The gradual decline of the fade-out in popular music (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The gradual decline of the fade-out in popular music (2014)

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33 pointsotoolep47 comments

Ha, interesting observation! When Kurt Cobain died I remember someone postulating that the fact that no Nirvana songs ended with a fade out was a metaphor the band. I liked the idea, though the stats make it look like it was just a trend in the mid 90s!

I was in a cafe the other day and it was playing pop songs from the 40s or 50s. A large number of them would end by simply stopping the main song, and everyone playing a quick "dun-dun-dun". It was kind of jarring. I wonder if the "fade out" will be as jarring to people in the future.

Darkly ironic, because "it's better to burn out than fade away" is a Neil Young lyric that Cobain quoted in his suicide note...

"It's better to burn out than to fade away." -Kurdt

This was also discussed on the Sonic Talk podcast #543, Cliff Drop Ending. They start at 12:57, but I thought the best bit was at 20:23:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bkJpKtZMl4&t=20m23s

They make some interesting points about how fade outs were a manual skill before digital audio, something you had to do with your hands on a mixing desk. So if your hand twitched during the fade - especially if you were fading the individual instrument channels at once, and not just the stereo master channel - then you would have to start all over again & try re-recording your fade out until it was just right.

They also discussed some of the more creative approaches to a fade out - maybe you fade out the instruments faster than the vocal, so that the vocal at the end is left floating on its own. And rather than just decrease the vocal, you also increase the reverb at the same time, leaving a ghostly sound of just the echoes of vocals that remain through the fade out.

I usually think of fade-outs as a cop-out, but that made me consider there can be more craft & artistry to it than I'd considered.

>I usually think of fade-outs as a cop-out, but that made me consider there can be more craft & artistry to it than I'd considered.

I'm not sure this argument is entirely convincing, because 'fading' (be it acoustic or analog-electric or digital) is not incompatible with a traditional, more explicit ending. On the contrary! The diminishing, whisper quiet ending is one of the most effective techniques in classical music, and intelligently varying the presence of your instruments and/or singers is an essential ingredient for high quality orchestration.

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Some concrete examples:

Ligeti - Musica Ricercata No. 7 (1953) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmuK8Wtux6Q

Simeon ten Holt - Palimpsest for String Septet (1993). This one kind of starts out as a fade but then ends more abruptly, which i love! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSX-TK_8Y90

Philip Glass - Violin Concerto (1987) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owf8tk1MdPM

Dvorak - Piano Quintet Dumka (1887) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SInKlybxgQw

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The fact that fades and explicit endings are not mutually exclusive is, I think, rather important: the implication is that (IMHO) very close to 100% of fade-out songs can be greatly improved by adapting those techniques our Classical friends showed us.

It won't be missed.

It especially sucks when the band sounded like they were doing something interesting before the fade-out. The ending to the song "Demon Cleaner" by Kyuss is midway through an amazing solo when the fade-out occurs.

On the other hand, this is often enough cover for not knowing where to go.

Listen to the original recording of "How Could I" by Cynic - it fades just as an absolute shredfest gets going.

Then listen to the remaster from 2008(?) - the fade is removed, revealing that actually the band just kept on going until they gradually gave up one by one...

What about Sultan of Swing? I always want this solo to go on. But that’s probably true only for guitar players:)

Leave it to guitar players to get nearly 6 minutes chock-full of great guitar licks and solos and still complain that Mark didn't give us more. :)

To be fair I'd take that (and similar fades on DS1/2) over Homme's obsession with false endings from Sky Valley onwards

It's almost definitely an on the spot improvised solo and the fade is probably covering up a sudden and abrupt end to it.

Yeah, I’ve always had the same thought.

Another musical pet peeve of mine is when, usually during the intro, a song doubles the number of bars for a sequence, basically repeating itself for no good reason.

My ear is ready for the song to kick in, but at that moment it just repeats the previous 8 bars. Every time I think “really, we need to do this 8 more times? Can’t we just get on with it?”

It’s like the musical equivalent of waiting in line.

Not sure about pop music, but in the EDM world, I've always considered this as an artist actively considering how the DJ will use this track. For DJs that simply fade in/out of one track to the the next, they wouldn't care. However, for the DJs that actually beat match and mix tracks together, this added phrase at the head of the track allows for a much more seamless mix before the song "kicks in".

Sometimes extended intro repetition puts you in trance. Enter Sandman for example.

as an active musician (and having been one for 15 years) i personally almost never find myself using fades on the macro level. i think they're super useful for controlling the build up and release of tension throughout the song but i tend to prefer a cold close just because of how sudden it is. now, i do sometimes use tape stops to end sections or songs, and you can consider those to be a fade in terms of the pitch and speed, if you view fade in the most general terms as an envelope that is decaying over a period of time automating a specific parameter. to me i think it's less that fades have become less popular and more that they have found more application in modulating tension across different tonal aspects (pitch, duration, filter cutoff, really anything that can be automated) and a lot of that is a side effect of moving to a more digital culture where the idea of patch bays and plugging generators into each other is a lot cheaper since you no longer have to buy all the expensive hardware to do so.

