Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication [2LP VINYL]

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This is a zoomed-in version of the song “Parallel Universe” from the “Unmastered/Unsequenced” CD-R. Notice how the peaks are flattened, but not horizontal. Horizontal flattening would imply the signal was clipped.

Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers - Rate Your Music Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers - Rate Your Music

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. 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! 5Finally, we have the picture disc. What you’ll notice right away is an increase in underlying surface noise. Picture discs are renowned for their added surface noise as a byproduct of how they’re made. In terms of the master, I’d say this was the same master as the original, sadly, as the distortion on the guitar solo is still very clear. Interestingly, though, the overall volume is lower than the original. What Does a LOUDNESS WAR Master Look Like? I just finished a comparison among this, the CD (and streaming version), and the famed "Unmastered" version of this album. As others have noted, there are some differences in the mixes between this LP and the CD. The "Unmastered" version is even more different. However, my goal was to find the best sounding version to my ears, regardless of mix elements.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication (Vinyl Remaster Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication (Vinyl Remaster

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. These are sections of “Hurt” by Johnny Cash, “The Blister Exists” by Slipknot, and “The Day That Never Comes” by Metallica, respectively.

The band’s Greatest Hits album contains a number of songs from Californication, (specifically “Parallel Universe”, “Scar Tissue”, “Otherside”, “Californication”, and “Road Trippin’”) and they have a bit higher dynamic range than their retail counterparts, and notably less distortion. Even “Californication”, which is 0.7dB quieter on Greatest Hits, has a lot less hiss than its previous release. (It should be noted though, that the Greatest Hits mix of “Californication” has organ in its first verse and runs through the first chorus twice.) While the 2014 digital remaster of Californication has as much rampant clipping as the original release, it features a slightly different mix of “Savior”, one with “all in the hand” vocals during its outro. (I couldn’t find a posting of this mix on YouTube, so this is the passage in question on my “dynamic edit” of the release.) Universally Speaking”, by contrast, has an odd, clipping-like hiss over the top of its vocals, but features a waveform that looks like this:

Californication (1999, 180g, Vinyl Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication (1999, 180g, Vinyl

For those not in the know, the “loudness war” is a phenomenon beginning in the mid-90s onward, in which music was mastered louder and louder, with the underlying reasoning being that louder music sounds better, and thus, sells better. As with any medium, however, there is a peak loudness a signal can reach, so dynamic range compression (which makes the louder parts of the signal quieter while keeping the quiet parts the same loudness) and sometimes even clipping (attempting to make a signal louder than maximum loudness) were used to make music as loud as possible. 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.

I attempted to make this album more dynamic and fix up its compression, bringing the dynamic range of the album from 6 to 12! I am probably the least confident in my removing of the distortion in this album though, mainly because selecting the parts that are distorted with “Perfect Declipper” is much more difficult when these sections aren’t horizontal, and when they seem to be the result of production, rather than mastering. I still hear bits of clipped vocals at points during “Universally Speaking” and “Midnight”. I also edited the songs from the deluxe edition of the album, the songs from “By the Way” single, and two alternate official mixes of “Universally Speaking”! Since the bad old days of the late 90s and 2000s, things have eased off a little. Some balance restored in recent years, partly because the industry recognized there is a problem, but also because of changing listening habits. 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. 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.

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication (2021, Vinyl) - Discogs

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. 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! Some consumers turned to the vinyl copy in the hope of salvation but were sorely disappointed to find it was the same “squashed” mix as the original CD, just pressed to vinyl. It wasn’t until 2012 that the record finally received a proper remaster, specifically for vinyl, when Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering was tasked with cutting the record for a 180g re-pressing. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are a particularly good example, as their 1991 classic Blood Sugar Sex Magik stands in stark comparison. Here, the dynamics are superb, the mastering compression is mild, and in my opinion, it’s one of the best recordings to come out of the 90s. While all previous Chili Peppers projects have been highly spirited, Californication dares to be spiritual and epiphanal..." - rollingstone.com, Greg Tate, June 24, 1999

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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. John's guitar technique had deteriorated by this point from not having been tested or exercised in two years, so there are no virtuoso performances like those that we have come to expect from him on this recording, but that is an advantage, I think, as the simplicity of the songs is the key to their genius. Flea's bass playing is simple too, but highly inventive and harmoniously effective. This was a time when the Chili's were playing with each other, delighting in each other's ability, and pushing each other along, which is why this is probably the most satisfying post One Hot Minute record they have yet released. Hell, even Anthony's sex rap nonsense seemed to take on an unusual poignancy for the first time.