Ask HN: Why is 80s music lacking in bass? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is 80s music lacking in bass?

5 pointsamichail16 comments

And why not remix 80s music to give it more bass?

Depends on what you are listening to and the band's decisions. Not quite 80s, but Metallica released an album with nearly all the bass guitar ducked. On the other hand, something like Duran Duran or The Police wrote their music not to thump, but to have the bass guitar actually carry part of the melody. Modern music uses bass quite differently than older music, and what many people think of when they think about "bass" is usually the really rattly sub-bass that only subwoofers can really produce.

80s music was intended to be played on a boombox radio with no sub-woofers and still represent all the sounds the band recorded. In the end, it's just one of the ways music has changed over the years.

I've become very interested by the difference between modern popular music and that of decades gone by. The three main things that I've noticed is that older music tends to be more melodic generally, makes greater use of dynamic range, and has more complex rhythms.

One of the standouts to me is what you mentioned -- in older music, the bass often does heavy melodic lifting and in newer music, it tends to be mostly just carrying a beat.

Not saying one is "better" than the other -- that's a matter of taste. It's just interesting to note the change.

It's also interesting that if you ignore music after the '80s and just compare '80s to the decades before that, you could accurately say something very similar.

It also depends a lot on what musical genre we're talking about. Not all '80s music was new wave and the like.

Another fun thing to consider is older orchestral music as the "gold standard" for what music as theory intended. If an orchestra had the same amount of bass modern music does, it would have to be very heavily overpopulated by low brass instruments to the detriment of the rest of the instrumental ranges. Instead, each instrument is a "sound" which can be used to craft a greater musical phrase. A good example of this is a pipe organ, which has stops to add/remove particular sounds, ranges, and timbres depending on what kind of music you are playing.

Compared to modern music where the instrument isn't limited by the sounds it can physically make (due to digital production) as well as the things they make each instrument do, as you said much of modern music is carried by a beat rather than a melody, so a vocalist might be the only discernible melody. Back to a pipe organ, it would be really difficult to play a modern song on the pipe organ as a result because the structure is so different that it's hard to really compare. However, the pipe organ was a marvel in that it allowed a player to basically BE the entire orchestra if needed.

The pipe organ was about the only way to get that much bass volume for more decades than anything else.

There's a whole genre from then called "Miami Bass". See also Detroit/Chicago House. All full of 808 goodness.

In the Deep South, at least, go to Sonic drive-in any night of the week and there'd be low-rider pick-up trucks whose beds were filled with 20 inch subs.

Also, any number of cars with the back seats taken out to make room for stupid loud window-shaking bass.

As an aside - going back to the '60's and the evolution of bass - one of the reasons The Beatles stood out when they started was that their lows popped on transistor radios because Paul recorded his amp using a loudspeaker instead of a normal mic.

Because CDs ushered in an era of crystalline highs that were never captured well before. Vinyl and tape are good at capturing lows, not so good at capturing highs. After decades of muddy sound, they were thrilled to capture the highs. They overreacted and focused almost exclusively on the highs to the detriment of everything else. That's probably what setup the mega-bass trend in the 90s.

Along with that, they went crazy with hall effect reverb on a lot of recordings. Everything sounds like it's being performed in a big, echoey concert hall. I'm really glad that fad faded!

Recording media at the time didn't do well with the "big boom," every sample maximized, sound mixing trends that came with CDs. Record needles would jump tracks, tape would print echos on the reel.

They have remixed a lot of 80s music.

And yet, in my own personal music collection, I have a number of recordings that were produced before the '80s that have very boomy bass.

I think the non-bass-heavy nature of much of '80s music is more about fashion than anything else.

I think the question for me is, why does modern music have such heavy bass?

Doesn't it sound more attention-getting than it would otherwise?

I don’t know. My opinion is no.

In a nutshell, because it can. Synthesizers were still something of a novelty in the '80s, so it would have been difficult to create the deep, complex bass sounds we now take for granted. Furthermore, subwoofers were not at all common; even if someone had made such music, it would have sounded like crap on the car stereos, boom boxes, and home hi-fis people actually used at the time.

Subwoofers became increasingly popular through the '90s along with the rise of hip-hop music pushing ever-harder bass, synthesizer technology developed along with the increasing power of computers, and by the 2000s music producers had a new corner of the sonic palette to play with. New genres followed suit.

Bass is 30% melodic, 70% percussive. For live music if they are out of sync with the drums you may as well give up. Music today today is often far more percussive in style The bass is a big part of that.

Good mathematical estimate.

In the '80's most audio equipment had not been capable of reproducing material which would feature bass as the main element up until that time.

So apparently very few had developed the taste that would have driven them to produce recordings where the singing and melody were less prominent for that reason.

But you can turn up many old recordings on a modern subwoofer-enhanced system and rattle the walls quite effectively, the rest of the instruments will be as equally strident as the bass though, like the producer intended and more like the live concert than the old audio gear would do.

Idk, there’s a ton of heavy metal bands from the 80s and death metal too that are very very heavy on bass.

It’s the genre that matters not just the time period

Maybe because not everyone wants bass assaulting their ears like modern "music".

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