Serious question about the "demo sound" that vanished from recordings after 2002

I was digging through old CD-Rs this weekend and found a demo my buddy's band recorded in his parents' garage back in 2001. The guitar sound was raw and buzzy but had this character I can't find anymore. Fast forward to his 2004 recording in a proper studio, and it sounded polished but lost that grit. Is it the gear changing, or did we just stop accepting rough takes in the digital era? What do you think killed that sound - better plugins or our own ears getting picky?

2 comments

2 Comments

ninam7613d ago

@jade47 you're not wrong about better gear, but my buddy's 2002 four track had a blown preamp that added this weird fuzz on everything. He tried to fix it with plug-ins later and it just sounded fake. Maybe it's just me but that accident was part of the charm.

jade4716d ago

Oh man, "lost that grit" is EXACTLY how I'd describe it but I gotta push back a little. You're acting like it's this huge mystery when it's probably just better gear and better ears. Bands back then used whatever cheap crap they could find, that buzz and rawness was mostly bad equipment and bad room acoustics. Once your buddy had money for a real studio with actual sound treatment and decent mics, of COURSE it sounded cleaner. That's not a tragedy, that's called progress. People act like lo-fi is some magical lost art when half the time it was just crews working with what they had.