the importance of analog sound in prog

Don't worry Surrealist, I know exactly where your coming from...



Edited by Cornelius - May 12 2013 at 14:46

Surrealist wrote: If the production is so bloody awful or the playing so ruddy amateur then no one will buy it no matter what equipment was used to produce it. Dean, as always, you completely miss my point.. but that is to be expected.

Edited by Dean - May 12 2013 at 17:24

As you edited yours Dean, I shall edit mine...

Edited by Cornelius - May 16 2013 at 06:49

surrealist wrote: ...On the creative end.. we have to go back to the beginning. Before the age of digital manipulation, sampling, auto tune, pitch shifters, infinite digital editing option..... there was a different approach toward a recording session. A musician didn't walk into a studio with the idea that they could simply buy a perfect recording. Artists spent much more time preparing for their recording....

Gerinski wrote: Surrealist wrote: You still confuse the technology itself with how people use the technology. It is true that digital technology has enabled people to misuse it in ways which were not possible before digital came in, but blame the people not the technology.

I do blame the people ... every one of them.  That is why I suggest shutting off your computers when you start recording music.  Music is to be listened to.. so that your ears can have the experience... not looking at digital wave forms on a computer screen.  The modern engineers are spending hours and hours trying to get a track to LOOK right... not sound right.

I am not insulting modern musicians who practice.. actually completely the opposite.  I sympathize for their lack of support from the general public and the industry in general.   Most people are so ignorant as to sound quality and the reality of digital editing that the couldn't tell a real piano track recorded on garage band and an actual piano.  So the modern musician spends so much time trying to perfect things on the computer to garner some attention from the public because essentially they are competing with digital manipulation that has become "standard" to everyone's ears. 

Unless one sees it live.. people now just roll their eyes... "ok that was nice.. next...

But the masses... particularly the youth culture are attending electronic music events much more than live music events... for any number of reasons... that's where the chicks are.. the drugs are... or their friends are. 

This is the head down generation.  Everyone is staring at their iphone while the world is going on around them.  The other day I saw four kids having lunch... no one said a word to anyone.. they all had their heads buried into their iphones the entire meal.  It was pathetic. 

How does this relate?

Music now is meant to create white noise.  It's the background track... non invasive.. asks nothing of the listener other than to move their body to a 4x4 pulse. 

How was it that the youth culture of the early 70's packed stadiums to see bands like YES or ELP?  Because then ...what they saw was real.  The shared the experience with their friends.. and the recordings they bought were not questioned if not subconsciously. 

No one now has time to think.  Too busy texting.

