Creating a song...or capturing the music? Feel like I'm cheating.

[Unclenny]

Sometimes it feels like I'm cheating.

I was up during the night tuning the bass track to the piano track. While I was at it I put up volume lines and spent an hour automating.

I didn't play it that way. I'm a songwriter......not much of a player.

A couple of weeks ago we put down close to fifty bass tracks for one tune. Those tracks are still being boiled down. Over half of them were keepers.

I listened to The Doors on the way home yesterday....'L.A. Woman'.

I have a few simple questions.......

Is music ever perfect? And when we realize it isn't should we be pushing it that direction?

And.......with the demands of listeners being as they are, is it too late to go back to just capturing a performance?

[Myr]

I think a lot of it is just knowing how it was made, knowing all the faults, all the patches, edits, and mistakes. It takes away a lot of the mystery and wonder.

I'm 100% certain that you could use half of your recorded takes and the song wouldn't sound any better or worse to the average listener.

[bringmewater]

perfect is the enemy of the good, however there are some albums for me that are so well crafted and tight that they approach perfect.

Aja.....Steely Dan
Woman in Me........Shania Twain
Come on Over.......Shania Twain

The last 2 are Mutt Lang productions and demonstrate the insane and I do mean insane level of attention to detail. Sections of songs are approached as different mixes and some intros and outros are more complex than other entire songs on other albums (Steve Miller Bingo, Tom Petty Mojo) e There are also a huge variety of arrangements and instrumentations.

[The dman]

I don't think listeners care or know if stuff is perfect it's all about the song, arrangement and feel. There's many successful recorded performance that aren't perfect.

Take CSNY for example if you dissected their harmonies from the master tape they'd probably be far from being perfectly in tune but the blend is just rich sounding. If it was recorded now some auto tune geek would be all over it masturbating his AT and vocal align skills. Would it make it better?

Originally Posted by bringmewater

Woman in Me........Shania Twain
Come on Over.......Shania Twain

So true.

Fantastic albums from the essence of production & songwriting.

[hello people]

Originally Posted by Unclenny

Is music ever perfect? And when we realize it isn't should we be pushing it that direction?

And.......with the demands of listeners being as they are, is it too late to go back to just capturing a performance?

I suppose just record it...especially things like a rhythm guitar track...record the whole thing and forget the mistakes

[j-uk]

Originally Posted by Unclenny

Is music ever perfect? And when we realize it isn't should we be pushing it that direction?

Why would you want it to be perfect...?
I know Aja is very often brought up in this context but although I appreciate that album for what it is I also agree with the critique that it's too perfect and lacks the human imperfection....
Although on a side note, Aja is of course with todays standards not very "perfect" anymore.

i prefer imperfection myself.

[joelpatterson]

I'd say "demands of the listener" is a huge red herring.

I'd replace that phrase with "unspoken, unexamined habitual imperatives of using the tools at one's disposal to make the rough places plain and the crooked straight without ever even considering that the roughness and the crookedness may be the vital human touches that allow the song to connect with people."

Everything about recording music is *cheating* but there's *simple, straightforward cheating* and there's *war criminal-style cheating* and the *cheating with the fingerprints all over it* inevitably, in spite of all appearances, is a lesser, compromised, more boring end product.

Would that people were obsessed with the little tricks and sneaky underhanded subterfuges that would make a song more exciting... rather than strictly in time and in tune.

[Acko]

I just spent a few day's comping drums from 9 takes, then editing the composite track, only to revert to take 1 in it's unedited glory, print the mix and call it a day. And it sounds really good.

[Byll]

Unclenny: You have brought up a subject that is very important to me. I have been in the business for more than 40 years. We have gone from truly live mixes to one or two track, through 2" 24 track, with the whole synchronous tracking thing, to where we are today: Workstations with total 'control' over each small part of the sound, and therefore, supposedly, of the end product. Is this good? I don't know. Is the product better? Define better. Am I happier with the end result? Not really. I do not like dishonesty. We have created a scenario when mediocre can be looked at as acceptable, because the mediocrity is 'perfect.' This should be an oxymoronic situation, but it seems to be the state of the industry, at the moment.

