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One addition I would make that all those formats were used at the same time during the 90s. I had a stereo (like they were called back then), that had a vinyl player, cassette player and the CD player in the same tower. I think cassettes were my main go to, because you could record vinyls and CDs to cassette, but not the other way around. I would get CDs from the library and copy them to cassette and buy used vinyls from used record stores, because they were cheaper than cassettes or CDs.
The trumpet bits made me laugh out loud Both times😂These videos are so interesting to me. Like... I would have sworn that my taste in music was very much influenced by the 90ies (I mean... I was still in my teens back then) but when I heard all the examples in the video and your explanations on the production techniques, and how they changed, I came to realize that it was indeed the 80ies and only the first one or two years of the 90ies. The 90ies indeed were a special era, though *he said in his grandfather-voice* I remember "fights" between metalheads, hip-hop-, and grunge fans on the schoolyard... And little me standing aside thinking about 80ies music ;))) It's hard to overstate the impact the CD had. Growing up with vinyls and later music cassettes, having an album on a small disc-not as huge as vinyls-and being able to play it as often as you want to, and the sound quality won't degrade as with cassettes, was mindblowing. Or copy the CD on a cassette that you can play in your walkman, and when the cassette doesn't work anymore, you make another copy. It's weird to think back in days of music streaming to your smartphone... Fun fact: One of my professors was one of Germany's top music-video directors of the mid 80ies to early 90ies, and he said the same thing: In the 90ies suddenly music videos became more important than the music, and there was tons of money in it because labels built on MTV and music videos. Even unknown bands and artists had massive music-video budgets. (Excuse the rambling. But you sent me back into my teenage years. It's your fault 😉) Thanks for this video, man!
Ik it seems small but that’s the first time someone has called me a TH-camr like that. That means so much thank you. What decade do you want to see next?
@nicorinehart dude I've been looking for the history of recording ever binging all your vids you should do stuff on fx in the 50s and 60s, like the most niche stuff
14:10. I don't know anyone who has a VHS in their car in the 90s but I sure did have a cassette player from the mid 80s onwards. You didn't have to be rich. They were a standard option or an aftermarket install. But what really made music personal was the Sony Walkman.
I think Massive Attack's "Mezzanine" was a great example of the blended electronic / analog approach. I don't think we will ever hear an album that is engineered and produced quite like that one.
I'm 49 but i learned something. You are a great researcher. And i did agree you almost everything, like the minimalist approach. You are absolutely right. They did the mixes like it's almost mastering. And the minimalism was there in the every step of the way. Think about the red hot chili peppers. Not many instruments at the same time. The run dmc made their rap with only a drum beat in the early 90s But the CD part was a little bit off. No one had CD players in the car. The car radios had only cassettes until 2000s. And the album culture was very strong, a lot more important than the singles. Think about those liner notes in a cd booklets. So much work in the art and the story. It was so important to the artists and the fans. The singles were only a taste of the upcoming album.
I totally agree and I wasn't very clear. I meant the new control over listening to music (Skip, rewind, etc) would start the deemphasis on albums but still didn't change the dominant culture quite yet. Thanks for your input!
To me the 90s were first and foremost an era of unprecedented stylistic eclecticism. Hip Hop, Techno, Jungle, IDM and some pretty gnarly Rock all had their commercial peaks in those years. Pop often seemed to be steeped in a nostalgia for the 60 and 70s. Then in the mid to late part of the decade some major and at the time sensational crossover styles were bred. Sonically, I associate the 90s with _Phatness_ - especially in Pop and Hip Hop. There seemed to be a lush, playful busy-ness in and a thick layer of bass underneath everything regardless of style. In the follwoing decades of 8-bit, Indie Folk, Dua Lipa, Milennium Parade and Vaporwave, I guess the eclecticism is something we've come to take for granted, but the dense 90s sound hasn't come back yet in my opinion (nor does it need to, I really find it a bit cloying if listened to all the time). Modern music sounds much cleaner and airier to me (that too can annoy me a bit, sometimes). As far as writing goes, I feel these days tunes are often more elaborate, operatic and whimsical than their 90s ancestors.
We had a cassette player in our car until 2001 -- and even then, that elicited oohs and aahs from my parents' friends. I never, ever heard of anybody having a VHS player in a car. In their house, sure, but never in a car. We did have a ton of CDs at home though... my dad was/is a music nerd and had a sizable vinyl and CD collection, so I was very familiar with CDs even before we had a player in the vehicle. (Most of the collection has, er, migrated to my house. I do give him MP3 CDs of the albums though and occasionally bring some back when I run out of room.)
Man you make some good videos I’ve watched two or three previously. I subbed! And I still have every CD from the 90s I ever bought. I still buy CDs. Some of my favorites are The Chronic, Dirt, Rust In Piece, Doggystyle, Emergency On Planet Earth, ATLiens, The Black Album, Use Your Illusion 1&2, just to name a few. But there’s many more!
@@nicorinehart How about video game music. I’m 49 so I grew up playing video games. Games have great music from the 8-bit era and arcades all the way up to now. I don’t really play much anymore but I still enjoy the music from the games. Maybe a video about legendary record producers and session musicians. That would be interesting.
