Industry Standard...

[John_C]

There are only 2 options for describing sound:

technical - not the job of a musician to have to know this, that's a big part of what you're being paid for

best metaphor - this is the only other way and so everyone non-technical uses it. Deal with it.

 

[pitoga]

That's why I most of the time ask them to describe a sound by giving me existing examples of similar sounds. This works for me best.

 

[nialldoran]

I could quote more in this thread, but these'll do. How can you guys get pissed off at this? How are they meant to describe sound? "It sounded like it had a little bit of a lowpass at 17khz, then it boosted at 110hz, a little bit of compression with a fast attack/release, and then some limiting and some distortion for harmonics, some saturation and finally some clipping" vs "rounded".

I can understand being annoyed by marketers or retards on other forums, but you should be annoyed because they're marketers or retards, not because they use terms like "warm" or "creamy" or "organic". As an engineer, it's part of your job to decipher musician's and their weird terms for things because they're not engineers - that's why they're coming to you!

Yeah if musicians use words that like that i can understand why they would, but the "rounded " situation was in my college class and we are studying music production and technology, and they best they could come up with as second year university students was "rounded", just annoyed me as they are supposed to be training to be engineers,

 

[Mago]

No offense, but aside from certain midway bands, there's a HUGE difference between Death metal and Brutal Death Metal, if I was on my computer I'd easily give you two YouTube links and you'd start saying Brutal more often

ratsapprentice allready sent me a msg to enlight my noobish knowledge on Death Metal
I don't think that there's a way to get me say "brutal" even more often

 

[Manifesto]

The one that gets me more is "world class." When people say something has "world class" tone or is a "world class" recording studio... what the FUCK does that even mean?

It actually means something when you live in a country where everything besides engineering... pretty much sucks.

In this case, when you say "world class" you're saying "this does not suck, as you may expect".

 

[GoofPig]

Yeaaaaah. Will agree to most of these.

However, I am guilty too. I generally refer to different chord changes and moods as colours and forget that people have no idea wtf I'm talking about. Then begins the crappy process of trying to explain what I mean. Haha.