Is There Such Thing As "Cheating?"

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Melvin McSnatch

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I'm writing a home recording blog post for a class and I need some input.

Can musicians use digital recording and editing to "cheat" by making them sound better? Is copy & paste, pitch correction, or even overdubbing - cheating? Is it fair to present the listener with an "unnatural" performance? Where do you draw the line? And if no post-performance manipulation can make someone sound better, why not?
 
Technology lowers the entry barriers (those being talent and money) for people to produce music. The result is a huge amount of music available compared to the pre-digital age. I wouldn't call it cheating, but you now have to sort through way more crap to find the good stuff. I realize that is subjective, but it's hard to argue. Just because anyone can make a record doesn't mean they should.

Here's another angle: Some people devote their life to learning an instrument. People don't do that as much anymore. There's less of a need. Live acts use tracks instead of musicians, studios use samples.

Is that good? Depends. Better for the masses who want to dabble. Worse for the real artists, and the future of art itself in my opinion. Recording is going the same direction. Recordists were called engineers for a reason at one time. Now that term is laughable.
 
Recording is cheating. Using anything other than human voice and unmodified rocks and branches is cheating. Music theory is cheating. Electronic tuners are cheating. Opposable thumbs are cheating.

Either it's all cheating or none of it is. Any line you draw is arbitrary. People who ask questions like this are dependent on some "authority" to spoon feed them opinions. They are followers rather than leaders, consumers rather than creators, Billy Squier and Whitesnake rather than Led Zeppelin, every "grunge" band after Nirvana. It's never cheating when you make the rules. In music the closest thing to cheating is following the rules, but that is more laziness than cheating.

Permission to quote me in your blog is denied. That would be cheating.
 
I don't think it's cheating, necessarily... Honestly, if you're recording something in any way other than completely live; no E.F.X, no pitch correction, no level automation... And you're doing it all in one take, it's technically cheating. You do as many takes as you want until you get it perfect; you just have to pay for all the time those takes are. So even if you do suck, if you have a musical bone in your body, you can get at least one take right out of 100. Then it's just punch-ins until fingers break.
People accuse auto-tune of killing music (which it hasn't... Just most of the talent), but if used properly, it's not bad at all. I mean, you can be a perfect vocalist, but if you're sick and can't hit all your notes perfectly, you're paying to be there for every single take you have to do.
Honestly, there's a point where the line can be drawn between "correction" and "surgical," but it's rare to find a group of people that agree on where that line is.
So yes, it is cheating to use anything like that. But in all honesty, it's simply time saving. It's unrealistic to expect people to be perfect, but that's where consumers are at now, so you're going to have to make a perfect recording if you're going to release it to the public with any serious hope of it going over well.
 
The Beatles made their first album in a day, cut live to 2-tracks. Their last album took months and is heavily edited and processed. They're both great albums.

And everything in the studio is made to make the performer sound better; it's certainly not made to make them sound worse! You can make a good performer sound better, but there are no tools that can fix an inherently bad performer playing an inherently bad song.
 
I was just watching Dave Grohl talking on the Grammy Awards --

A) It is, after all, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences -- Not live performance, not awesome lighting design. Therefore, anything goes as far as I'm concerned.

B) That said - What dave said gives me nothing but huge amounts of respect -- They recorded their new album in a garage with microphones and a tape machine. "Real" and "human" and "soul" are really starting to disappear from a lot of music.

Heck, when I want to listen to MUSIC now, half the time I'll listen to country. I never really liked country. But there are still musicians and singers. Sure, there's way too much autotuning going on - But with a lot of recordings, there's still at least some measure of human element in there. Not that there isn't some bad-ass rock recordings out there - But the band-in-a-box drum-machine robo-voice stuff just doesn't really interest me anymore. Sure, I can get into some Daft Punk and appreciate electronica and what not. But I miss humans using instruments to make records.

I did Abney Park's new album late last year (Off the Grid). I wasn't nearly as psyched about it as my brother and sister-in law (both huge AP fans), but I was a "sorta" fan. But when I heard the mixes -- and put it together with the title -- It wasn't their usual electronica-driven steampunk. There were real instruments - Drums and everything. It's as close to Abney Park "Unplugged" as I've ever heard. Even the vocals were more "sung" (for lack of a better term - If you're into AP, you know what I'm talking about). I was listening to tunes - many tunes they already released - in a completely different way than I've ever heard them. And it was friggin' cool, let me tell you.

I don't think all the "help" is necessarily "cheating" - But I think it can change the dynamic from setting out with the purpose of "making the record that's in your head" to "messing around with a bunch of stuff and seeing what happens."
 