This is spot on. To me, the 90s were the peak of the analog recording chain/workflow. Great microphones and consoles already existed, big budget studios with great acoustics were thriving, tape machines like the Studer A827 were as clean and refined as ever created, but still sounded forgiving on loud instruments, and even mixing consoles like Solid State Logic 4000 G+ had clean and clear sound, but with tons of processing power and compressors. Engineers were experienced with this environment, and artists were expected to give better performances and rely less on editing. Because of these things, you could get even great indie rock albums like Pavement's "Brighten The Corners", recorded in a week or two, sounding excellent. And then the big artists had giant budgets that don't exist now for huge productions within a big studio/analog environment. Even the digital technology that existed was part of an essentially analog workflow: ADAT and DASH digital tape were used like tape machines, and the other big source of digital audio were samplers, used essentially as drum machines. All this still revolved around an analog mixer. Obviously, there are a lot of things we can do now that they couldn't, tools that didn't exist. And just about everything can be done cheaper with DAWs. But I still find that on average, that was the last decade that sounded really good in terms of recordings and mixes, even if they start to get hot and compressed closer to 2000. I'm not sure that even with a lot of the current DAW tools, that recordings and mixes sound as good or better at the core. And then you have the reality that CD quality was actually the high watermark of consumer audio quality as well (not withstanding the brief, but unsuccessful flash of SACD, DVD-A, and Blu Ray Audio discs).
To me, that peak was in 1983, certainly not in the 90ies. I actually did some kind of research, listening to popular A-list artists, but ordered by year. And to my ears, '83 really was IT. Besides technology being refined and elaborated, it was also the artistic and financial circumstances I guess. As in "which artists get the chance of being produced", "how much time to we put into making an album" and so on. While those typical Shure/Mackie/ADAT-setups from the 90ies and the DAW-based setups nowadays contribute to a more democratic and fair situation in regards of who is "allowed" to produce and publish music. Which CAN be good, but then also a lot of mediocre stuff is being released.
@@wackerburg That was right before digital recording really hit, along with widespread digital effects and MIDI. 1982-83 a lot of albums still feature plate reverbs instead of digital ones, and music was still fairly oriented to rock bands, so had more minimal arrangements that give instruments more space. Discrete mixing consoles like Neve, API, and Quad Eight that had a bigger sound, if less processing abilities than what was to come. The last of the analog Police, Pink Floyd, even Phil Collins records which were very hifi. But then, there were a lot of really bad sounding albums from then as well. But the 90s, you had clean tape machines, more powerful and refined digital effects (plate reverbs still existed if you wanted them), SSL consoles that were fairly clean, had very powerful sweepable equalizers, and a compressor on every channel, and they could incorporate MIDI and digital into the same recording session. Some of those records had absolutely huge mixes/arrangements like Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, Nine Inch Nails, where most (if not all) was analog, often 48 tracks of it. 90s was still big budget times, with some albums taking 6 months to record and mix. I hear generally louder, clearer, and more complex productions than in the early 80s. Maybe preference has to do with how much compression you like in music, as that along with track counts was a major difference between those eras. That bit of extra compression makes good 90s stuff sound more controlled to me.
Akai Mpc2000xl ,Mpc3000 , S-3000 ,ASR-10 and SP1200 Mackie Boards +SSL 4000 Software - Sound Tools (early Pro-Tools) thats the reason why the 90's sound the way it did.. Well for Hiphop and R&B ...
👍 good info. Some other points worth mentioning: DAT before ADAT, especially for rap and DIY indie music. Also MD Minidisc to a lesser extent. 16 bit samplers; Akai especially. The supersaw waveform. Mesa Dual Rectifier. MegaBass Walkman. The rise of home recording; hit records from such setups (Enter The Wu-Tang, Foo Fighters, Jagged Little Pill) Aftermarket / custom car stereo culture, speakerboxes.
@ first time hearing bass heavy music on a 400W (a lot for class AB!) dual 12 inch woofer setup was revelatory. Visceral. Re-contextualized what it meant to feel the music.
@ 1990 Miata with a beast in the trunk must have been extra fun to drive during those key years. I only got licensed until after graduating. Friends had beaters and boxes, some of which I helped poorly install heh. Also my HS OST is more like a sprawling, curated box set 😂 Y2K era we still had Case Logic organizers with dedicated section for the absolute bangers. CD and/or tape (they were much cheaper and still knocked harder than mp3). A few MD head units were around. Aux cord too but that mostly came later, we had cheap CDr. Gas was under $2/gallon. Driving around blasting old school Biz Markie & Slick Rick, Death Row, Wu, 2pac & Biggie, Big Pun, OutKast, DMX & MF DOOM. KMFDM. Sublime. Aphex Twin. Three Six. Lost Boyz, Mobb Deep, RAP-A-LOT, No Limit, & Cash Money
The turn of the millennia was such a whiplash to pop music since it essentially killed every genre that was going around at the time and surging in popularity, one day you had Vengaboys, next day it was Vespertine, and everyone simultaneously went "What happened?" I grew up when Eurodance was on its last legs and everyone tried to do some combination of Eurodance and a style of music unfamiliar to European audiences (Country, Jazz, Gospel), but I think it really died because artists were getting less meta with their lyrics. Like of course, Saturday Night or Daddy DJ or Barbie Girl weren't gonna win any big awards for their songwriting but they always had a slight tongue-in-cheek-ness and when you do a _bit_ too much of that tongue-in-cheek-ness, your songs become annoying. Barbie Girl was annoying for the sake of being annoying but it also had a charm because of its lyrics, but a song like Fast Food Song by Fast Food Rockers, that's when you lose everyone. (Making an entire Eurodance album about fast food was a bit too late in 2003...) There was also a fair share of acts writing "deep" lyrics but they were at best, just fun to sing along to.
An excellent video. Something people often get wrong is that, since digital recording started being adopted in the early 1980s, most of the 1980s and 1990s must've been digital, when in fact they were hybrid, like you mention, and a lot of the tracking was still being done on analogue. One of the problems of early digital is that it wasn't easy to edit. Digital tape machines were still very expensive, and to do even the most basic of edits, you needed two of them. Classical and jazz were the first to adopt digital recording because the edits there are more straight-forward. When it came to more creative and complicated productions, analogue tape was still king until the very late 1990s. Some bands like Radiohead still track to 16-track today, and then transfer to digital, because it's a way to enforce a decision process that would otherwise result in chaos and nothing being done (heard this first-hand from their producer Nigel Godrich). Thanks for the video!
