My Home Cooked Gothique-Industriel Mastering Analysis Web Payge.


Above: Here I am in my studio, calculating RMS by ear
 

Background Info on The Project:

After 4 months of waiting for it to get out of the shop, I finally got back my missing Tannoy monitor. In order to re-acclimate myself with the sound of the monitors, I decided to spend the day listening to a bunch of reasonably popular CDs in or near the electro-industrial genre (the scene.)

Being fanatical in nature, that wasn't enough for me, so I decided to analyze them all. The following spreasheet is what resulted.


 
 
 

Alphabetically Sorted:


 

By Mean RMS:


 

By Peak RMS (I won this one! :D ):
 


 

Sordid By Overall Peak Value (The Red LED Club):


 

By my proprietary "Compression Factor (TM)" benchmark:
 


 

By "Dynamic Content." Low values tend to indicate songs with heavy, nonstop arrangements:

By Root Frequency:

By Song Length. Trance tracks are obviously longer:


 


Some interesting things can be determined from this data:


 
A) Never, ever ask Patrick Stevens of Hypnoskull or Raoul R. of Noisex to master your material. These men, while fine upstanding young gentlemen, have got the market cornered on ear fatigue, and your tracks will return to you as square waves.
B) Switchblade Symphony doesn't appear use a tuner before going into the studio, which is kinda punk, I think.
C) My own shit may be too damn loud, since I am way up there on the RMS list. Never ask me to master your material either.
D) Trance is generally louder than industrial.
E) As an elaboration on A), rhythmic industrial is generally mastered louder than God, with RMS values of 10/4 being not uncommon.
F) As the "dynamics purists" are fond of pointing out, older music tends to feature more of a dynamic range and less 0.0/-0.3db maximization.
G) Further modification/interpretation of the data is welcome. I'm no physicist, some of those fields (I & J) I made up because they seemed to make sense.
H) I was going to make bar graphs and what not but I decided that was just too stupid.
I) Whatever you determine, let me know. In this same directory I've included the Excel Spreasheet, so you can sort and massage the data however you want, if so inclined.

Note: These analyses were performed in Wavelab 3.0 and with the aid of the SpectraLab signal generator and a 12 pack of Nestea.

FIN.
O_o----------!