.

The audience doesn’t have a clue. And the audience doesn’t mind.

If sound quality is so important, we’re doing something wrong, right? The thing is: for popular music, non-linearity is key. If it’s all linear, it’s flat and boring sounding. Sound needs to have tension, needs to be a little “faulty”. That’s how rock music was started: blues players turning their small tube amp to the maximum volume which resulted in interesting overdriven tones. We haven’t changed that method ever since. We apply overdrive to everything. And it’s why we still love doing analog mixes, because that mixer is less linear than digital, it has all kinds of small “errors” which makes it more warm, random, unexpected, muscial and human.

To make a long story short: digital is way too clean sounding. So we need to add some “errors” to it to make it sound more funkier. And this is the reason why I LOVE the Pulveriser. Because it adds some dirt and unevenness to any given signal. When we’re running clean sounds through the Pulveriser it comes out alive and kicking and screaming.

Last couple of weeks I’ve been doing these Pulveriser series. So on every working day I published a blogpost focussing on a specific aspect of the Pulveriser. That was a challenge. The discipline of experimenting, writing and publishing demo songs daily takes a lot of planning, motivation and perseverance. But what helped me a great deal were the very positive responses I got on this series.

All articles of this series are published under the Pulveriser special tag →

Tomorrow this series of blogposts/articles on the Pulveriser will come to an end. But next month I will still focus on the Pulveriser. Just watch out for my blogpost tomorrow and I’ll tell you everything about that.

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