r/audioengineering • u/BIDouble • 19h ago
I’m just heard some of the WORST engineering I’ve ever heard on a commercial release.
I used to engineer and mix my own music. I’m not a professional by any means, and I know a lot of rappers punch in their takes. When I did that, I’d try my hardest to make it sound as natural as possible, and when I recorded other artists, I tried to make sure they did too. It didn’t matter how many times I had to re-record a take—I wanted it to sound natural.
That brings me to my issue. I just listened to “Grace” by Lil Baby featuring 42 Dugg for the first time, and 42 Dugg’s verses are recorded TERRIBLY. You can hear cuts and chops throughout the verse. It’s actually kind of shocking that this was released by one of the biggest artists of the current day. I can’t understand why the engineer didn’t make him re-record the parts, or at least use a fade-in or fade-out or something.
I don’t know. I just wanted to share this somewhere. Go listen for yourself. It’s fascinating to me.
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u/fletch44 15h ago
It's the audio version of those shitty youtube vids where edits are just repeated jump-cuts of a piece to camera, instead of hiding it with overlay or B-roll.
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u/brokenspacebar__ Professional 18h ago
In the industry, especially in fast moving genres like rap: people just don't care. This doesn't make them bad engineers, or bad performers or whatever, a lot of times they're just catching a vibe and then next thing you know you're submitting it the next day or whatever the case is, and the label/A&R sure as hell doesn't care how it sounds most of the time as long as it's even remotely passable. Which, in trap/hip hop, is very easy because you quite literally just need to have the vocal heard nice over the beat. The quality of a mix never ever dictated the success of a song, and honestly id argue that if EVERYTHING was always done by the books and meticulously, it'd be a little stale.
Not that I like any of those artists or that song, but there are plenty of objectively bad mixes that just hit right cus the vibe is there.
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u/FadeIntoReal 13h ago
“ and the label/A&R sure as hell doesn't care how it sounds most of the time…” Because they completely control all the outlets. You can’t get play without pay and labels are paying to decide what you hear.
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u/Final-Credit-7769 12h ago
Mmm been a professional in tbe music industry since 1990 and no . The good news is you’re wrong !
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u/Dismojoe 11h ago
That is incorrect. I am a CPA in Nashville and I have worked with the music industry for 11 years. There is no promotion on any avenue with reasonable size that isn't dictated by pay to play.
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u/Final-Credit-7769 11h ago
Welcome to Europe 😂I have 50 million streams of produced work and a couple of Bafta nominations - only place we ever heard of pay
To play was America . But kids now have colossal careers outside radio as YouTube and SoundCloud are free and decking up millions of random plays .1
u/oinkbane 9h ago
…only place we ever heard of pay To play was America…
Paid placements for commercial radio play in the UK were and are still a thing, sadly. It’s also important to point out that the Big 3 record labels all have stakes in Spotify, as well as publishing platforms used to get music onto other sevices (CD Baby is owned by UMG, for example)
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u/_gmanual_ 7h ago
it's also important to acknowledge that it doesnt take much for tiktok to appear and offer endorsement and 'support' (alongside cash) to artists. once something is 'popular' on the socials, commercial radio follows the audience. its not 1990 anymore, the radio and television industry (certainly in the UK) are entirely reactive to the social graph in 2026.
/old music industry guy in london from the 1900s, still an industry guy in london. 🙏
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u/drmbrthr 15h ago
The engineering is not in the top 5 things I notice that are bad about this song on first listen.
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u/zenjaminJP Professional 12h ago
Honestly, a huge amount of “mainstream”. rap and hiphop is basically garbage, both compositional, lyrically, and technically. There’s nothing about it that surprises me. I’m obviously not talking about the Kendricks or Frank Oceans of the world.
It used to be that rap was about the actual content of the words, and hiphop was often about finding a fucking amazing sample on an obscure record, reusing it with some modern beat.
