Quote:
Originally Posted by roostert  Hey T,
I love the record. Love what you did, and what Moose, Swine, and all the boys played. Let's not forget how important the song and the artist are to helping accomplish this feat. Jamie would sound horrible tuned. He's like Hank Jr. If he's not natural, it ain' right. This was the perfect album for him and cudos to you, and everyone involved. If we could have more artists and songs like this in Nashville, then I think this approach has a chance. Unfortunatley, the current trend is to sign the Taylor Swift's of the world, and for me to eat, I gotta tune and compress, do what the label wants. Jamie is one of those rare opportunities that comes along (as you said you've been waiting 16 years) that allows you, as the engineer, an opportunity to make change! I'm glad everyone including Jamie recognized this, and went with their gut. Congrats brother!
MM |
Take a page out of old school NYC,
tell the label you did all that stuff, but,
DON'T actually do it.
Nobody
HAS to do anything, you can hire a vocal coach so next time you won't have to tune or coach, the artist improves, recordings get better, sessions are better, sales get better, the bar is raised back to where it was lowered from. Just don't let on what you did. There will always be some form of compression, you just don't
have to over-do it.
It takes about ten more minutes to mix a song that isn't compressed to lifelessness.
People say we haven't cheapened the art to bubble gum? Look what we've done to country!
Let over-compressing and auto-tuning and everything that stunts the growth of talent be what it is, UNCOOL.
Support people, not gadgets.
Autotune is better and appropriately used in mall booths advertising "anybody can sing", when the reality is anybody who doesn't do serious work on it can't, without the box.
It isn't just talent either. Over-compressing and auto-tuning also props up substandard engineering and engineers. You never have to learn how to really mix well. You just push the button.
Doesn't mean you can't, you just don't.
So now, you have substandard talent propped up by spineless craftsmen. Record company extortion heaven! That's all marketing and accounting driven policy and it has nothing to do with art or music. Everytime a group has a distinct sound due to anomoly or quality a new genre pops up to put it in a little box inside a bigger box and now it's about the boxes instead of what's in the boxes.
It's NUTS! They are actually marketing the marketing now, not the music!
Cheap cheap cheap.
It all equals betting on failure and substandard work being perceived as passable by the end user and a big ass marketing effort to stem loss. Looking at sales, I'd say that was a bad bet. It's built and building a LOT of bad karma.
Get some backbone people.
In the long run, if you have something great to sell, it will sell, if you don't, it won't.
The more we make
"making things not great as a built in process", the less records will sell.
We have removed the opportunities for human beings to be great and excellent and express greatness and excellence in and at our crafts, apparently without a fight. Everything is now just passably good enough, overproduced, energy-less, boring, and homogeneous sounding.
Who would pay for that?
Music today is like that paperboard black laquer coated furniture, looks good for a minute but it doesn't hold value.