Have you ever achieved "that sound" ?

RAMI said:
This might not be totally related to the original question, but maybe a bit.

I've always wondered this: Why is it that people always talk about "vintage" stuff as being the best (Old Gibsons, Fenders, mixing consoles, vintage compressors, etc......)....but I've never heard an old recording that actually sounds good. I mean, I know there are great recordings "for the time", but nothing from the 50's or 60's actually sounds great by today's standards. The best recordings of those eras sound great considering when they were made, but wouldn't cut it today. Who's guitars sounded good? Pete Townsend? No. George Harrison? Not really. Maybe SOME Hendrix and Clapton???? Not really much to choose from. Same with drum sound, especially. Overall mixes? Not much I can think of other than some trend setters, but in general, nothing sounded as amazing as the equipment should have made it sound if it was that good.
Click to expand...

I really disagree, for me it's the complete opposite. And good old recordings sound somehow more "real" for me
Like this:

Totally natural und "hifi" enough imo
 
Drums alone is a whole conversation by itself. Until...I don't know....1969 and John Bonham (am I forgetting someone else?) drums sounded shit. Even The Beatles, who were supposed to be the big innovators and the first to close-mic drums, don't really have any great drum sounds. There are a lot of INTERESTING sounds, but nothing that really stands out as outstanding.
Click to expand...

What is "amazing" or "great" sound, how does it differ from "interesting"
 
Dr.SpringReverb said:
What is "amazing" or "great" sound, how does it differ from "interesting"
Click to expand...
Something that sounds "interesting" doesn't necesarilly sound "good". Some of Ringo's drum sounds were "interesting" and "cool" to me, but not something that I would consider a "good" drum sound. But since they're all subjective terms, I'm not going to spend 3 pages discussing it with you just for the sake of having a nit-picking argument. Most drum sounds from the 60's wouldn't cut it in a modern mix. Agree, disagree, I don't care, it's all good man.
 
...and just to be clear, because I have nothing against Dr. Spring or anyone else that might agree or disagree with what I'm saying....I didn't really have a point, and I also didn't articulate what I wanted to say very well. I'm not even sure what my point is, so I shouldn't have said that Dr. Spring missed my point, because, to be honest "I" don't really even get my point. Sometimes I have verbal diarrhea and just spew forth before really thinking it out.

Back to the original topic. :cool:
 
RAMI said:
I didn't really have a point, and I also didn't articulate what I wanted to say very well. I'm not even sure what my point is, so I shouldn't have said that Dr. Spring missed my point, because, to be honest "I" don't really even get my point. Sometimes I have verbal diarrhea and just spew forth before really thinking it out.
Click to expand...
I thought you articulated your point well and I caught your point. I both agree and disagree with it, but only because there's a wide scope of drum sounds within a mix on records spanning 1960 to 1970. A lot of the drums on a wide variety of records across a number of genres wouldn't cut it even by the mid 70s. Some barely cut it on the records they were on in the 60s ! And it wasn't only the drums.
It occurs to me that there were two main reasons for that, aside from the technology.
Firstly, it was new and evolving. Engineers moved from recording entire outfits with one microphone to capturing performances with multiple mics and multiple tracks. I think there was a lot of thinking in the 40s and 50s that the drums were important to the artist but not the overall sound. After all, the artist was the one that the record label was pushing on the public, not the drummer. Often, the drummer was thought of as the timekeeper rather than an important musical element. So as long as the recording artist and band could hear the drums and stay in time, all was deemed OK. Also, dare I say it, many producers and engineers on both sides of the Atlantic simply didn't like or understand rock'n'roll and that spilled over into how some of them recorded those that made the records.
Secondly, the emphasis was the opposite to the way things turned after the Beatles. Bands eventually got together because they wanted to be "recording artists" and have hit records which was not the way many of the singers and bands began. Most began as performers. And as most of us know, performing on stage or in a room or hall is very different from recording. You just hear it so differently. These artists had to learn a whole new craft when it came to making records. It must have come as a shock to many of them to hear themselves recorded for the first few times. Learning how to translate their live sound onto recordings that could be played on record players and radios took a pretty serious leap of imagination. It's no coincidence or surprise to me that band members started to take more of an interest in the recording and mixing process and gained far more power than they initially had. As their demands stretched engineers and resources, so various developers pushed the technology to accommodate them.
I don't think there's a young engineer from the 60s that, had you offered them digital technology at the time, would have turned it down. Digital was the outcome of all they dreamed of back then.
Many of them just happened to fall in love with analogue along the way.
 