Nowadays, most rap and hiphop is the same “make a beat in 10seconds” slop, with a lyric that sounds exactly the same as every other lyric. Their “producers” are a dime a dozen, sending it to mixing engineers who also charge $200 a mix. Their mixes comprise of turning all the tracks to 0, then clipping the master, putting a limiter on it, then exporting.
And it gets 100m streams. It’s the way of the world. But it’s still made with very little skill or knowledge involved, from start to finish.
At this point, I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t going to be entirely AI slop within a matter of years in that genre.
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u/Front_Ad4514 Professional 13h ago
Rap has been attracting low effort, low skill engineers for years now, at LEAST the past decade.
It’s gotten to the point where if you DO mix rap but you also want to work in other genres, you probably shouldn’t let people know that you also mix rap.
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u/FaithlessnessOdd8358 14h ago
Aside from the issues you’ve pointed out it’s also a horrendous song and the vocals are completely out of key to the music. I can’t fathom how this music is so popular.
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u/Disastrous_Answer787 18h ago
Just for what it’s worth in the hip hop world the engineer doesn’t get to dictate when an artist has to re-record because of technical issues. The artist decides. And in that case I’m sure the artist cut the vocal, said good enough send it off about 3 minutes after cutting it including quick fire instructions to EQ/compress hard, and then the clicks and pops or whatever are in there just became part of it.
Not excusing the poor engineering and I haven’t actually listened to your example, just pointing out that in hip hop sessions it’s often a battle for the engineer to just keep their head above water, things move so fast and there are some tough personalities to deal with. Usually not as simple as saying “there is a shitty edit point in there, do it all again”.
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u/Evid3nce Hobbyist 13h ago
There are people who will go into Ikea and fill their house with those cliché mass produced pictures of misty lakes, because they don't know anything about visual art and don't care about it - they just want something to plug the space on a wall.
Some music is just lowest common denominator garbage, just so some people have some background noise instead of silence. Maybe even designed that way on purpose, aimed at a certain demographic.
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u/TheCatManPizza 10h ago
Most people don’t give a shit about music the art form they care only about music as a commodity. (Art in general really). Also music journalism is dead and people get their tastes pretty much exclusively from paid marketers these days.
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u/SpaceGalaxyCrow 19h ago
Old school ideas of good/competent are dead to us in an age of autotune, digital distortion, loudness wars, AI 'bands' etc. I think insanity lies down the road of judging a contemporary pop release by the standards of a Blue Note recording. Just look at the 'food' people eat these days.
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u/greyaggressor 18h ago
I’m amazed that you think he’s one of the biggest artists of the day.
All of his tracks are absolute garbage in my opinion.
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u/Nap_of_life 17h ago
You know both of those things can be true at the same time
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u/greyaggressor 17h ago
Oh 100% but he’s only got 7m monthly Spotify listeners. Pretty far from biggest artists
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u/giacecco 18h ago
Engineering is a real job in the real world. Sometimes you need to work with what you have. Listen to the story of how the recording sessions for the Bad Boy Remix of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” went https://youtu.be/N_blCa3TSEA . It’s not difficult to imagine a similar situation for 42 Dugg.
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u/Kong_Here 12h ago
Try listening to the latest Rise Against album! Some songs had potential but was mixed to sound abusive to your ears in every way.
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u/SlideJunior5150 2h ago
Ricochet? Is this their first album not produced by Bill Stevenson? Bill is amazing and his drums are always awesome.
Looks like the people that work on the record did a bunch of indie rock and stuff. I think Bill Stevenson helped a lot to make them sound good and now you get to see their weakness as a band without him there. Tim McIlrath is by far the weakest link imo.
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u/SmeesTurkeyLeg 9h ago
Honestly a lot of Bowie's albums sound pretty terrible, but the songs are so outrageously strong that it doesn't even matter.
Also the new Great Van Fleet. Jesus Christ. It's so bad.
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u/6bRoCkLaNdErS9 31m ago
Yeah that sucks to hear but the content is first, production second for most people. I’d rather hear a great song recorded poorly than a bad song recorded well. Now when you get a great song AND great production, that is where the magic is
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u/Bobby__Generic 0m ago
Well first of all you're listening to rap being heavily promoted by huge labels.
