Could you polish turds ?

Guitargodgt said:
I turned this into a listenable (sort of, that statement is very subjective) song. Do I win anything?

Biggest fail ever period.

Yes I did indeed have a group of kids come in and record this, straight face.
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All they had to do was claim it was avant garde freeform metal or some such epithet ! Maybe they could use this to ferret out Osaama Bin Laden......
In the OP, I wasn't so much thinking of out of time untogether playing as much as stuff that sonically was off, you know, distorted, drowned in effects that couldn't be removed, bits too quiet, some parts overly hissy, that kind of thing.
 
tmix said:
OMG! Dude.......(LOL) ...you ought to win something for not spontaneously exploding....I don't know if you really meant to title it Holly...but I would hate to be her...and what was being done to her....and your ears...(LOL)
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I admit it was hard to not laugh when they recorded that.
 
That song still came out pretty bad even after the fact. That clip was what they came in and recorded right off the get go. I REALLY wish I had taken pictures of the drumset, mega lol content.
 
Will fecale matter? Faeces it folks,traditional svengali managers/developers/opportunists/radio/record company/PR executives have it that taking a piece of prerecorded choliform and added some currently popular tweak such as, at different times, theromine, styrophone, reverb, double speed vocal, fuzz guitar, moog synth (sorry kc), pedal steel guitar, autotuned vocals can cash in for a short period. In which time sufficient grist is added to the turntable to polish many, many things that are less than savoury into the grain of popular memory.
Can I do it? No, no skill, no killer instinct and less inclination.
 
rayc said:
Will fecale matter? Faeces it folks,traditional svengali managers/developers/opportunists/radio/record company/PR executives have it that taking a piece of prerecorded choliform and added some currently popular tweak such as, at different times, theromine, styrophone, reverb, double speed vocal, fuzz guitar, moog synth (sorry kc), pedal steel guitar, autotuned vocals can cash in for a short period. In which time sufficient grist is added to the turntable to polish many, many things that are less than savoury into the grain of popular memory.
Can I do it? No, no skill, no killer instinct and less inclination.
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Whoa, my brain just made a turd.......
 
Being as it has been referenced a few times:



Can I personally polish a turd? No. I can't even polish a gem if I get my hands on it.
 
grimtraveller said:
All they had to do was claim it was avant garde freeform metal or some such epithet ! Maybe they could use this to ferret out Osaama Bin Laden......
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maestro_dmc said:
Wow. looks like it worked.
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Erockrazor said:
I think it worked.
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You know, when I made that post, I added the Bin Laden thing as an afterthought. I was vaguely thinking of when the army tried to 'unsettle' General Noriega with heavy rock being blasted at where he was holed up or something like that. I was thinking of Guitargodgt's sample being blasted through the caves of Afganisthan or somewhere. I was just leaving the house to go out with the family when I saw Erockrazor and maestro's posts. I didn't know what they meant, I had my mind on other things. Around 8.30 I happened to turn on the news to get the kids to go to bed and I caught the breaking news of his death. Blimey.

Right, back to the topic at hand !
 
I can't even polish my own tracks - which are already awesome to begin with so I just don't understand it...

but I think the mythbusters estimate is probably right - about 3 days of work to polish a turd...

I'm sure getting people to re-record really bad tracks would be much faster that over-producing. But i guess sometimes thats impossible.
 
black_betty said:
I wonder if anyone's ever actually attempted to literally polish a turd
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grimtraveller said:
I think the saying applies in musical circles because something like a turd can't be polished whether moist or hard. It's not given to polishing, unlike say, glass or wood. Personally, I think it's a flawed saying because the last 70 years have shown that, musically speaking, you can polish turds.
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You'd be amazed at what a nice coat of lacquer can do!
 
Doesn't it depend on the type of music? I mean, if you completely dropped the backing shenanegins out of a lot of modern pop music it would sound god-awful and Lady Gaga would be extremely silly sounding "ohh la laa raa gaa gaa" without the sonic superthud synthy dance pop and superlayered vocals and so on. Buuuuut... (and here's my stone-age rock elitism showing) I'm pretty sure you could get a listenable recording of a real, actual band playing a real actual song that isn't all cut-and-pasted into reality with nothing but a couple of microphones. It would be a "turd" by modern radio standards without the guitar parts stereo doubled, the bass fixed and tightened, without the vdrum perfections and point editing and precision EQs and all the crap that makes mediocre songs sound like good radio play... but a good band playing a good song well together at a reasonable volume isn't very hard to capture something listenable from, mic bleeds or not.

Once that turd is captured, I guess it could be polished to even out the relative levels, compress the dynamics to be more listenable, pull up/down EQs to make things stand out or not, that's all good simple polish and might help it be more radio friendly, but it would still be a turd, just a turd that still sounds good, if not 'standard', still listenable.
 
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