When I make music I spend hours tweaking the little things that, realistically, no one would notice. Tracking to tape or any physical medium means you make the at decision and move on. Just one of the many things I’ve learned from previous decades to improve my music today
@@vinylarchaeologist yeah it wasn’t until the mid 80s when engineers really began to understand and master the nuances of the 2” tape format (at both 15 and 30ips). Once that knowledge base had been built, it extended throughout the 90s and the last vestiges of big studios with big budgets from the big record companies. Dre records were all SSL board and 2” I still chuckle why a “digitally remastered” Snoop Doggy Dogg cassette tape existed around 2003 when the original from 10 years prior is a sonic masterpiece 😅
Only few clarifications: - MIDI was very strong in the 80’s, as well as drum machines (all the ones you mentioned were actually from the 80’s, and were all featured in very successful songs. - Skipping tracks was usually and easily done on vinyl (you only had to get up), and even easier with cassetes (most car stereos would have a search function which would stop at the next interval between songs). - CD’s were mainstream for music listening at home, but during a good part of the 90’s, not everyone had a CD player in their car (many Mercedes. BMW and Audi’s still used the cassete player, and the CD player was an expensive extra. - Cassete mixtapes were really a thing in the 90’s, and the Walkman (cassete based) always sold a lot more than the Discman (CD), not only because of price, but also because CD players weren’t great at keeping track while you were moving a lot. - Most pop/rock albums from the 80’s were already made of several songs, without the “connection” of the whole album that was much more prevalent in the 70’s. Even prog-rock bands like Genesis or Yes were making smaller and individual songs in their albums in the early 80’s. 😉 Loudness wars really began in the late 90’s and (mostly) 2000’s. If you were in the 90’s and you were playing another CD, you would have to actually move, change the disc, and it wasn’t unusual to adjust the volume. Compilation CDs would have the levels adjusted at the mastering stage m, and it wasn’t unusual for some songs to never hit the 0 dBFS mark, or in other words, lowering the louder songs in order to make them sound at the same level, instead of compressing the hell out of the more dynamic ones. The 2000’s brought mp3 and iPod, and that was the point when anyone could really have a clear perception of the huge difference between older and newer recordings. Since many people didn’t bother (or even know how to use) the normalizing feature in both iTunes and the iPod (and that feature wasn’t perfect at that time either); the loudness wars really started to go nuts. As a last note, I wouldn’t necessarily say that the 90’s had more electronic sounds in music than in the 80’s, since synths and drum machines were probably the biggest part in the sound of the 80’s. While dance music (and pop) clearly kept synths and drum machines very alive, there was also a certain distance from synthesizers along rock bands, which was clearly not the case in the 80’s. 😉 In rock music, the 80’s was probably the most “polished” sounding time for rock bands, while the 90’s went back to a much more raw sounding rock (from Nirvana to older bands like Rush). Polished rock sound became very “uncool” in the 90’s. 🙂 But IMHO, the 2000’s were the biggest change in music, not only by the squashed dynamics everywhere, but also by the growing popularity of beats and loops, which almost seemed to replace real musicians and instruments, and that was also when videos started to really showcase half dressed women, expensive cars, jewelry (etc) as a selling point for the music. In the 90’s, music videos were still a lot about the song, the band/artist, and a story. Thankfully, it seems like it is much more balanced now,
Really great storytelling, I have forgot about the ADAT. Now the cassette sound is back, espec in indie. I was very much into the melodic pop of the 90s, the swedes, The Cardigans, Roxette and others.
There are three things that have proliferated since the 90's that I think have significantly changed recorded music. Pitch correction, tempo quantization and drum replacement. These production techniques have led to pretty serious sonic homogenization in some genres. Every mainstream rock and country record essentially sounds the same. The big silver lining to the streaming era has been in-app loudness normalization. It has more or less ended the loudness wars. Over limited/distorted masters don't sound louder - they just sound worse. If I'm mastering a record now I'm no longer trying to hit an arbitrary loudness target, I'm trying to get it to a loudness that feels good.
What an amazing video and Insight to an amazing decorative music the best singer from the 90s and even now and the 80s is the one that only John read from nightcrawlers the album let's push it from the 90s is a masterpiece we love him so much he's amazing go look him up
Massive Attack is very best band of 90s. But oldies rock bands like Scorpions (Crazy World), Queen (Innuendo, Made in Heaven), Aerosmith (Get a Grip) is very best too! Also Madonna surprised by her Bedtime Stories and Ray of Light. Plus Radiohead's OK Computer, U2 Achtung Baby and Metallica's Black Album and Load/Reload - well, i believe is my choice of 90s
I very much liked your video with the history of music recording. Yet, you forgot to mention one extremly important thing in your video. Before CDs were the thing, there were cassettes which we played songs at home and in our cars. That replaced the 8-Tracks in the 80s and were used until the end of the 90s and into the early 2000s
I haven't watched the whole video, but public service announcment, the SM7, and the SM7b are not the same! The look so similar, but the SM7 is what would be used if the session called for it!
This is good but .. some criticism (hey it’s the internet). Sony was not a new-comer on the recording scene. They had industry leading microphones way before the C-800. (The c37a was top tier way back in the 60s) and their tape machines were just as popular as Studer or Otari (see: MCI and their consoles as well). There are lots of misconceptions in this video (like having to listen to vinyl all the way through without skipping around - which is super easy to do) … and as afar as getting a “warm” sound out of a Studer A820? That was without a doubt the cleanest, most pristine, recording tape machine ever made. The “warmth” would come from the mic choices, tape formula, EQ, compression, way before the actual ,machine had any sonic impact (which was absolutely minimal). Here’s hoping you keep on reading and learning about recording, but my advice would be to go actually work in a studio full time for a few years and stay very faraway the big blue forum - it’s slam full of misconceptions as well.