Reading about the making of "Revolver" in 1966 was really fascinating because it was that point in recording history where a number of revolutionary changes took place, partly because of the changes that were in the air {technology meets young engineers meets aware artists meets drugs meets loosening record labels....}, partly because of the stinginess of EMI. And when Ken Townsend came up with ADT {artificial double tracking}, John Lennon and George Harrison liked it so much that all their vocals for the next few years were treated with it. It wasn't their 'voice'. Was it cheating ?
Almost 20 years previous, when Les Paul was looking at ways in which he could double the guitars and have harmonic guitar lines and have Mary Ford sing different parts, sometimes in harmony, sometimes not, was this evidence of a cheating nefarious ne'er do well trying to work out how he could con the public ?
In the cinematic equivalent, were the great effects advances of "The wizard of Oz" and "King Kong" cheating ?
The reality is that much of the arts are essentially concerned with effect and appreciation and not process. Especially those involving technology.
Bouldersoundguy has it right when he says recording in itself is "cheating" because only the very rich with masses of money and space would have the means to have a performing troop at their beck and call ! The rest of us make do with records !
Of course, we use the word "cheating" highly sarcastically because it isn't cheating at all. What's cheating ? Cheating how ? Cheating who ? Cheating what ? A punter wants a piece of music they'll enjoy. There are many roads that lead to the creation of that piece. Some more purist than others, but that's highly subjective.
Personally, there are aspects of modern recording that I can't stand. But then, I wouldn't have dug them even if they had happened in 1966. I am of the era where singers sang, instrumentalists played their instruments.....yet running alongside this was a whole stream of experimentation with electronica and new instruments {mellotrons, synthesizers}, recording techniques, fusion with other art forms and musical genres giving rise to new ones etc and as far as music went it all had it's place and you either liked it or you didn't.
It is, in my view, naive to declare that you can't polish a turd ~ close to 50 years of recording would seem to indicate otherwise ~ and it is precisely because of the sort of technology that the OP alludes to that you can.
 
Melvin McSnatch said:
Can musicians use digital recording and editing to "cheat" by making them sound better?
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Why, yes. Editing out a flub or a weakly hit and barely audible bass guitar note that would otherwise break up the dynamic flow of the piece and replacing it with the same note from elsewhere in the performance makes the whole sound better. In the early days of recording, if one person made a tiny error, an otherwise great take had to be scrapped and started over. I see no virtue in that. But it's not cheating and by the end of the 50s, EMI were already doing 'drop ins' with a second tape machine to fix tiny errors.
Melvin McSnatch said:
Is copy & paste, pitch correction, or even overdubbing - cheating?
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I was doing a song with a friend in which he was drumming and I was doing a guide guitar. We got down a great take, it had the requisite drum feel and I was happy with it. It was only when, a week or so later, I looked at the lyric sheet, that I realized we'd forgotten a verse ! Well, forget about dragging my mate back, I wanted to lay down the guitars there and then. I wasn't up for waiting a month for him to come down. So I just copied and inserted one of the verses. I made sure all the other instruments that go on the copied verse are sufficiently different and distracting so you'd never know.
Personally, I don't use pitch correction because I make people sing ! If they miss the note, we do it again. But I have no problem with it in principle. A friend of mine had a friend of ours from Zambia doing some vocals and she missed a couple of notes but had flown home by the time he could get around to working on anything. Pitch correction was essential. I just hate it when it's deliberately used as an effect {it's valid to use it that way and my dislike is purely personal, the same way I dislike black or red nail varnish on a woman}. Otherwise, I never know when it's been used !
Many home recorders are like DIY people. We are not often people who do this for a living. But given some time and thought that is not afforded to a pro, home recorders can come up with stuff that is easilly the equal and sometimes better than their full time counterparts. Because one's stuff is at home and you can afford to strike when inspiration hits, you have no choice but to overdub. So no, it isn't cheating. An interesting question would be "If you had every instrumentalist and vocalist at your disposal whenever you wanted and they were willing to help out and rehearse, would you still overdub ?"

Melvin McSnatch said:
Is it fair to present the listener with an "unnatural" performance? Where do you draw the line?
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Is it natural to fly through the sky from one country to another ? Is it natural to communicate in seconds with people on the other side of the world ? Is it natural to have a band play it's songs in your van or car or kitchen ? Is a plank of wood with metal strings being fashioned into notes natural ?
'Natural' doesn't come into it. Turning on a telly or a stereo is arguably unnatural. Printing or surfing the net equally so.
The listener isn't concerned with 'natural' or 'unnatural', but 'like' and 'dislike'.
I don't know where I draw the line but when and where I do, it will be according to my own likes and dislikes, as irrational and arbitary as they may be.

Melvin McSnatch said:
And if no post-performance manipulation can make someone sound better, why not?
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Well, to be honest with you, I don't think it's a 'given' that post performance manipulation makes someone sound better. Sometimes, it has the opposite effect. Sometimes it can bring out timbres that become exaggerated and can really irritate. On various instruments, post performance manipulation can be a positive downer. Often I've left something raw after trying out various things because it just sounds better the way it was ! All the things we do to drums don't guarantee a great sound. Sometimes, they just sound better raw and uncontrolled and dynamic.
I think sometimes, it's just a mindset we get into, "must do this and that to it".
 
art evolves and changes as the available techniques change.