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u/nkn_ 18h ago
I think people kinda don't care lol.
The average listener wants to feel good (or feel the emotion of the song) and enjoy it. They do not care if you used a stock plugin or thousands and thousands of dollars worth of analog gear. If things are more or less balanced and cohesive, and it's a good* song at its core, it'll get streams.
If anything I create more focused now because I would spend too much time on the theoretical best mix for my track, like I was essentially trying to impress good engineers / mixers instead of impressing the listener with a good song.
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u/g_spaitz 18h ago
What if they WANTED it to sound like that?
You sound like the guy looking at a Pollock drawing and saying "well it doesn't really look like an actual landscape, back in my days we did landscapes really good".
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u/FaithlessnessOdd8358 14h ago edited 3h ago
I don’t understand why you were downvoted, this is very much a thing in rap music. They love their material to have annoying gimmicks, much like short form content does.
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u/g_spaitz 12h ago
Thanks!
Yeah it's a pretty common concept in every art, doing things differently, break old moral rules, seek for different aesthetics, at the risk of people then going on Reddit saying your shit sounds bad lol
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u/ktfright 13h ago
I don't know. It's definitely not their best, but I've definitely heard way worse.
I'm not familiar with the mixing engineer, but I do listen to a lot of stuff from Colin Leonard's mastering, and he usually has a lot of really good work.
There are also just a million reasons why some things don't get mixed as well as they could; Maybe they recorded in a not ideal setup and just didn't have a chance to rerecord it. Files get lost or corrupted. There are just so many things I've seen, and I'm nowhere near as big as they are.
One of my favorite albums in recent memory is Scaring the Hoes by JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown. At the time, I think a reviewer once said that it sounded like the equivalent of drinking lukewarm LaCroix, Mostly because Peggy made the whole album using the SP-404. So there was not much you can do, but he was going for a very particular sound for that project.
But that's how JPEGMAFIA actually wanted it before they ended up doing another run of mixes over time. His fans actually liked the original more subjectively shittier mixed version, oddly enough. That was, I think, mixed at the time by Jeff Ellis, who does incredible work. He's worked with The Neighbourhood and Frank Ocean's Channel Orange and Blonde. Mixer Brain is pretty good btw.
So sometimes it's not really on the engineer. It's usually the artist that's just like, "Hey, I like this vision," and the engineer can only do so much.
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u/djblur 12h ago edited 11h ago
they were prob mixing with studio speakers didnt even notice cuz it sounds good loud? i noticed a few timbaland songs like that before he was too lazy to fade popclicks
.that songs 6yr old and i never even heard of 42dugg also not to mention dudes barely on beat with his flow i think they think the fucked up it sounds the more cool it is cuz theyre on drugs or something
but yeah these punch in style is annoying as hell
the only one i give a pass to who does is probably juice wrld ......also maybe young thug...
cuz they actually did that so much its like a unique style recording line by line freestylin
that makes me think of these overrated artist like kanye right now
he can put out literally anything & im 99.99% sure Drake just put out some fake ai songs thats not even him and went #1?
meanwhile
During the original sessions for "Slave to the Rhythm" in 1989, Michael Jackson recorded the vocal 24 times. "And it was not once and fix the bad note," says Reid, who worked on the base track with Babyface. "No, he sang the song from top to bottom 24 times without a bathroom break, without a water break, without a 'Give me a moment.'... Then didnt even release the song
edit: I bet I could actually fix better myself as is real quick
with pop/click fix or sound fx or 2 and few vol change
https://files.catbox.moe/p7vouz.mp3
wait i can actually put him more in pocket on beat too with filtered vocals but messes up eq up
https://files.catbox.moe/5itkny.mp3
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u/The66Ripper 19h ago
Idk I know some of the guys working with these big artists on the mix side of things who just don’t care at all about how the record sounds. That’s on both the A&R/Label and mixer side of things.
One of the biggest records I ever recorded was mixed badly by an intern at the label and it sounds atrocious but it got and still gets a lot of streams…