I hear you. I do feel like I misspoke I meant the c800g as the newcomer and I said Sony which is flat out wrong. I also meant to say the general warmth associated with tape machines in general. Thanks for pointing it out I can do a lot more to tighten up my scripts. I worked in a studio for a bit and honestly the work wasn’t for me. I need to be more clear in my videos what my goals are. I keep talking like I’m an expert when I’m not and I’m not trying to be but I’m not communicating that. My videos start with me having a question, researching an answer, and presenting it like I would a fun fact to a friend. I’m gonna start stating that in each video because it’s important. I’m not an expert. However, as I get bigger I hope to bring on experts from the era so they can share their knowledge as you have in the comments here. Trying to make each video better than the next and ur helping! Cheers!
The 90s was when electronic music was at its peak. House, Trance, Techno and UK Garage were some of the big genres and many tracks were entering the top 40 (in the UK and Europe). Trance in particular was at the top of it’s game as most of the classics were released at the end of the decade with the genre peaking in 1999.
Certainly here’s some great 90s House tracks I would recommend: MK - Burning (Vibe Mix) Hardrive - Deep Inside Duke - So In Love With You Ruffneck ft Yavahn - Everybody Be Somebody Camisra - Let Me Show You Here’s some recommendations of Trance tracks from the 90s: Veracocha - Carte Blanche Chicane - Saltwater Binary Finary - 1998 Paul Van Dyk - For An Angel Three Drives - Greece 2000
I remember Trance in the late 90s and very early 2000s. It was pure Ecstasy, trance in its purest form. Not the stupid, carnival, festival, dumb EDM, mind numbing, cake throwing, idiotic, 1 note root bassline, stupid ass, no building the lead melody into the drop using a low pass filter music. Trance was all about the rise, tension build, and ecstatic release!
I still have my old CDs, I'll still buy some and I still burn digital music to CDs. I mean I still use iPods so there's that. Most of my faves are 80s/90s or late 90s. I was mainly raised on 80s and older music so it wasn't until I was about 7 or so ('97) that I was listening to the pop and country of the era.
This sounded like a Zillennial/Z take on the 90s. Take this as a compliment and a constructive criticism: Cassettes were everywhere, very portable, inside cars (not VHS, perhaps in Japan, tho). CDs were only IN after the mid90s, that’s when cars begun coming with CD players/discman becomes a thing. Drum machines/synths/samplers/MIDI was all over in the 80s (they were NOT a 90s thing, quite au contraire really: from 90 to approx 98 drum machines were beginning to be OUTLAWED in anything that wasn’t hiphop/electronic). Album oriented music fell out after punk rock (some 10 years before the 90s already), and begun to be phased in again with some hard rock and grunge, along with the pop folk and pop electronic movements. This “spectacle before music” really WASNT a mainstream thing in general, only in r&b and very restricted acts. Hiphop wasn’t popular then. Hard rock was still the most popular genre of music at the beginning of the decade - succeeded/subverted then by grunge, which mid-decade/late 90s begun to give room to indie rock and boy/girl bands that would mark the 00s.
Being born in 2006 means I don't know what other take I could have. I see your points however I never said that because something was used and popular in the 90s it wasn't also popular in the 90s. I also feel its disingenuous to say 90s wasn't a huge decade for hip-hop. It was very popular than. Popular doesn't mean MOST popular. Appreciate your input however I disagree.
@@nicorinehart Sorry, mate, disingenuous is to publish a video regarding a topic and soliciting the attention of the viewer as “serious” and now, telling me it’s “a take by a Zillennial/Z”, regardless of its veracity or whether the content was actually adequately researched. R&B was more popular than Hip-Hop, with which it traded places and, later, in the 00s, traded places and converged together to see Rock Music fall down the charts (circa 2012’ onwards). Thanks for the reply, though, I can appreciate how hard it is to receive criticism sometimes. I see you did a good job and have the capacity to make some canonical videos that “we, the people” can really appreciate for historicity. Cheers
You missed cassettes. You’re wrong. You COULD skip Songs on albums. You give MTV credit for HipHop and R&B, but for years MTV refused to play any music by any black musical artist until Epic Records threatened them to play Michael Jackson’s album.
My favorite '90s album is 'Razorblade Romance' by HIM -- it's got the slick production of pop records of the time but keeps a raw rockin' edge with all analog amping and the warmth from the Neve board.
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One addition I would make that all those formats were used at the same time during the 90s. I had a stereo (like they were called back then), that had a vinyl player, cassette player and the CD player in the same tower. I think cassettes were my main go to, because you could record vinyls and CDs to cassette, but not the other way around. I would get CDs from the library and copy them to cassette and buy used vinyls from used record stores, because they were cheaper than cassettes or CDs.
Good insight
The trumpet bits made me laugh out loud Both times😂These videos are so interesting to me. Like... I would have sworn that my taste in music was very much influenced by the 90ies (I mean... I was still in my teens back then) but when I heard all the examples in the video and your explanations on the production techniques, and how they changed, I came to realize that it was indeed the 80ies and only the first one or two years of the 90ies. The 90ies indeed were a special era, though *he said in his grandfather-voice* I remember "fights" between metalheads, hip-hop-, and grunge fans on the schoolyard... And little me standing aside thinking about 80ies music ;)))
It's hard to overstate the impact the CD had. Growing up with vinyls and later music cassettes, having an album on a small disc-not as huge as vinyls-and being able to play it as often as you want to, and the sound quality won't degrade as with cassettes, was mindblowing. Or copy the CD on a cassette that you can play in your walkman, and when the cassette doesn't work anymore, you make another copy. It's weird to think back in days of music streaming to your smartphone...
Fun fact: One of my professors was one of Germany's top music-video directors of the mid 80ies to early 90ies, and he said the same thing: In the 90ies suddenly music videos became more important than the music, and there was tons of money in it because labels built on MTV and music videos. Even unknown bands and artists had massive music-video budgets.