At this point in my career, I have come full circle. We are doing more and more work, where we are recording music with less microphones, in live settings, with fewer overall tracks. We have stopped using visual monitors, unless we need to do micro editing. We only use auto-tune, when all else has failed.

My own folk band has released a 'live concert' CD. Our choice was to repair a few popping ps, and then to allow the listening audience to hear all of the other live performance anomalies that exist in the real world, such as a missed word or an alternate note or two - at no extra charge.

I vote for real, rather than manufactured pseudo-perfection.

Best to all.
Byll

PS: As I was writing, Joel nailed it... as usual...

[12ax7]

Originally Posted by joelpatterson

I'd say "demands of the listener" is a huge red herring.

Agreed!

I have come to the realization that alot of 'modern' records just don't leave the listener anything to DO!

Everything is "laid out in your lap."

It's as if the producer has already done all the listening FOR you, or you are being commanded as to what to pay attention to.

This leaves the listener uninvolved.

Maybe we should start making records more like the way Hitchcock made movies!


(Just my $0.02.)
.

[Arthur Stone]

Channel4 (UK) have a series where bands record live (at Metropolis) and output to vinyl...On Track with SEAT - Channel 4

I watched the Bee's last night...quite revelatory.

[Unclenny]

Originally Posted by joelpatterson

Would that people were obsessed with the little tricks and sneaky underhanded subterfuges that would make a song more exciting... rather than strictly in time and in tune.

This gets right to the crux of the matter for me. I track to a click but oft times you wouldn't know it. And while I will labor endlessly to get instruments to be in tune with each other while still speaking seperately, my vocals are.......another story.

Originally Posted by 12ax7

Maybe we should start making records more like the way Hitchcock made movies!

Care to expand on that? Or perhaps leave the question for another die-hard movie buff who I think may be reading this.

Originally Posted by Byll

I vote for real, rather than manufactured pseudo-perfection.

Perhaps a poll?

Seriously, though, the question remains....with all of this technology at our disposal, how do we manage to keep ourselves from deploying it?

[theblue1]

Originally Posted by The dman

I don't think listeners care or know if stuff is perfect it's all about the song, arrangement and feel. There's many successful recorded performance that aren't perfect.

Take CSNY for example if you dissected their harmonies from the master tape they'd probably be far from being perfectly in tune but the blend is just rich sounding. If it was recorded now some auto tune geek would be all over it masturbating his AT and vocal align skills. Would it make it better?

As I recall it, CSNY's live Four Way Street may be one of the strongest arguments for applying vocal re-tuning to a live album ever.

[The dman]

Originally Posted by theblue1

As I recall it, CSNY's live Four Way Street may be one of the strongest arguments for applying vocal re-tuning to a live album ever.

I wasn't talking about 4 way street but I spent many hours of my youth enjoying that record. I'm sure they were probably blasted out of their minds

[Turdadactyl]

Originally Posted by bringmewater

...however there are some albums for me that are so well crafted and tight that they approach perfect.

Aja.....Steely Dan
Woman in Me........Shania Twain
Come on Over.......Shania Twain

Add most Toto tunes to the list.

Of course, then you have Boston's first album. A lot of people bitch about it being TOO well produced. I dunno...to each his own.

[DaveE]

I'm all about minimizing distractions for the listener. In the end it comes down to good taste and not going overboard. Any chimp can hit the red button and do a capture, but a kickass producer will coach, edit, compose a string section, or do whatever it takes to help the song to be the best it can be.

Another snafu is that the general public knows about the tools we have available so it's possible to be branded as lazy should you choose to take a "hands-off" approach. Also the bands who are so amazing that they only require a "capture" already have 20 engineers up their ass offering to work for free. That means it's an uphill battle to try and market yourself as a purist who only captures reality.

