I can understand your aversion to current pop and the crap that tries passing itself off as "R&B" these days. A lot of empty calories with not a lot of substance there.
I also am not a big fan of country, but there's a *lot* to be learned - both musically and technically on an engineering level - from much of the non-pop stuff coming out of Memphis and Nashville. Some of the world's best session musicians and engineers call those places home, and thay have stuff to teach people with any taste in music.
Check out the catalogs from Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt (with a special nod to the "supergroup" album Hiatt was involved in called "Little Village") for starters.
To hear how they did things old school and got great sounds without the use of compressors, MBCs EQs or any of that other crap that just messes things up today, check out some of the jazz and jazz-pop stuff from the late 50s/early 60s currently being offered on the Verve label. Look up some Oscar Peterson or Duke Ellington or Miles Davis from that 1956-64 period for some really ureat sounding recordings that put much of today's big budget-big studio stuff to shame, sonic quality wise.
Here's three singles, one from the 70s, one from the 80s, and one from the 90s, all entirely different genres (70s disco-rock, 80s synth pop-reggae, and 90s alt world), but all very nice examples of how to arrange and multitrack a hundred different tracks and still get clean results and great balance across the spectrum: Santa Esmeralda "Please Don't Let me Be Misunderstood", Burning Sensation "Belly of the Whale"*, and Poi Dog Pondering "Complicated" (the studio version).
For pure sonic cleanliness in production, if not always in technology, for me it's hard to beat almost anything Bob Marley did.
For a sound that almost makes me cry in it's beauty, check out the sound track to the movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon".
For a couple of the best produced and engineered albums in the last couple of years in the hip hop field, check out the "Fishscale" album by Ghostface Killah (one of the finest albums of the decade, IMHO, and I'm not even much of a fan of hip hop), and the self-titled album by Gnarles Barkley.
I'll leave all the classic, rock and stuff alone, as there are a billion posts on this BBS talking abut that already. In the meantime, I think the above will get you started in more directions than you care to
.
Also, I highly recommend checking out the website Pandora (
www.pandora.com). Put stuff you like on there and it does a very interesting job, based upon a sophisticated musical algorithm, of coming up with suggestions on what else you might like that you have never heard before. A very interesting and cool website.
G.
*Depending on which vinyl or CD print you get of this track - this song shows up on several different compilation CDs, and some are mastered better/different than others - if you have a good playback setup there is some 3D imaging in some versions of this song that is rather cool. Things like the main guitar sounding like it is eminating from a point a few inces or a few feet (depending upon the scale of your playback system) *in front* of the loudspeaker. I don't know if this is an intentional effect or not, but it's very interesting when it happens.