RAMI said:
It's the music itself that I find awesome.
Click to expand...
In relation to "older" and "newer" music, this is where I'm at. For me, the music recorded and the recording of the music are indivisible. If I love a song, I couldn't care less how it was recorded. The recording of it obviously hasn't gotten in way of me loving it.
 
Track Rat said:
I get sounds I'm happy with.
Click to expand...

fat_fleet said:
But I also think there are grains of truth about the tonal qualities of equipment- older tube amps, a real Fender Rhodes vs a digital sample....
Click to expand...

miroslav said:
I guess it's all about what we individually like and what gets under our skin during a particular decade.
Click to expand...
I call it playing within the range of the idea.
I'm not interested in sounding like anyone in particular but I am moved by the particular tones that various instrumentalists {on a huge variety of instruments} have come up with over the last 60 or so years.
So I look to approximate certain sounds. For example, there are certain snare sounds that pass over my head. The drumming on songs containing them may be great but the sonics of the snare don't stand out, particularly. But there are also some that turn up on a variety of songs and albums involving lots of different drummers that I really like and as I got a little more confident, I'd say to whoever was drumming, no, I don't want that snare sound, I want this one, because they were thinking of how it sounded to play whereas I'd be thinking in terms of what it was going to sound like recorded and in a mix of my vision.
Similar thing with organ and electric piano. The electric piano sounds I liked virtually always were played on Fender Rhodes, Wurlitzer or Yamahas so when I sold my Fender Rhodes, I got VSTis of the Fender and Wurlitzer. Same with organ. Although I quite like the Vox continental and Farfisa, the Hammond was the one that turned up on most of the organ tracks I liked so when I sold the Hammond, I got the B4 VSTi which gave me Hammond samples. There's only about 4 sounds on it that I like but that's all I need.
And with the electric guitar there have been so many tones that I've liked and with a combo of a couple of amps, a couple of pedals and a six and 12 string guitar, I can dredge out plenty of sounds that I really like. Same with bass. I have a 5 string electric and a 4 string acoustic bass guitar that you can plug in so with a combination of the bass or guitar amp, the odd effect { I use the Behringer version of the sans amp as an effects pedal as much as a sim}, DI, fingers or finger picks, mics, line outs, splitters and three way tracking etc, I can approximate lots of bass sounds that I might want to use for particular songs.
And so on and so forth.
They're all my sounds that I've come up with. But they're based on something I've heard elsewhere and I'm using memory alone to approximate. When I do listen to the songs that may have inspired a particular instrument sound, I always find that it actually is nothing like my approximation ! :D
 
Over my many years of making music, the idea of trying to recreate someones sound never occurred to me. I just played the way I played.
 
I stumbled across a "sound" when recording.
I did three tracks in a collaboration with GregL, Ido1957 & JoeyM.
The resultant "sound" was rather Berlin Era Bowie.
It was not intentional, but the result of individual sounds blending and in no small part to Joe singing in a baritone that was, in hindsight, Bowiesque.
If you want to suss it out look up pygmy beat on soundclick or go HERE & try The Master, Haemophilliac Heroes and Thanatogenous. They get more into THAT sound as they go from the 1st to third.
An English producer noted the "sound" and offered to do the Eventide thing to the snare on one of the songs to make it even more that "sound". That version isn't on s/click.
I haven't tried for or accidentally found that sound since then - simply because the truly important components - Greg, Gerry & Joe - haven't come together in a collaboration with me since then as music, life and work have taken us on our own journeys.
 
Interesting question. In my experience, I've found that a sound or sounds on an album I like (but wasn't involved with the recording process) are largely based on my own perception of the sound(s) and said perception has little to do with how the sound was actually created. I've found that most times, the particular sound I want to replicate or re-create is often due to a combination of things going on in the track, and that what I'm hearing is probably different from what another listener hears or perceives.

During the past 20 years of writing/recording/producing music, I've been fortunate enough to work with/learn from some of the folks who worked on some of the albums whose sounds I wished I could replicate, and when I asked them how they achieved a certain sound, many times they had no idea what I was talking about. For example, I once asked a fairly well-known engineer/producer how he captured this really great dirty bass tone. It had a punch and a grind to it that I could NOT get right, no matter how many different basses I tried through countless different amps and pedals. Turns out, it wasn't a bass guitar at all but a Rhodes keyboard sent through a few pedals, a guitar amp, and a bass amp. But I heard it as a bass guitar: my perception of the sound ironically worked directly against my efforts to replicate it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top