What is Mother Earth Radio?
Radio quality at its best!
Hi-Res Audio pioneer Mother Earth Radio has been broadcasting the best radio quality you can receive worldwide since February 2020.
How can you actually define radio quality? Here you can find out what we think is needed to provide radio of this format:
Technical quality
The quality of a radio stands and falls with the technology. On mainstream radio, they usually use highly intrusive editing before broadcasting. As a result, the part when all the instruments stop playing and only the vocals breathe tenderly into the silence is the loudest in the entire piece. This is at least very unnatural and therefore unpleasant to listen to.
Sound quality
Mother Earth Radio broadcasts in best radio quality FLAC 192kHz/24bit format and we play out without any post-processing. We recorded most of the pieces in the program from vinyl.
That’s why we have a lot of original recordings from a time when music was made and recorded in a completely different way:
Quality of the music
Music recordings from the past were recorded by all the musicians together in one go. And this also means that only the very best were allowed into a recording studio. To be released on a record, you had to be able to meet the very highest musical and technical quality standards.
This fine art of shining in the moment has been forgotten today.
Everyone joins in bit by bit and records their track on existing recordings. He can then repeat this as often as he likes until he is satisfied.
Computer
Computers then came into play in the 90s. You could suddenly fit everything perfectly into a clock grid.
However, it is the small, subtle deviations from the exact time signature that make the “groove”. And as a result, any freedom in the performance and the musicians’ interaction with each other was lost.
Counterexample tempi:
AC/DC “Back In Black”
- Verse 1: 90bpm
- Refrain 1: 95bpm
- Verse 2: 92-93bpm
- Refrain 2: 95bpm
- Guitar solo: 93-94bpm
Led Zeppelin “Whole Lotta Love”
- Verse 1: 88-89bpm
- Refrain 1: 91-93bpm
- Verse 2: 92bpm
- Refrain 2: 94bpm
- Guitar solo: 87bpm
Composition
Consequently, things continued to go downhill, namely in terms of composition. When the money was gone, the music industry began to follow the hit manual. Producers today only use the harmonies that work.
A little theoretical background: In contrast to a melody made up of individual notes, a piece of music is made up of chord progressions.
The simplest basic form: I degree “tonic” (root note), to IV degree “subdominant” to V degree “dominant” (for example “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”).
And that is the compositional vocabulary used almost exclusively today: Nursery Rhyme level.
Moreover, this limitation in the chord progressions leads to a further impoverishment – the quality of the melodic line:
According to compositional theory, you build a melody from the chord tones: for example, C major = C, E, G
However, if you only use I-IV-V connections, the melodies eventually become as uniform and interchangeable as they are today on quality-free hit radio.
Any uneducated blackbird will warble far more uplifting tunes to you in an hour.
If you use bold chord progressions with key changes, chromaticism etc. you have to come up with something for the melody part. Unfortunately, the hit guarantee then expires. And the other 5-8 people involved in the creation of the property veto it – the families have to be fed and the rent paid.
That’s why the song lyricist won’t write anything sophisticated, difficult to understand or thought-provoking.
Quality of the lyrics
On Mother Earth Radio, the music is selected according to my philosophical views.
To summarize, I only play songs that are about courage, love and joy.
Stories of suffering and sorrow are certainly told, but nothing about the devil, envy and resentment, hatred and infidelities.
You can listen to Mother Earth all day and you won’t be told a curse word (maybe one) or a terribly horrible story.
And you notice that at the end of the day.
So: it should be simple but beautiful, and the lyrics should be easy to understand – that’s what the Hit Manual says. The result is mainstream radio that can be described as simple to the point of stultification. Basically, your neurons are ground down with perfumed sandpaper until there’s nothing left but nursery rhyme level.
Florian Reiterer, Munich 2021