T
Terry Wetzel
New member
We can only hope. It can't get much worse!
gcapel
boom box recordings
All this Lo-fi vs whatever is proof that people will like the artist/buy the album no matter the recording method / producer.
I heard that Bon Iver album. Dude shut himself in a cabin with a SM57 and what ever he had and recorded an album and released it. It sold a shit load.
I think it all depends on the type of music it is. THat shit was depressing.
THat folky indie crowd can get away with that lofi stuff. But anything in the pop / rap / r&b genre wouldn't do it unless they all were doing it.
I heard that Bon Iver album. Dude shut himself in a cabin with a SM57 and what ever he had and recorded an album and released it. It sold a shit load.
I think it all depends on the type of music it is. THat shit was depressing.
THat folky indie crowd can get away with that lofi stuff. But anything in the pop / rap / r&b genre wouldn't do it unless they all were doing it.
T
Terry Wetzel
New member
Just my opinion.
I believe that the problem, if there is one is the lack of good influences for young musicians to aspire to. Granted there are a lot of less than prolific guitarists and singers out there but there always have been in the world of pop music. I use the term pop but let's face it, the big seller is Rock n' roll! It's been that way since 1956 and although the basic form will continue to change, it is the bread winner of the music business. There have always been good,bad and mediocre records. Just as in art, beauty is up to the individual. one man's poison is anothers cure. There have and always will be promoters in the record business who are quick to grab a commercial oportunity such as teenage trends in music and other fields. The record business, especially R.& R. will always be for and about the young, potential music buyer as long as they have money in their pocket. I'm not knocking commerciality. It's the bastard twin of the record business and a necessary evil if the music is to continue. Does anyone remember Dick Clark and his small army of young handsome pretty boys that were promoted to a t.v. audience of millions of gullible, and possibly tone deaf teens in the 1950's? Fabian couldn't carry a tune in a bucket! Yet he sold millions of records. Most parents thought Elvis Presley was terrible, I thought he was terrific! The point I'm trying to make is, what goes around comes around. I'm sure there are yet to be discovered young musicians and singers out there who will grow in to yet to be discovered giants in the business! Good things come to those who wait! The main difference now is the Internet. These kids are not waiting to be disscovered. They are going after it from a different direction but, in the end they still have to sell their souls to a record company!
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
Does anybody really believe the the Strokes or the White Stripes or the Ravonettes or any other such similar "lo-fi" act sounds the way they do because the budget forced them to sound that way? Not a chance. Each of those is/was a conscious production decision, and each one of those sounds could just as easily be gotten with a Presonus interface in a basement or an AMS board in a quality room. The "lo-fi"-ness of those records is an illusion created by conscious arrangement and production choices, and has nothing to do with an actual paucity of fidelity in their recording conditions or budget. Most of the stuff coming out of this board on $100 mAudio/MXL crap has a higher fidelity "sound" than the bands we're talking about.
Somebody already alluded to this - sorry, I can't find the specific post now - but it's almost all a generational rebellion thing. One generation sets it's standards and spends a decade or two refining and polishing the sound. The next generation comes along and - based on an entirely mis-guided Logan's Run attitude that is encouraged by the decision-makers involved solely to exploit such tendencies in order to make money (A/R guys, promoters, label merchandisers, etc.) - insist on having their own identity for their own generation. Once the fruits of the previous generation have evolved and refined to include more sophisticated production values, the new generation respond with a "fuck you" rawness.
This has been going on for at least 80 years years, from the rise of blues to jump to beebop to British invasion to punk to grunge to street rap to today's 'screw the music, as long as you have a recording' meSpacers. So far every one of those movements has managed to grow, mature, and sophisticize, and eventually be replaced by the Next Big Thing, except for the meSpacers, which is what we're still in the middle of experiencing.
G.
Somebody already alluded to this - sorry, I can't find the specific post now - but it's almost all a generational rebellion thing. One generation sets it's standards and spends a decade or two refining and polishing the sound. The next generation comes along and - based on an entirely mis-guided Logan's Run attitude that is encouraged by the decision-makers involved solely to exploit such tendencies in order to make money (A/R guys, promoters, label merchandisers, etc.) - insist on having their own identity for their own generation. Once the fruits of the previous generation have evolved and refined to include more sophisticated production values, the new generation respond with a "fuck you" rawness.