How about this for a cold close?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKmnW6NWPZY

The song even opens harsh too.

It was supposed to be sandwiched between "Mean Mr Mustard" and "Polythene Pam" but Paul asked the engineer to throw the bit of tape containing the song away.

The engineer was under direction to never throw anything the Beatles recorded away, so he tacked it on to the end of the Abbey Road master.

When the Band had a listen through, they liked the effect and decided to keep it there.

A Vox video on this topic - "Why more pop songs should end with a fade out": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpKypvDjiPM

The fade out is basically stupid because it has to be replaced with a proper ending when performing live.

I've almost always preferred the song endings from the live version compared to the fade-out on the album.

An electronic volume fade out is not appropriate to serious music; there is the diminuendo, but that's an instrumental technique.

"Build Me Up Buttercup" ends with one of the most interesting fade-outs. It actually ends with a key change during a climax, ending unresolved. I've always found that to be one of the most interesting artistic fade-outs from the oldies.

When a song fades out, I always like to picture that the song didn't really end, and that the track I heard was just a small window into a universe where the band just keeps jamming on the last part of the song forever.

It's sometimes fun to find those bands where that's actually the case when you see them live that after the fade out is a wild jam session that eventually just shifts into the next song.

It's also sometimes quite taxing to find those bands when you aren't expecting them and the studio engineers were doing you a favor in fading out after all the best parts.

It feels like this big buildup that runs away from you. So disappointing

I really wish I knew what Ghostface says at the end of "Scary Hours"...

Maybe you can find a live version that doesn't fade out?

> A Little Bit Softer Now, a Little Bit Softer Now …

... isn't a fade out that ends a song. It ramps down in loudness but is followed by the lyrics, "A little bit louder now," while the loudness ramps back up.

Edit: clarification

definitely not a fade out but still conceptually a fade. still i do think it's important to note the distinction regardless

I appreciated this. I've always disliked fade-outs, in particular because I grew up listening to "oldies" (50s-70s music, don't know if the term has changed in meaning since that time) with my dad, and DJs would often fade a song out artificially early in order to meet time requirements. It always felt like you missed out on part of the song.

Cool/refreshing to see that a lot of artists were legitimately using it to create novel musical effects, or add new meaning to their songs. I hadn't considered that it could be used for that purpose.

Maybe it's the musician in me, but I can't listen to a song that fades out at the end without wondering how the band really ends the song when they play it live.

For some creative fade ins/outs listen to Cygnus X-1 by Rush. The sound engineer fades in or out the instrument while leaving constant the send to the reverb room (late 70s, there was no digital gear at that time). 1:24 bass, 9:40 guitar.

https://hooktube.com/watch?v=1OMibr8CqQ4

I just noticed that yesterday, there was a segment on a TV music channel with 90-00s music, and I noticed how almost all ended in a fadeout, and how it made me feel that it's wasting my time in today fast paced world.

Just like that recent article about long form press or books, we just don't have time for that or fadeouts anymore. Everything must be TL;DR

This is very unscientific, but fade-outs are the most boring way to end a song. I don't see why we need them.

So the title is basically "fade out of fade-out in popular music"?

Yes, pun intended: "And like a classic example of itself, the decline has been long, gradual, and barely noticed."

This means the fade-out will eventually become cool and make a comeback.

I always thought the fade was just a radio friendly way to make it easy to transition seamlessly with 90s live radio technology.

I always thought the bands just didn't know how to write an outro.

Or the producer being lazy. It's amazing how much control the producer has over any decision the band might have wanted.

Or "by the time we play this live, we will figure it out; just fade it out for now".

This is the theory I subscribe to.

This is the theory I put into practice when making my own music.

Sad? I always felt the fade-out was a cop out for people who couldn't figure out how to end the song. Good riddance.

As I listener, I would generally agree, and as a musician, I would definitely agree -- about myself! But sometimes it does seem to work nicely. For example, I'm not sure that a definite ending would have improved The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows".

While I hate fade outs in general, there are very specific ways that fade outs can be used well: see "Ministry of Lost Souls" by Dream Theater.

But it isn't; some pretty fantastic bands who have a great live ending to a song end up having a fade out on the album from time to time.

Here is one: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av14050662/

That song has a lame fade out on the Glamour album [1988]; what a waste. Love this live ending!

OK, we've taken sadness out of the title above.

Agree

Absolutely.

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