Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication [2LP VINYL]

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Universally Speaking”, by contrast, has an odd, clipping-like hiss over the top of its vocals, but features a waveform that looks like this: Regardless, since I’m doing it for every one of these examples, I made the album more dynamic, bringing it from a dynamic range of 6 to 12! Red Hot Chili Peppers aren’t really known for having great masterings of their albums. 1999’s Californication especially left many consumers scratching their heads from how it sounded, many convinced there was something wrong with the disc itself. Californication and many of the band’s albums since One Hot Minute have been subject to what is known as the loudness war, their music being very heavily clipped or dynamically-compressed (not to be confused with data-compressed, which concerns MP3s and such). While all previous Chili Peppers projects have been highly spirited, Californication dares to be spiritual and epiphanal..." - rollingstone.com, Greg Tate, June 24, 1999

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication (2020, 180g

As you can hear, the original master is squashed and compressed to a level of unacceptable distortion. The snare is reduced to a hard crunch rather than a crisp snap, and the symbols take on an aggressive edge that is fatiguing on the ear. Worst of all, the slide guitar solo is audibly distorted. I edited this album to fix up its clipping, and I was able to get its dynamic range from 5 to 12! I also edited the b-sides from the “Dani California”, “Tell Me Baby”, and “Snow (Hey Oh)” singles! Vlado Meller mastered this album, and will continue to master all of the band’s digital releases until The Getaway, but returned again for the band’s upcoming album, Unlimited Love. Meller is rather infamous for his digital mastering work, often audibly clipping the albums he works with, and Californication is perhaps his worst example of that. There are certainly ways to make loud and dynamically-compressed masters while avoiding making it sound THIS distorted. The solution is generally to have a quieter master. Even one or two less decibels of loudness would lower the amount of distortion on this album significantly, and it would STILL be considered a loud master. Left is before, right is after. Both versions are made the same loudness, so you can more easily see the differences.It’s important to note that the dynamics are not being restored with the “Perfect Declipper” program that I use, but rather, they are being approximated. While one may not be able to “declip” an album as one would be unable to “unbake a cake”, I find the results here to be a convincible attempt at doing so. Only in the most extreme examples have I heard the program produce odd artifacts that would appear unintended in the album’s mix. I think it’s also important to note that dynamic range compression is not an inherently bad thing. It can tighten up performances, add grit, and help remove dynamic outliers that would take you out of the mix. Californication” and “Universally Speaking” also feature different mixes than their album counterparts on Greatest Hits, but I already noted and edited them in their respective album sections.

Californication [2LP VINYL] Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication [2LP VINYL]

For me Californication is an album which I play along to, and when my brother and I get out the guitars to have a jam, the Chili Peppers staples, "Californiation", "Otherside", "Scar Tissue", "Road Trippin'" and "This Velvet Glove" are what we regularly turn to (usually spliced in with some choice moments from Bloodsugar...). It is a record which, when played correctly by two trained and highly professional musicians such as me and my brother, can have enormous bonding qualities, and I like to think that it has brought we two siblings closer together. Another unofficial version of the album was an “Unmastered/Unsequenced” version that was leaked in 2011. Despite what its title may imply, this release faced a ton of compression on its signal, resulting in distortion comparable to the original retail release. With less audible distortion on this release compared to Californication, my ears were instead drawn to how much of a mess the band sounds when they have no dynamics to breathe with. The choruses especially sound like a band trying to fit both themselves and their instruments into a telephone booth. Interestingly enough, the vinyl release of this album was also mastered by Vlado Meller, but doesn’t seem to be subject to the clipping of the original release! 5 It suffers from the same inconsistency as all their albums do - nobody would have missed songs like "Purple Stain" or "Right On Time" - but this is the closest they've come to a solid, consistent listen. What this album needs is a complete remix from top to bottom, just imagine how good it could have sounded. Sadly I doubt we will ever know.

On The Go

Zooming in, we see something quite familiar: the diagonal flattened compression like was seen on One Hot Minute and the “Unmastered/Unsequenced” versions of Californication.

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication (2022, Yellow, Vinyl

A similar-looking compression was also applied to One Hot Minute a few years prior. I would argue that use of it complemented the messy aesthetic of One Hot Minute's production. The production on Californication is far more basic and straightforward though, so creating relentless distortion through compression or clipping doesn’t really fit, in my opinion. These are sections of “Hurt” by Johnny Cash, “The Blister Exists” by Slipknot, and “The Day That Never Comes” by Metallica, respectively.One Hot Minute, mastered by Stephen Marcussen, is the first Red Hot Chili Peppers album that can be described as a participant of the loudness wars.