Just listening to some music I like, again, but noticing things where the production is overpowering or ruining the song (IMO)

* To clarify: In terms of production, I'm not talking about bad recordings, I'm talking about songs that are well recorded but that killed the vibe/mojo of the performance

For example Sail Away by David Gray - the studio version:

WTF is going on with that sub bass? It annoys the shit out of me. Compared to this:

I just don't understand the thinking that thought "you know what this track needs? More sub bass!" IMO it doesn't add anything to the song, it's just distracting and taking up bandwidth for no (again IMO) good reason.

Another example is Big Love by Fleetwood Mac, I first heard this live version which is straight up Lindsay Buckingham:

Amazing.
or even this version

So I'd never heard the 'original' album version and it sound like this:

Which, to me, sounds completely flat and souless in comparison. My feeling is that Buckinham brought this in sounding pretty much like the live version, but somewhere it got messed up. I'm not saying it's a bad recording, it's not, I just feel like something in the recording process ruined it. I realise there were probably other factors in making sound shitty, FM were pretty well known for their shitty internal dynamics, but I feel like this was a production decision, maybe to placate other band members, but the end result was to shitify the song. Again, not saying it sounds bad, just like it's been neutered.

The final example I'll give is The Cranberries - Linger - in this case I'm fairly certain it was a decsion by the rest of the band rather than the producer, but buck stops and all that. Again, this IMO is where the performance by the vocalist takes it to another level, I love this song for it's simultaneous beauty and vulnerability, that Delores wrote as a teenager, and got her into the band!

Yet I fucking hate the intro and all the string section through out, to me it just overpowers the intensity of the performance. Compare it to this cover where it's just guitar and vocal

These boys fucken nail it - it has all the intensity and emotion of the original, just without the fluff (IMO).

Anyway, do you agree with any of these? Am I barking up the wrong tree or do you have other examples where you think the production has ruined the song?

 

Paul McCartney thought Phil Spector's arrangements on Let it Be ruined the album. You can find his stripped down version released as Let it Be... Naked.

I personally think Spector's strings make the album better.

 

For me, this is one of the songs ruined by the studio production:

 

most of my tracks... but I trying to overcome!

 

Of course the ultimate example of this was covered in the Dewey Cox documentary

 

here is the worst example I can think of, ever. When compared to live versions, which were just typical punk/post punk sounding, someone did this to it. It's not just a case of some bad eq or wrong compressor plugin. This is how you end up on South Park:

 

Overproduction is one of reasons why I hate most of today's production and especially remasters. I also love to discover band's original raw material demo's from the 80s but now with all digital production things got really terrible, producers don't know where to stop with all these possibilities. Uncooked bedroom-produced soundcloud demos in our days often sound more proper, untamed expressed.
Man, firstly don’t forget you are judging listening to YouTube compression, and in the case of Big Love, you are listing a 2008 remaster, which sounds sterile and slightly worse than the original, but I think it has really great production you don’t like it just because it’s not your cup of tea. Everything is explained simply: that acoustic version would never be a hit in 1987 and for the group the solo version never worked. When he started his solo career, that’s when it started sounding right

This is my favorite version from 1987 you can hear the future reign of house music, before it was a mainstream

and OG

 

Last edited: Sep 25, 2025

I agree with all posters about the good and bad versions of the songs but, in many cases, the 'bad' production choices are what was necessary to be on radio at the time the track was released.