(Excuse the rambling. But you sent me back into my teenage years. It's your fault 😉)
Thanks for this video, man!
Always appreciate your insight! Glad you like it bro!
Great great video man!
Appreciate it!
New fav youtuber please cover other decades
Ik it seems small but that’s the first time someone has called me a TH-camr like that. That means so much thank you. What decade do you want to see next?
@nicorinehart dude I've been looking for the history of recording ever binging all your vids you should do stuff on fx in the 50s and 60s, like the most niche stuff
oh hell yeah, let's talk engineering
Been a sec since I’ve gotten into it
14:10. I don't know anyone who has a VHS in their car in the 90s but I sure did have a cassette player from the mid 80s onwards. You didn't have to be rich. They were a standard option or an aftermarket install. But what really made music personal was the Sony Walkman.
So true! My grandfather even had an 8 track in his car not in the 90s but up until 87). :)
I think Massive Attack's "Mezzanine" was a great example of the blended electronic / analog approach. I don't think we will ever hear an album that is engineered and produced quite like that one.
Ashamed to say I’ve never heard of it. Checking it out right now!
I'm 49 but i learned something. You are a great researcher. And i did agree you almost everything,
like the minimalist approach. You are absolutely right. They did the mixes like it's almost mastering. And the minimalism was there in the every step of the way. Think about the red hot chili peppers. Not many instruments at the same time. The run dmc made their rap with only a drum beat in the early 90s
But the CD part was a little bit off. No one had CD players in the car. The car radios had only cassettes until 2000s. And the album culture was very strong, a lot more important than the singles. Think about those liner notes in a cd booklets. So much work in the art and the story. It was so important to the artists and the fans. The singles were only a taste of the upcoming album.
I totally agree and I wasn't very clear. I meant the new control over listening to music (Skip, rewind, etc) would start the deemphasis on albums but still didn't change the dominant culture quite yet. Thanks for your input!
I had a CD player in my car in 1997, and I was a high school kid.
To me the 90s were first and foremost an era of unprecedented stylistic eclecticism. Hip Hop, Techno, Jungle, IDM and some pretty gnarly Rock all had their commercial peaks in those years. Pop often seemed to be steeped in a nostalgia for the 60 and 70s. Then in the mid to late part of the decade some major and at the time sensational crossover styles were bred.
Sonically, I associate the 90s with _Phatness_ - especially in Pop and Hip Hop. There seemed to be a lush, playful busy-ness in and a thick layer of bass underneath everything regardless of style.
In the follwoing decades of 8-bit, Indie Folk, Dua Lipa, Milennium Parade and Vaporwave, I guess the eclecticism is something we've come to take for granted, but the dense 90s sound hasn't come back yet in my opinion (nor does it need to, I really find it a bit cloying if listened to all the time). Modern music sounds much cleaner and airier to me (that too can annoy me a bit, sometimes). As far as writing goes, I feel these days tunes are often more elaborate, operatic and whimsical than their 90s ancestors.
Good take! 90s always very diverse
We had a cassette player in our car until 2001 -- and even then, that elicited oohs and aahs from my parents' friends. I never, ever heard of anybody having a VHS player in a car. In their house, sure, but never in a car.
We did have a ton of CDs at home though... my dad was/is a music nerd and had a sizable vinyl and CD collection, so I was very familiar with CDs even before we had a player in the vehicle. (Most of the collection has, er, migrated to my house. I do give him MP3 CDs of the albums though and occasionally bring some back when I run out of room.)
I misspoke I meant cassette I can’t believe I made that mistake lol
great video!
Man you make some good videos I’ve watched two or three previously. I subbed! And I still have every CD from the 90s I ever bought. I still buy CDs. Some of my favorites are The Chronic, Dirt, Rust In Piece, Doggystyle, Emergency On Planet Earth, ATLiens, The Black Album, Use Your Illusion 1&2, just to name a few. But there’s many more!
Thank you for watching? What kinda videos would you like to see in the future?
@@nicorinehart How about video game music. I’m 49 so I grew up playing video games. Games have great music from the 8-bit era and arcades all the way up to now. I don’t really play much anymore but I still enjoy the music from the games. Maybe a video about legendary record producers and session musicians. That would be interesting.
Great idea!
This is spot on. To me, the 90s were the peak of the analog recording chain/workflow. Great microphones and consoles already existed, big budget studios with great acoustics were thriving, tape machines like the Studer A827 were as clean and refined as ever created, but still sounded forgiving on loud instruments, and even mixing consoles like Solid State Logic 4000 G+ had clean and clear sound, but with tons of processing power and compressors. Engineers were experienced with this environment, and artists were expected to give better performances and rely less on editing. Because of these things, you could get even great indie rock albums like Pavement's "Brighten The Corners", recorded in a week or two, sounding excellent. And then the big artists had giant budgets that don't exist now for huge productions within a big studio/analog environment.
Even the digital technology that existed was part of an essentially analog workflow: ADAT and DASH digital tape were used like tape machines, and the other big source of digital audio were samplers, used essentially as drum machines. All this still revolved around an analog mixer.
Obviously, there are a lot of things we can do now that they couldn't, tools that didn't exist. And just about everything can be done cheaper with DAWs. But I still find that on average, that was the last decade that sounded really good in terms of recordings and mixes, even if they start to get hot and compressed closer to 2000. I'm not sure that even with a lot of the current DAW tools, that recordings and mixes sound as good or better at the core. And then you have the reality that CD quality was actually the high watermark of consumer audio quality as well (not withstanding the brief, but unsuccessful flash of SACD, DVD-A, and Blu Ray Audio discs).
