Don't get me started.
Ooops. Too late.
I'm fully in agreement with everyone on both sides of this issue. Am I allowed to have it both ways? Music processed within a measure of its life is spoof to the nth degree, but I don't think that this is always a bad thing.
originally posted by Arnt Egil Nordlien:
The reason behind the use of ProTools has nothing to do with spoof. It is easily available, less expensive, more movable. So people can do home recordings cheaper and more easy.
Which is often not a good thing, because it's so easy to be "creative" that you don't have to waste time thinking about the sound you're putting down. Factor in mixing on bad monitors and you have music appropriate for background aural wallpaper but not to inspire the artist within us. The gap can be as wide as the difference between 2008 Two-Buck Chuck Shiraz and 2004 Allemand Chaillot. I like the idea of having a recording studio in my Macintosh but the room and the outboard gear are important factors (the terroir of recording?) that don't come into play in a positive way in most home studios.
originally posted by Dan Donahue:
The Cream never played Crossroads live the way it was released; EMI/Legge spliced in some of Sutherland's high notes for Flagstad at the end of her career and Furtwangler's '51 Bayreuth 9th as released is different from the recently surfaced Bavarian Radio broadcast tapes. These are all recordings that I love and I'm sure there are hundreds of other examples. I guess I'm not a purist. The end result is paramount, not how it got there.
Add Les Paul & Mary Ford's "How High the Moon" to the spoofed list, as well as The Beatles' "Sgt Pepper" and Nirvana's "Nevermind" (that album would have been unlistenable without the post-production quantizer work to fix the drums).
Don, was music copying more authentic when it was done in pen and ink instead of by computer?
I used to think that I was "fighting the good fight for natural music" when working with baby bands to spend 4 months in pre-production, putting the singers with vocal coaches, teaching the drummers to play to click tracks, and making sure that the stringed instruments (guitars, basses, zithers, whatever) were repaired well enough to remain in tune. We would lug around a Hammond B3 and (with a Leslie) instead of using the standard DX-7 patch to cut organ tracks, and a grand piano was the only way to go, because it was authentic. All of this was an effort to create a more realistic recording of the songs I'd painstakingly arranged and rehearsed over and over again with the artist(s) involved. Would the song have been as powerful had I just hired some studio yo-cats to come in and perform them over the course of an afternoon? Probably so, because "fixing it in the mix" never works the way you'd hoped it would. Shit's gotta go to tape/disc properly in the first place -
then you can make it "more perfect" after everyone else has gone home.
originally posted by lars makie:
Recording/engineering music is an interesting example to bring up. It's a world where analog and digital co-mingle regularly. You can still record an album using analog boards and put it to tape or you could record digitally straight to a hard drive and work solely with files. Or you could do a combination of both.
Lars, I agree with you on your digital/analog analogue, but unless you've got a huge budget, 2" tape is pretty much out of the question these days and obviates the necessity of working with Pro Tools. Even
finding tape is damn near impossible since Ampex stopped manufacturing it a few years ago. The companies that are now making the stuff are not very good in the quality control department, so the best option these days is to load up the front end of the process with analog processing (tube mics, mic-pres, Pultec and Neumann EQs, Fairchild limiters, etc), sending it into the digital domain to make editing easier (and affordable) and then running it back out through the old-school equipment when you're mixing. The people who own stereo systems good enough to notice the difference are probably not listening to the songs as much as they're listening to the recording quality in the first place. Would they be considered audio idealogues?
Not to stray too far afield, but yesterday I attended a track day sponsored by my local car club. There were like about 100 Yugos in all out there, divided up into groups of about 20 according to our (presumed) driving ability. Now, what made this interesting was the fact that within each run group, there were some original-condition cars- no reinforced cardboard interiors, the suspensions were OEM, and they were running on street tires. But then there were other Yugos that had had some work done to them. Fancy coilover suspensions, forced-induction mods to the engine, R-compound tires, and even one with a Lamborghini exhaust system and one of those big, swoopy aerodynamic tail wings. So what happened was that the good drivers in each run-group did just fine with their cars, regardless of whether they were stock or modded. The less-sure drivers used their modified cars to work around whatever limitations they had with driving skills, and thus everyone was able to stay out of everyone else's way and have a good time, all the while driving our cars flat out and having a great time.
Pro Tools spoof enables people with fewer skills to sound better. As mentioned a couple of times, they're just tools to make it easier to arrive at your musical destination. Once it's completed, it's a simple task to decide whether you like it or not. There are few albums that I refuse to listen to based on the quality of the recording. If the music is performed well and with feeling, then I'll listen to it in low-fi, mid-fi, or in supercallifragalisticexpialidocious-a-rama wide screen sound.
-Eden (hell, I own not only a SACD player but have both tube and solid state hi-fi gear in my setup)