Surrealist wrote: One of the technological revolutions of the Internet age has been the marked increase in Self-Release and Self-Publishing of all creative arts. Fine-art, the written word and music have all been caught-up in this flurry of activity that promises to banish the corrupt self-serving corporate monster moguls to the annals of history and allow "the artist" the freedom to connect directly with the art-loving public. But is this Utopian idyll an egalitarian dream or a self-delusional nightmare? I have ventured into this world on many occasions, from the early beginnings of the World Wide Web and the look-at-me progenitors of social networking where I could create a "Home Page" to publish my confused rantings and musings on all manner of subjects and to present a primitive form of the eNovel for all the world to read or ignore at their leisure. Later I had several attempts to releasing my home-made music via numerous means from an AOL home-page, the original version of mp3.com, MySpace and LastFM to (finally) giving some of it away under Music and Musicians Exchange here at the PA. And more recently I have used a web-based vanity press to produce an actual printed paper novel replete with glossy paperback cover. What these experiences have taught me is that this is not a simple process, that the skills required are more than just being good at what you do. Of course my relative success or failure in these endeavours could be seen as jading my personal view of the whole process, but simply dipping a hand into these waters and plucking a self-released product at random will show even the most optimistic of "purchasers" that this is a far from perfect solution.   For all these one-man table-top ventures suffer from a number of failings that immediately mark them as being substandard and amateurish (in the worse possible connotation of that word) - they lack the judicious hand of the experts - the editors, the producers, the graphic artists and layout specialists and the management agents, the A&R men and the marketing teams who stand up to "the artist" and say that the product is not good enough, that the packaging is in need of refinement, that the work needs more work to be in any way, shape or form saleable ... While it is fashionable to cheer at the demise of all these industry middle-men and corporate hanger-oners under the assumption (though not completely without foundation) that they have corrupted the very nature of the business they draw their substantial salaries from, they do actually perform a valid and worthwhile role in the furtherance of the art as an art-form and therefore are a vital part of the creative process. While on the surface their job-functions ensure that the product will give a return on investment, it has the underlying responsibility of maintaining a level of quality that filters the worthy from the also-rans. This does not imply that they sort out the commercial from the unsellable, or even the professional from the amateur, but that they provide some necessary critical feedback to the artist prior to unleashing their prized creation onto the public, to ensure that what is heard or read is the best that the artist can produce.   Quality Control is not something that can be bolted on at the end, it has to be prevalent through the entire process, from the moment that *someone* says that a particular phrase is clichéd and should be re-written or discarded all the way through to the final presentation in its packaging and overall look, so that the product placed on the virtual shop shelves not only stands out against the plethora of other items from all the other dreamers, but is of equal quality to the best of what is on offer. So for a book not only does it have to be of the right readable standard, or if it is an album of music it has to be of a given listenable standard, but it has to be of the same professional standard as those produced by the established publishing houses and record labels.   Without this the music world (and by that I mean the music world at all levels – the underground and the specialist markets and not just the commercial pop and rock world) will be reduced to the lowest common denominator (if it hasn’t already), that all product will be as bad as each other rather than being as good as each other. Once we, as the buying/downloading/listening public, accept the limitations of what the artist deemed was good enough and take into account his excuses for the known faults of his work then we have bought into this myth and will have acknowledged sub-standard production methods (of content, packaging and promotion) as being the norm. The question then becomes how will be recognise a masterpiece in all the flotsam and jetsam that passes through our media players and hi-fi systems and by what means will the crème de al crème rise to the surface when all that is produced is produced by all that can produce?   Now, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that any single artist can possess all the talents to raise the level of what they create to an acceptable standard, or that a single band can contain individuals within their number with a share of theses skills, but in many ways they are complimentary and even counter to the creative process and would ideally be divorced from it. Artists often say that they are their own worse critic, but are they really? In reality are they any worse than their immediate friends and family, who to a man (and woman) will invariably be supportive rather than honestly (and brutally) analytical?

Wow, I could not have put that better myself. At last you've seen the light (assuming you understood the whole sentences not just the individual words).

Edited by Dean - May 14 2013 at 04:31

Surrealist wrote: Gerinski wrote: Surrealist wrote: You still confuse the technology itself with how people use the technology. It is true that digital technology has enabled people to misuse it in ways which were not possible before digital came in, but blame the people not the technology. I do blame the people ... every one of them.  That is why I suggest shutting off your computers when you start recording music.  Music is to be listened to.. so that your ears can have the experience... not looking at digital wave forms on a computer screen.  The modern engineers are spending hours and hours trying to get a track to LOOK right... not sound right.

... Right there ... You don't sound like a person who spent enough time editing sound files (tell me if I'm wrong). You can make it neat or sloppy; it's your call. Has it ever occurred to you that sometimes neatness sounds right?

Edited by Dayvenkirq - May 14 2013 at 13:02

Well, in that case, I am not aware of what other tools they may be using in the studio other than auto tune but that they 'polish' the singing of bad singers, I am certain.   Yes, you can't change the tone but then a good mic already distorts the tone substantially so with today's technology a bad singer can sound like God.   They might get him to be somewhat in tune after several takes and then edit all the mistakes to present an illusion of perfection.  And when you find that he just can't sing properly on stage no matter what, it looks bad.  It would have been better to leave a few mistakes on the record for the sake of integrity.  

I don't think anybody is putting a 'bad singer' into a recording, for sure not if the intention is to have a commercial hit. Many of the modern hit singers may be more or less 'fabricated stars', but all of them must have a certain level of competence. There are enough pretty people who can sing that it would be silly to choose one who can't.

Dean wrote: I'd need to hear a "before and after" before I could even begin to speculate, but as far as I am aware there is no software or technology that can polish a turd.

I am going to give an example from back home because it is what got me thinking on these lines.   This guy is not a professional singer.  He is an actor and won an award for Best Playback Singer for this song:



And this is a live performance of the same song (and even this is pretty 'controlled'...it's not like he sang live in a stadium or hall, just live in the studio)




Even in these controlled conditions, there is evidence that he is very tentative and not comfortable playing the part of a singer.  He might have a fairly palatable tone and sound reasonably in tune on the surface, but that's it.  There are plenty of pitch mistakes, way more than would be considered acceptable in Indian singing, but that apart he is also sliding into notes rather than hitting them on the centre (which the studio version suggested he did).   I tend to think such a huge difference between studio and live in a fairly simple song is the product of manipulation.