To me, that peak was in 1983, certainly not in the 90ies. I actually did some kind of research, listening to popular A-list artists, but ordered by year. And to my ears, '83 really was IT. Besides technology being refined and elaborated, it was also the artistic and financial circumstances I guess. As in "which artists get the chance of being produced", "how much time to we put into making an album" and so on. While those typical Shure/Mackie/ADAT-setups from the 90ies and the DAW-based setups nowadays contribute to a more democratic and fair situation in regards of who is "allowed" to produce and publish music. Which CAN be good, but then also a lot of mediocre stuff is being released.
@@wackerburg That was right before digital recording really hit, along with widespread digital effects and MIDI. 1982-83 a lot of albums still feature plate reverbs instead of digital ones, and music was still fairly oriented to rock bands, so had more minimal arrangements that give instruments more space. Discrete mixing consoles like Neve, API, and Quad Eight that had a bigger sound, if less processing abilities than what was to come. The last of the analog Police, Pink Floyd, even Phil Collins records which were very hifi. But then, there were a lot of really bad sounding albums from then as well.
But the 90s, you had clean tape machines, more powerful and refined digital effects (plate reverbs still existed if you wanted them), SSL consoles that were fairly clean, had very powerful sweepable equalizers, and a compressor on every channel, and they could incorporate MIDI and digital into the same recording session. Some of those records had absolutely huge mixes/arrangements like Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, Nine Inch Nails, where most (if not all) was analog, often 48 tracks of it. 90s was still big budget times, with some albums taking 6 months to record and mix. I hear generally louder, clearer, and more complex productions than in the early 80s. Maybe preference has to do with how much compression you like in music, as that along with track counts was a major difference between those eras. That bit of extra compression makes good 90s stuff sound more controlled to me.
Akai Mpc2000xl ,Mpc3000 , S-3000 ,ASR-10 and SP1200 Mackie Boards
+SSL 4000 Software - Sound Tools (early Pro-Tools) thats the reason why the 90's sound the way it did.. Well for Hiphop and R&B ...
👍 good info. Some other points worth mentioning:
DAT before ADAT, especially for rap and DIY indie music. Also MD Minidisc to a lesser extent.
16 bit samplers; Akai especially.
The supersaw waveform.
Mesa Dual Rectifier.
MegaBass Walkman.
The rise of home recording; hit records from such setups (Enter The Wu-Tang, Foo Fighters, Jagged Little Pill)
Aftermarket / custom car stereo culture, speakerboxes.
great points! car stereo culture is a video all on its own!
@ first time hearing bass heavy music on a 400W (a lot for class AB!) dual 12 inch woofer setup was revelatory. Visceral. Re-contextualized what it meant to feel the music.
Kendrick Lamar in the 1990 Miata with a poorly setup and way too loud sub. That was the soundtrack of high school
@ 1990 Miata with a beast in the trunk must have been extra fun to drive during those key years. I only got licensed until after graduating.
Friends had beaters and boxes, some of which I helped poorly install heh. Also my HS OST is more like a sprawling, curated box set 😂
Y2K era we still had Case Logic organizers with dedicated section for the absolute bangers. CD and/or tape (they were much cheaper and still knocked harder than mp3). A few MD head units were around. Aux cord too but that mostly came later, we had cheap CDr. Gas was under $2/gallon. Driving around blasting old school Biz Markie & Slick Rick, Death Row, Wu, 2pac & Biggie, Big Pun, OutKast, DMX & MF DOOM. KMFDM. Sublime. Aphex Twin. Three Six. Lost Boyz, Mobb Deep, RAP-A-LOT, No Limit, & Cash Money
MF Doom was a staple for me too. With the top down hearing the sub and and the engine? Fun times
Good stuff! You should do a series on the best producers or maybe engineers/studios of each decade.
I’m always looking for new ideas for videos. I’ll add it to my list!
Well done! 👏👏👏
Thank you! Cheers!
Wow that was really interesting even for someone not in the sound engineering world. Loved the bugle 😂.
The turn of the millennia was such a whiplash to pop music since it essentially killed every genre that was going around at the time and surging in popularity, one day you had Vengaboys, next day it was Vespertine, and everyone simultaneously went "What happened?"
I grew up when Eurodance was on its last legs and everyone tried to do some combination of Eurodance and a style of music unfamiliar to European audiences (Country, Jazz, Gospel), but I think it really died because artists were getting less meta with their lyrics.
Like of course, Saturday Night or Daddy DJ or Barbie Girl weren't gonna win any big awards for their songwriting but they always had a slight tongue-in-cheek-ness and when you do a _bit_ too much of that tongue-in-cheek-ness, your songs become annoying.
Barbie Girl was annoying for the sake of being annoying but it also had a charm because of its lyrics, but a song like Fast Food Song by Fast Food Rockers, that's when you lose everyone. (Making an entire Eurodance album about fast food was a bit too late in 2003...)
There was also a fair share of acts writing "deep" lyrics but they were at best, just fun to sing along to.
I totally see what
You’re saying with lyrics and I agree.
An excellent video. Something people often get wrong is that, since digital recording started being adopted in the early 1980s, most of the 1980s and 1990s must've been digital, when in fact they were hybrid, like you mention, and a lot of the tracking was still being done on analogue. One of the problems of early digital is that it wasn't easy to edit. Digital tape machines were still very expensive, and to do even the most basic of edits, you needed two of them. Classical and jazz were the first to adopt digital recording because the edits there are more straight-forward. When it came to more creative and complicated productions, analogue tape was still king until the very late 1990s. Some bands like Radiohead still track to 16-track today, and then transfer to digital, because it's a way to enforce a decision process that would otherwise result in chaos and nothing being done (heard this first-hand from their producer Nigel Godrich). Thanks for the video!
When I make music I spend hours tweaking the little things that, realistically, no one would notice. Tracking to tape or any physical medium means you make the at decision and move on. Just one of the many things I’ve learned from previous decades to improve my music today
What blew me away was finding out that ALL Outkast albums were recorded on tape, usually 2 Studer A820 24 track machines.