[Mertmo]

IMO, truly great recordings have both unaltered human performance moments,
and perfectly crafted, altered moments.

And that's the definition of a truly great record producer in my book:

Someone who knows which moments to leave flawed, and which moments to
perfectly sculpt. Because you can't have it all one way or the other. (unless
you're Mutt Lange).

The real art of record production is knowing/deciding which moments go in
which direction.

[MisterMyGo]

Originally Posted by Unclenny

Is music ever perfect?

It depends on your definition of perfection. The purpose of a piece of music is to illicit some kind of emotional response from the listener. For me, the music that is most affecting is that which sounds like it has been made by a human being and not a machine.

Sometimes it's the nuances of the performance that some people would call mistakes that give the work it's sense of humanity.

[mgilboe]

I also don't think the average "listener" has anything to do with it either. Nor is it average people "abusing the tools".

It's a combination of:

1. Record labels want to make sure they are "set apart" from the others with superior production.

2. Some indies with deep pockets buy into the above and want to do it as well.

Just a few years ago, this would indeed often make stuff "better" to the average listener. However, tools have gotten so good, that many people can achieve great results. So now the majors seem to have unwittingly stepped into the territory of "just spend sooo much time with it that the others can't compete."

And I think it's starting to backfire. As I look around on comment boards on blogs and stuff, I have never seen so many people complaining about the "major label sound"... especially the vocal tuning craze.

Soon, labels will have to start evaluating actually artistic merit of songs/recordings... and that is something they've never been equipped to do.

I'm oversimplifying here, but I'm sure others will bring up many other points in the discussion.

[12ax7]

.
Yeah, well:

The average "listener" DOESN'T!

(And there are REASONS for that.)
.

.

[cjogo]

After starting back in the 70's -- we approach the digital world pretty much the same -- just without tape... No Wav editing at all > and lots of pre work vs post. Like the extra tracks for vocals with our DAW > but no chopping / moving tracks around/ etc ..more than two takes and you didn't do your homework

[jasonwagner]

Originally Posted by Unclenny

A couple of weeks ago we put down close to fifty bass tracks for one tune. Those tracks are still being boiled down. Over half of them were keepers.

Have you ever tried putting a time limit on your recording of songs? It's really easy to spend forever on stuff you shouldn't just because there is no time line. Sense of urgency can be very productive at times.

[bringmewater]

Just think how Bruce Swedien felt when he worked on Billy Jean (i think that was the one) and did over 100 mixes to settle on #2. e

Originally Posted by Acko

I just spent a few day's comping drums from 9 takes, then editing the composite track, only to revert to take 1 in it's unedited glory, print the mix and call it a day. And it sounds really good.

[Dean Roddey]

I don't use any magic tools anymore. The most I will do is comp from a set of takes. A little automation for creative purposes, not for fixing purposes (though I might automate out a bad stab of sibilance or something if it happens.) Other than that it's just EQ and compression and some effects. I either get an acceptable real performance or I don't. If I don't, then I don't and I can either put it out that way or not put it out.

I think that the issue is, why are you doing it? If you are doing it to impress people with the songs you put out, then obviously doing everything to make it sound better than you can actually do yourself probably makes sense. Or if you are a songwriter who is shopping his songs around to potential artists, it obviously makes sense.

If you are doing it to improve your ability to do it, then it doesn't make sense. If you limit yourself to putting out only what you can actually create, then it'll push you to get better at creating, instead of fixing, because you want to put stuff out, but you don't want it to suck. So you are pushed to get to the point of creating non-suckworthy stuff as quickly as possible.

I consider all the stuff I've done so far as basically my own self-demos, which I'll come back and revisit maybe a year or so from now, since I feel that I'm starting to get it and that by then I'll be ready to really do it right. And hopefully they'll be better actual performances as well, since I'll have had a lot of time to think about them and how they could be improved in terms of composition, lyrics, arrangement, etc...