This has been going on for at least 80 years years, from the rise of blues to jump to beebop to British invasion to punk to grunge to street rap to today's 'screw the music, as long as you have a recording' meSpacers. So far every one of those movements has managed to grow, mature, and sophisticize, and eventually be replaced by the Next Big Thing, except for the meSpacers, which is what we're still in the middle of experiencing.
G.
DrewPeterson7
Sage of the Order
Initially, in the case of the White Stripes, yes. They recorded the first album or two themselves in their attic, I think, on a reel-to-reel machine with a couple mics, and basically nothing else. It was partly because they chose to do it that way, but arguably at first they couldn't have afforded anything else. Now, it's totally a production choice.
Addressing the OP... I think first that there will always be guys who do something a certain way because that's what they like, and they don't care about prevailing trends. I mean, I know you're a big Tom Waits fan too - you can hear a LITTLE bit of an influence of prevailing trends in his music (his 80's work was a hair more "clean" sounding, then the 90's hit and Bone Machine got pretty grungy and fucked up sounding), but pretty much what we're dealing with here is a guy who really likes gritty, broken-up, funky sounding recordings, and would rather beat on 2x4s than record a pristine drum track. Tastes could shift to pristinely produced, immaculately recorded and mixed lush opuses, and Tom Waits would still be banging on random shit and intentionally distorting his voice a bit while tracking.
But, with that caveat, yeah, I think it's cyclical to a certain extent. The 80's were pretty polished - everything was reverb-y, you had these huge booming drum sounds, big crunchy yet "polished" sounding guitars, tight vocal harmonies, and an emphasis on perfect, occasionally showy, musicianship. Then the 90's hit and arguably the first "breakout" band, Nirvana, started doing almost the complete opposite. Little to no vocal harmonization, raw, in your face guitars, relatively dry drums (compared to, say, Twisted Sister) that got drier with time, and a production ethos that sounded almost like three guys could have tracked it live.
That sounded, after a decade of heavily produced albums, remarkably "fresh" and "edgy" and "bold," and then for the next decade, very live, underproduced-sounding albums were sort of the de facto way to make a rock record. Over time the trend was to take that further and further, and eventually you got bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes where the recording "sound" almost seemed as much as an afterthought as anything, like there was an intentional disregard towards making a "good sounding" album. For some bands/albums, that was actually pretty cool (try to imagine the White Stripes doing "My Doorbell" in the production style of a Whitesnake album - it doesn't work). However, I think we're approaching a limit where I don't know how much farther you can take that - the Stripes are about as minimal as one can get, and some of the bands who were pushing the underproduced thing have kind of gone full circle a bit - listen to the Killers.
So, yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if in the next decade the "commonly accepted" style is going to go around back towards an immaculate production focus.
However, for guys like us in the trenches, so to speak, recording in the privacy of our houses, I think none of this matters. If you want to record a multi-platinum pop hit, well, arguably we all know we're wasting our time, so it doesn't matter so much whether we're in line with the "popular" styles or not. Fuck, I'm making an instrumental rock/hate-to-use-the-term-but-"shred" album, and those haven't sold since the 80's for anyone whose name wasn't Satriani or Vai.
So, in some level, I think that's kind of empowering - neither you nor I are probably capable of the sheen of a Britney Spears album, but that doesn't matter since I suspect neither of us are after that sound. We're free to make an album sound exactly the way we want, and if for you that means going for a cleanly produced sound, then neither you nor I should care about what the guys at Rolling Stone think about that. For me, I'm a product of the early 90's, plus my dad's record collection (the Stones' "Beggar's Banquet" is argubaly the reason I'm a music lover today), and while I've come to appreciate cleanly produced albums (and certainly want tight musicianship on mine), I also tend to gravitate towards a fairly live, organic sort of sound, with just a bit of edge and chaos thrown in there (I blame Porcupine Tree and Tom Waits - you in particular ought to check out a PT album or two, either "In Absentia" or "Deadwing," as while they're a bit heavier than your normal fare, I suspect, I also bet you'd appreciate the production - very clean, layered, rich, and lush, but Steven Wilson is just as much a Waits fanboi as I am and there's the occasional element of pure noise that comes drifting in here and there. It's cool as hell).