Really? I knew I loved how they sounded
@@vinylarchaeologist yeah it wasn’t until the mid 80s when engineers really began to understand and master the nuances of the 2” tape format (at both 15 and 30ips). Once that knowledge base had been built, it extended throughout the 90s and the last vestiges of big studios with big budgets from the big record companies. Dre records were all SSL board and 2”
I still chuckle why a “digitally remastered” Snoop Doggy Dogg cassette tape existed around 2003 when the original from 10 years prior is a sonic masterpiece 😅
Only few clarifications:
- MIDI was very strong in the 80’s, as well as drum machines (all the ones you mentioned were actually from the 80’s, and were all featured in very successful songs.
- Skipping tracks was usually and easily done on vinyl (you only had to get up), and even easier with cassetes (most car stereos would have a search function which would stop at the next interval between songs).
- CD’s were mainstream for music listening at home, but during a good part of the 90’s, not everyone had a CD player in their car (many Mercedes. BMW and Audi’s still used the cassete player, and the CD player was an expensive extra.
- Cassete mixtapes were really a thing in the 90’s, and the Walkman (cassete based) always sold a lot more than the Discman (CD), not only because of price, but also because CD players weren’t great at keeping track while you were moving a lot.
- Most pop/rock albums from the 80’s were already made of several songs, without the “connection” of the whole album that was much more prevalent in the 70’s. Even prog-rock bands like Genesis or Yes were making smaller and individual songs in their albums in the early 80’s. 😉
Loudness wars really began in the late 90’s and (mostly) 2000’s.
If you were in the 90’s and you were playing another CD, you would have to actually move, change the disc, and it wasn’t unusual to adjust the volume.
Compilation CDs would have the levels adjusted at the mastering stage m, and it wasn’t unusual for some songs to never hit the 0 dBFS mark, or in other words, lowering the louder songs in order to make them sound at the same level, instead of compressing the hell out of the more dynamic ones.
The 2000’s brought mp3 and iPod, and that was the point when anyone could really have a clear perception of the huge difference between older and newer recordings.
Since many people didn’t bother (or even know how to use) the normalizing feature in both iTunes and the iPod (and that feature wasn’t perfect at that time either); the loudness wars really started to go nuts.
As a last note, I wouldn’t necessarily say that the 90’s had more electronic sounds in music than in the 80’s, since synths and drum machines were probably the biggest part in the sound of the 80’s.
While dance music (and pop) clearly kept synths and drum machines very alive, there was also a certain distance from synthesizers along rock bands, which was clearly not the case in the 80’s. 😉
In rock music, the 80’s was probably the most “polished” sounding time for rock bands, while the 90’s went back to a much more raw sounding rock (from Nirvana to older bands like Rush).
Polished rock sound became very “uncool” in the 90’s. 🙂
But IMHO, the 2000’s were the biggest change in music, not only by the squashed dynamics everywhere, but also by the growing popularity of beats and loops, which almost seemed to replace real musicians and instruments, and that was also when videos started to really showcase half dressed women, expensive cars, jewelry (etc) as a selling point for the music.
In the 90’s, music videos were still a lot about the song, the band/artist, and a story.
Thankfully, it seems like it is much more balanced now,
Thank you! Very good addition to a very good video
Great Video. Thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it!
@nicorinehart Hope you will soon get the recognition you deserve
Can you do the 2000s? ❤️🔥
That’s up next!
@ YAYYYYYY 😭🔥👏🏾
1:20 I inhereted 2 of these Sony"s, two yrs ago...Until recently I had no idea they do/did 1p/15 grand....My kids played with them....hahahaha
Lucky!!
Blur ‘blur’, Radiohead ‘OK Computer’ Verve Urban Hymns. 1997 was the last great year of guitar music.
Really great storytelling, I have forgot about the ADAT. Now the cassette sound is back, espec in indie. I was very much into the melodic pop of the 90s, the swedes, The Cardigans, Roxette and others.
Great selection! Thank you! Cheers
How do you know? You were born in the 2000s
Research
There are three things that have proliferated since the 90's that I think have significantly changed recorded music. Pitch correction, tempo quantization and drum replacement. These production techniques have led to pretty serious sonic homogenization in some genres. Every mainstream rock and country record essentially sounds the same. The big silver lining to the streaming era has been in-app loudness normalization. It has more or less ended the loudness wars. Over limited/distorted masters don't sound louder - they just sound worse. If I'm mastering a record now I'm no longer trying to hit an arbitrary loudness target, I'm trying to get it to a loudness that feels good.
What an amazing video and Insight to an amazing decorative music the best singer from the 90s and even now and the 80s is the one that only John read from nightcrawlers the album let's push it from the 90s is a masterpiece we love him so much he's amazing go look him up
Looking it up now!
Massive Attack is very best band of 90s. But oldies rock bands like Scorpions (Crazy World), Queen (Innuendo, Made in Heaven), Aerosmith (Get a Grip) is very best too! Also Madonna surprised by her Bedtime Stories and Ray of Light. Plus Radiohead's OK Computer, U2 Achtung Baby and Metallica's Black Album and Load/Reload - well, i believe is my choice of 90s
I very much liked your video with the history of music recording. Yet, you forgot to mention one extremly important thing in your video. Before CDs were the thing, there were cassettes which we played songs at home and in our cars. That replaced the 8-Tracks in the 80s and were used until the end of the 90s and into the early 2000s
You’re right! I misspoke and forgot to mention those.
I haven't watched the whole video, but public service announcment, the SM7, and the SM7b are not the same! The look so similar, but the SM7 is what would be used if the session called for it!
Whoa, ADAT was an Alesis innovation? Neat.