[Mark Kaufman]

You can make yourself crazy worrying about how authentic it should or shouldn't be. If you think about it, steel frets on a guitar are a cheat...I mean, can't you hit all the pitches with your own fingers?

I'm familiar with your music, Lenny, and you've already got integrity coming through in spades. Cleaning up the the little incidentals will not sanitize your tracks. I say go ahead and engineer them nice and clean for the ages. If you want all the slop, then record a live album...but your studio versions will always have heart and soul, and they deserve to be all dressed up for dinner. Lose the mistakes with a clear conscience--show us what's in your head, by any means necessary. thumbsup

[Bob Olhsson]

There's an old saying:

You can get more stink'n from think'n than you can from drink'n but to feel is for real.

I look at it as a question of distraction from the quality of the listening experience of the recording. If something distracts because it's out of tune, go ahead and fix it but watch out that the cure doesn't become more of a distraction from how the recording feels than the disease.

Authentic distracting slop is every bit as much B.S. as something that has been tuned to the point of sounding like a sampling keyboard. Both completely miss the point that music is about communicating emotions and not just a head trip.

[Mertmo]

Mark and Bob, great posts!

[Unclenny]

Originally Posted by jasonwagner

Have you ever tried putting a time limit on your recording of songs? It's really easy to spend forever on stuff you shouldn't just because there is no time line. Sense of urgency can be very productive at times.

In my house I commit early and move ever onward.

That bass session was a blast!!

Originally Posted by Mertmo

Mark and Bob, great posts!

[Dean Roddey]

BTW, I think that you can do both, and I try to. Since you have that cool tool the DAW, you can use it to work out the structure of a song, then go back and do heartfelt performances over that structure, then just remove the structure. I think lots of folks do that.

You can cut-n-paste and tune and stretch and tempo that scratch track stuff all you want in order to work out the structure of the song, so that, by the time you are actually recording stuff, you know the song, know where the vocal will be and how to support it, how the parts will transition, etc...

So I've tried more and more to use the tools to my advantage to deal with that part of the creative prociess. Once I have that, the rest I find to be pretty enjoyable, even when difficult, because the structure is there, and you can just kick back on each track and play it all the way through and get a real performances. And even the very first tracks you lay down for real will have something to play to and be inspired by. If the song isn't pretty inspiring in that initial guitar/keyboards and vocal form, it's probably not ready anyway, right?

The thing that has sucked the most about my attempts at songs was that I was trying to create them on the fly. So the early parts didn't have any idea what the real structure of the song would be, or where the vocal would lie. So they sounded like what they were, just a guitar jam on top of which a song-like thing was placed. The section transitions were bad to non-existent, drums stepped on the vocal, there wasn't enough variety and instrument/vocal interaction, and all that stuff that normally bands would work out by just playing the song live.

I still have a long way to go, but getting serious about working out the structure and laying down a guide instrument and vocal track to make sure it works and resonates as a song really has started helping me a lot. On the one I'm working on now, I've done way more on this front than ever. I spent probably a week of nights working on the lyric, plus thinking about it while shopping, driving, etc... Then multiple nights just playing with chord progressions and melodies and tempos, and section transitions. Then a couple nights laying down the whole song as a scratch guitar track to really sing the lyric to, making sure it has a flow and some melodic oomph and that I could hit the notes in that key.

I feel so much more confident now to start recording this one, because it's like I've been playing it for a while already, and it's more like covering a song I really know and like than struggling to jam something out that I might be able to build a tune on top of.

Anyway, this is nothing everyone doesn't already know. I just was waiting for a compile to finish and was too lazy to get up. So I felt like blathering on for a while.

N.B. And, BTW, this is not the type of 'never make a commitment' problem that is so bad these days. It's a means to allow you to fully commit on every track, because you know what you want to play and how it will serve the structure of the song. The never commit thing seems to come from the opposite, i.e. just creating it on the fly so you don't know what the song actually is. Nothing wrong with doing that sometimes. There's no one way. But that seems to be a lot at the heart of the 'create the song in the mix' thing, to me.