I remember when amateur records sounded rough.

Distorted.

Muddy.

Slammed.

Clipped.

Dull.

Yeah, I’m that old.

You can still pinpoint an amateur record (for lack of a better word). However, everything changed in the last 15 years. A complete 180° sound flip.

It’s quite ironic.

We used to aim for a polished, pristine-sounding record. Hi-Fi. Huge drums in a massive room. A lot of bottom end, a lot of high end, scooping those mids like gelato on an Amalfitan August afternoon.

We worked hard to try and get there. We worked at the source, with our mic selection and placement, trying to capture these sounds. We worked in our DAWs, equalizing the fuck out of everything with our Waves parametric EQs.

Fast forward to today. Countless fat-sounding sample libraries and loops are only a couple of clicks away.

Now every kid on the block has easy access to drums recorded by professionals in the nicest rooms on the planet. We sampled the best synths ever manufactured. Hell, even guitar and bass samples got good. And any obscure world instrument you’ve never heard of is available in gorgeous quality.

It sounds like wonderful news, right? Right.

Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien, as we say in French. Better is the enemy of good.

Coz now, everyone sounds the exact freakin’ fuckin’ same.

Truth is, 89% of people using these tools are too lazy to tweak the samples they pick (yes, this is a made-up number). Or to dig deep into the presets. Most will go with one of the first five sounds they hear.
If it doesn’t work, they’ll switch to another library and repeat the same process.

Then they’ll leave the thing sitting there, untouched. No EQing, no compressing. No adjusting that big-ass room that doesn’t fit the vibe of your song at all, or the previous parts that you recorded.

I remember making my first few shitty rock records. They were important records. Formative ones.

Someone I knew suggested I use samples to replace the drums I recorded. He was gently implying my drums didn’t sound their best. Or maybe it was before tracking even, and he was telling me, “Don’t bother and go to the studio. You’ll get a better-sounding result like this, minus the headache of actually recording drums”.

“But if my drums sound massive, while my bass, guitars and vocals sound like shit, the record will sound weird. Fake. I’d rather track everything myself and have it sound like crap, than cheat to have one perfect element. The whole record won’t sound honest otherwise.”

It’s interesting to look back, because 15 years down the road, my mindset hasn’t changed one bit. I cared about the process. About the whole thing, not about the sound of a single element.

I wanted to learn. I still do.

Over time, I’ve learned to play more instruments instead of relying on libraries. And I also became a decent engineer, so my records don’t sound like utter trash anymore, but they still sound honest. At least I hope so.

These days, you can identify an amateur record by how pristine and clean everything sounds. It’s a funny turn of events.

Which is why, once again, I encourage you to make up your own sounds. To get in there and have fun searching. Mess it up even. Go too far. Screw it up bad. The only way to stumble upon a cool sound is to make many terrible ones.

And the truth is, the line is thinner than you’d think most of the time.

In this age of perfect-sounding libraries and AI getting involved, I beg you to not be boring. Coz that’s what all of this is. Clean. Pristine. Sterile. Perfect.

Perfect is boring. We all know it.

Be a child. Make a mess. Clean it up, but leave some of the stains. Be a human, I beg you. Learn from old records you love. Most of them don’t sound half as Hi-Fi as the shit coming out now.

But then again, what do I know…

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