Look at photography ....... 200 years ago painters would have called that cheating.
Now it's an artform all its' own.

Yes ..... it irks me when someone like Taylor Swift who can't sing for shit becomes and continues to be a big star thru the use of autotune because otherwise the fact that she can't sing would be so obvious.
That's cheating to me.

OTOH ..... look at the creative ways such techniques have been put to.
I WISH we'd had this stuff 40 years ago when I first started.
There's no putting the genie back in the bottle ...... it ends up being the consumers decision as to which is art they like and which isn't.
So far they don't seem to care at all.
 
Cheating is getting someone else to do your homework for you... so I hope you will cite your sources in the finished work.

I don't think these polorised arguments are helpful - in the first instance recording is about capturing as natural and accurate a sound as possible, digital just makes that easier and less expensive. What you do with the sound thereafter is part the creative process, It may have taken the Beatles a day to record Please Please Me, I'll bet it wasn't released the next day, there would have followed a long process of editing and improving prior to the finished product hitting the streets.

I did read an article about The Foo Fighters latest and although they claim it was recorded "at home" It looked a lot like a pro studio to me, If I had that gear in my house i'd give up work.

No one would say that a painter should make a photographic likeness of their model it's about a creative process - not about cheating.

EXCEPT AUTOTUNE! thats deffo cheating!!!
 
For me ..... It usta be if you couldn't play the songs that you recorded in the studio live than it was *studio magic* or if you will cheating.
Then one day this album came along with the title of *Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band*. Then I had a whole new look on recorded music.
 
Is recording cheating? No more so than an artist painting a picture, being able to take as much time as he wishs to consider where to add a color, change his mind and over paint and "edit" his painting. The reverse of that would be performance art where an artist would paint his masterpiece in real time in front of an audience. I truely belive that if you're a slug as a musician, no amount of punching in and autotune is going to make you sound "great".
 
First off, I think that in the creative fields such as making/recording/producing music, photography, painting, etc. there is no such thing as "cheating." It's merely an artist expressing himself or herself, so how can one "cheat" that? No matter the tools you use, whether it's editing or copying or pasting or whatever, you aren't cheating. They're just tools to use in the journey towards the master creation! Even the despicable autotune.


Is it cheating if I use a hammer and saw to build a new desk for myself? No, because they are just tools that go toward the final creation.

I think when a lot of people refer to editing and plug-ins and such as "cheating" really they are talking about "deceiving." Like Moresound said, these people hate such tools because they aren't reproducible at a live concert! I guess that's understandable--what the product sounds like isn't what you've played. But then one must ask...am I in for the "rawness" of the track, or I am in it for the auditory beauty of it all?
 
This is one of those threads that makes my brain attempt a half-nelson on my spinal cord. Cheating???? Did somebody pass ACTA when I wasn't looking? Just call your efforts 'art' and POOF! it's art. There is no 'cheating' in art. Copyright violations, yes, but no cheating.
 
In most case, studio recording is not about *documenting* a live recording from source, direct to final distribution medium, and not doing anything to it to enhance/change it in-between. It's a production, often realized in the studio during the process of recording.

Sure...like some have said, when you use studio tools to create an absolute "fake" product, many would call it cheating --- the most famous being the Milli Vanilli scandal, however, as others have pointed out, much of what happens in a studio IS about altering/improving/creating something MORE than just what the source in front of the mics provided.

Much of it has to do with degrees and subjective opinion.
Certainly today's digital tools allow a greater/finer amount of audio manipulation, but if it falls within the artist's "vision" (and overall ability) then IMO it's just another step in the production.
Heck...what's the difference between playing a part 20 times until you get lucky and "nail it" once VS playing it 5 times really well, and making a comp of the takes...? Which of those two is "cheating"...? Probably both...or neither.
I love digital because of the editing possibilities, and I hate digital because of the editing possibilities (it's a lot of work)...but I figure since I'm editing my own music, then it's still me creating something with the tools at hand. You can fine-tune things to a much greater level with digital editing, which allows you to improve the quality of the final product.
Is that cheating...???
If it is...we are all doing it. :)

In live performances, the tools are similar but used for a different reason. A major artists doesn't want a "glitch" on stage, since they can't stop and start over like in a studio, so they use some help if needed...stuff like autotune, or they even lip-sync to prerecorded music so they can focus on the dancing...etc.
I think if they sound absolutely awful all the time without a lot of help...then it's closer to cheating than "helping".
 
Thanks for all the great comments guys. Call it cheating, deception, illusion, processing or whatever term fits your discourse or philosophy best. I just want to clarify I'm writing an article for school about what non-musicians expect a recording to be and what they actually are. (No comments will be used without permission, but if you have a thought you'd like to be included, please PM me.)

Can you think of any groups or artists that are notorious for terrible live performances compared to their studio albums?
 
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