I don't know why I'm gradually starting to just rant about the empowerment that comes from knowing you're free to disregard prevailing trends - lots of coffee on a slow day at work, I suppose - but it's worth thinking about - how much does it REALLY matter if "raw" albums are trendy and "well produced" ones aren't, if you're not trying to crack top-40 radio? Just do what you love, man, and fuck the details.
darrin_h2000
Banned
Well...do you really think a pro studio is run like a home studio?...its a buisness and you dont get paid until its done...you crank it out like its a factory and keep a consistant quality product...and at that level a days work can involve a few projects...you would know this if you were ever an intern.
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
While that's true, Drew, I postulate that their gear and location had very little to do with their sound. Did it contribute a little, maybe? Sure. But 90% of what the listener hears as "lo-fi" are their arrangement and production choices.
Again, I'll say that most of what comes out of the folks on this BBS with just as basic - or often worse - gear do not sound anything near as <quote> lo-fi <endquote> as Jack White purposely wanted to sound.
I bolded "purposely", because that's the difference. Most folks here with their entry-level gear are striving to NOT sound lo-fi. Jackie boy, OTOH, was purposely going for that sound.
G.
TeyshaBlue
It's the smell..
Having owned two, I'll tell you they can and will be run in a wide variety of modes. You would know this if you weren't trying to act like a douche to WS.
TeyshaBlue
It's the smell..
miroslav
Cosmic Cowboy
Yes...this is the crux of what I was talking about and not just about recording Lo-Fi out of any inexperience.
As I said earlier...it seems the whole Lo-Fi approach came out of rebellion toward the polished/produced records of the 70s/80s...and following on the heels of "Grunge" music came Lo-Fi recording.
So...will there be a return to a more produced sound...or will Lo-Fi stay strong?
And I do understand that neither is an absolute...there are produced records already, but not as a "movement" like Lo-Fi seems to be.
Way back in that day...the so-called Lo-Fi was NOT the result of any conscious choices...but mostly due to a lack of Hi-Q gear/techniques, however in the 70s recording and gear hit it's “golden age”, which ushered in the heavily produced sounds.
Now...even though gear is more prevalent than ever and available to many for cheap...there is still a big Lo-Fi movement.
YorkshireTrippe
New member
over-produced music will allways dominate the pop charts, even through this whole Strokes lofi phenomenon, the charts (or at least our UK ones anyway) have still kept a good slab of Phil Spector-esque wash. Its not going to go away miroslav sorry.
The LoFi trend as we know it now will most likely die out, as all trends do, but then it will come back in a different form. I mean its a hugely encapsulating word..."Lo Fi"...there's more than one way you can strip a recording process down and I'm sure the next way will be different
DrewPeterson7
Sage of the Order
No argument there, at all. I think it was a very good production choice, too, FWIW.
Miroslav - also, I guess I should mention that I tend to like lo-fi elements in an otherwise hi-fi recording - the occasional filtered-out sounding vocal line or percussion element, a background part with a bit of intentionally shitty-sounding distortion on it, the occasional turntable click-and-pop effect within an otherwise nice mix, etc.
I'd mentioned Porcupine Tree earlier (a lot of their synths, especially, are kind of funky sounding, which works pretty damned well with their otherwise immaculate mixes), but one of my favorite sounding albums is the first Chroma Key disc, "Dead Air For Radios." IIRC it's out of print, but you can stream the whole thing hi-fi from www.chromakey.com or you could the last time I checked, anyway.
It's an amazing sounding album, partly because a lot of the songwriting really is pretty spectacular ("Colorblind," "America the Video," and "Mouse (Now Watch What Happens)" are all incredible songs), but also because of the production, which I find incredibly powerful - it's, well, if you wanted to be rude you could call it synth-pop, but it's this dark, downtempo, brooding album, full of synth washes and sparse piano and drum parts, and through the swirl of sound comes this incredibly empty, washed-out sounding voice, that more often than not becomes further filtered in places. You get these great, pure piano and synth sounds, and then suddenly through it all will come something distorted to hell and back. Kevin Moore is also a big fan of sampling - there's a lot of grainy, poorly recorded (on "mouse," it opens with a sample of a message his roommate left him on his answering machine, and a number of songs have clips from interviews he recorded on a handheld tape recorder) vocals sampled and mixed in.