This is good but .. some criticism (hey it’s the internet). Sony was not a new-comer on the recording scene. They had industry leading microphones way before the C-800. (The c37a was top tier way back in the 60s) and their tape machines were just as popular as Studer or Otari (see: MCI and their consoles as well). There are lots of misconceptions in this video (like having to listen to vinyl all the way through without skipping around - which is super easy to do) … and as afar as getting a “warm” sound out of a Studer A820? That was without a doubt the cleanest, most pristine, recording tape machine ever made. The “warmth” would come from the mic choices, tape formula, EQ, compression, way before the actual ,machine had any sonic impact (which was absolutely minimal). Here’s hoping you keep on reading and learning about recording, but my advice would be to go actually work in a studio full time for a few years and stay very faraway the big blue forum - it’s slam full of misconceptions as well.
I hear you. I do feel like I misspoke I meant the c800g as the newcomer and I said Sony which is flat out wrong. I also meant to say the general warmth associated with tape machines in general. Thanks for pointing it out I can do a lot more to tighten up my scripts. I worked in a studio for a bit and honestly the work wasn’t for me. I need to be more clear in my videos what my goals are. I keep talking like I’m an expert when I’m not and I’m not trying to be but I’m not communicating that. My videos start with me having a question, researching an answer, and presenting it like I would a fun fact to a friend. I’m gonna start stating that in each video because it’s important. I’m not an expert. However, as I get bigger I hope to bring on experts from the era so they can share their knowledge as you have in the comments here. Trying to make each video better than the next and ur helping! Cheers!
The 90s was when electronic music was at its peak. House, Trance, Techno and UK Garage were some of the big genres and many tracks were entering the top 40 (in the UK and Europe). Trance in particular was at the top of it’s game as most of the classics were released at the end of the decade with the genre peaking in 1999.
Can you recommend me some uk house from the 90? Workouts aren’t the same without
Certainly here’s some great 90s House tracks I would recommend:
MK - Burning (Vibe Mix)
Hardrive - Deep Inside
Duke - So In Love With You
Ruffneck ft Yavahn - Everybody Be Somebody
Camisra - Let Me Show You
Here’s some recommendations of Trance tracks from the 90s:
Veracocha - Carte Blanche
Chicane - Saltwater
Binary Finary - 1998
Paul Van Dyk - For An Angel
Three Drives - Greece 2000
@@jacobhemingway213 Making a playlist rn thank you!
I remember Trance in the late 90s and very early 2000s. It was pure Ecstasy, trance in its purest form. Not the stupid, carnival, festival, dumb EDM, mind numbing, cake throwing, idiotic, 1 note root bassline, stupid ass, no building the lead melody into the drop using a low pass filter music. Trance was all about the rise, tension build, and ecstatic release!
Way cool
I still have my old CDs, I'll still buy some and I still burn digital music to CDs. I mean I still use iPods so there's that.
Most of my faves are 80s/90s or late 90s. I was mainly raised on 80s and older music so it wasn't until I was about 7 or so ('97) that I was listening to the pop and country of the era.
I got my first iPod in 2nd grade. Had only hand me down albums from my siblings but I listened so muxh
Here's a great recording fro. The 90s music.th-cam.com/play/OLAK5uy_m0xKWiVQBlo5eW7zN72jPSV7BB9yS8eUE.html&si=54cjzQSbsZlXSkbx
Those first bunch of songs you used as a reference of the 90's was absolutely terrible. So happy I stayed clear of that trash.
Wow
This sounded like a Zillennial/Z take on the 90s. Take this as a compliment and a constructive criticism:
Cassettes were everywhere, very portable, inside cars (not VHS, perhaps in Japan, tho). CDs were only IN after the mid90s, that’s when cars begun coming with CD players/discman becomes a thing. Drum machines/synths/samplers/MIDI was all over in the 80s (they were NOT a 90s thing, quite au contraire really: from 90 to approx 98 drum machines were beginning to be OUTLAWED in anything that wasn’t hiphop/electronic). Album oriented music fell out after punk rock (some 10 years before the 90s already), and begun to be phased in again with some hard rock and grunge, along with the pop folk and pop electronic movements. This “spectacle before music” really WASNT a mainstream thing in general, only in r&b and very restricted acts. Hiphop wasn’t popular then. Hard rock was still the most popular genre of music at the beginning of the decade - succeeded/subverted then by grunge, which mid-decade/late 90s begun to give room to indie rock and boy/girl bands that would mark the 00s.
Being born in 2006 means I don't know what other take I could have. I see your points however I never said that because something was used and popular in the 90s it wasn't also popular in the 90s. I also feel its disingenuous to say 90s wasn't a huge decade for hip-hop. It was very popular than. Popular doesn't mean MOST popular. Appreciate your input however I disagree.
@@nicorinehart Sorry, mate, disingenuous is to publish a video regarding a topic and soliciting the attention of the viewer as “serious” and now, telling me it’s “a take by a Zillennial/Z”, regardless of its veracity or whether the content was actually adequately researched.
R&B was more popular than Hip-Hop, with which it traded places and, later, in the 00s, traded places and converged together to see Rock Music fall down the charts (circa 2012’ onwards).
Thanks for the reply, though, I can appreciate how hard it is to receive criticism sometimes. I see you did a good job and have the capacity to make some canonical videos that “we, the people” can really appreciate for historicity. Cheers
Just because something else is more popular doesn’t mean the other thing isn’t popular. I like this video. No one is making you watch
You missed cassettes. You’re wrong. You COULD skip Songs on albums. You give MTV credit for HipHop and R&B, but for years MTV refused to play any music by any black musical artist until Epic Records threatened them to play Michael Jackson’s album.
I am sharing my perspective. I firmly believe what I said in this video. Thank you though
No one cares but loudness has to do with mastering and not mixing
Correct. The limiting, maximizing, expanding is what kills it
My favorite '90s album is 'Razorblade Romance' by HIM -- it's got the slick production of pop records of the time but keeps a raw rockin' edge with all analog amping and the warmth from the Neve board.
Good choice!