It's a beautiful sounding album, because it's alternately so pure and so, well, destroyed sounding at once.
miroslav
Cosmic Cowboy
You're talking about a certain type of "ear candy"...which I agree, is a nice way to add texture to a production. Having something gritty on top of a smoother background creates depth and 3-D like quality.
But it seems the Lo-Fi movement is about trashing every element….in most cases.
DrewPeterson7
Sage of the Order
I agree completely. I guess all I'm saying is it doesn't hurt to take a bit from here and there and bring it into a broader sound.
Listen to that Chroma Key album, if you've got the time/are around a decent set of speakers. I'm guessing we're from completely different musical generations, but I'd be curious to hear what you think of the way it's produced. I think it's brilliant - it'd never work for the stuff I'm writing, at least to that degree, but it's inspirational nonetheless.
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
It depends upon how you really want to parse the timeline, I think.
As I proposed earlier, I think everything happens in cycles. And yes, I agree that there is a *segment* of the music scene, mostly somewhere in those very fuzzy genre descriptions usually referred to as "alternative" and "college station rock", for which the "lo-fi" sound you're talking about has recently been in vogue. Tastes will cycle around to something a bit different (I don't claim to be able to predict exactly what) in those areas eventually as a new generation fills their demographic and wants their own identity.
But not everything is one single, neat cycle either. There are lots of overlapping cycles all over the pace. Because of this, the "low-fi" sound has been around as an undercurrent in one place or another for as long as I can remember. From Little Richard to The Animals to T-Rex to The Pixies to the bands we're talking about today, "lo-fi" has always been around as a production value of choice on occasions, as part of their own cycles within the overall music scene.
Sometimes it changes from album to album for some bands, depending upon the producer they go with at any given time. The Pixies are a good example of that. One could even arguably put Elvis Costello in that group. I won't even bring up what Springsteen did, because it's too cliche (oops, I just did, didn't I
)It can even show up unexpectedly inside of otherwise pretty heavily-produced albums. For those old-timers out there (or those with fathers that were into music), pull out the old "There's a Kind Of Hush..." album from Herman's Hermits (yes, I said Herman's Hermits.) It's hard to find a more whitebread, early 60's "he's such a nice boy" band with an album that depends so much on schmaltzy, Grammy-winning orchestrations.
But dig deep into side 2 of that album and look up the song "Jezebel", and I think you'll be surprised to find a trashy, edgy, distorted, decidedly "lo-fi" produced song more appropro to The Seeds or early Stones than to the Peter Noon of "Henry VIII". Just dig the vocal crescendo that finishes the song off and listen to that incredible level of Shure 55-style distortion that you know is there on purpose. (The Peter Gunn-ish bass line is cool too
)G.
miroslav
Cosmic Cowboy
Yes...I agree that the lo-fi sound isn't new to recent generations.
But going back to early Little Richard, Stones, Hermits...etc...I think their lo-fi sound was more a consequence of the limitations of the day...and being young punks at the time, they just ignored the limitations.
These days, it's more about ignoring the unlimited capabilities and intentionally trashing the sound (and trying to be young punks ).
Anyway...I don't dislike the raw, unproduced approach, and while I do get into big arrangements and layered sounds at times, I do also like to record more basic "roots" kind of stuff as though it was captured during a live performance in some less than optimal setting and just focusing on the intent rather than the quality.
I guess a lot of the lo-fi movement comes from that college dorm party, live band sound...though I can't help but notice that some bands/artists, unlike the Jack Whites, don't seem to have the skill set for anything more than a lo-fi approach....and so they make THAT their signature style/sound.
But going back to early Little Richard, Stones, Hermits...etc...I think their lo-fi sound was more a consequence of the limitations of the day...and being young punks at the time, they just ignored the limitations.
These days, it's more about ignoring the unlimited capabilities and intentionally trashing the sound (and trying to be young punks
).Anyway...I don't dislike the raw, unproduced approach, and while I do get into big arrangements and layered sounds at times, I do also like to record more basic "roots" kind of stuff as though it was captured during a live performance in some less than optimal setting and just focusing on the intent rather than the quality.
I guess a lot of the lo-fi movement comes from that college dorm party, live band sound...though I can't help but notice that some bands/artists, unlike the Jack Whites, don't seem to have the skill set for anything more than a lo-fi approach....and so they make THAT their signature style/sound.
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
Any such limitations were not necessarily technical. There were some great-sounding, high-fidelity albums produced as far back as the late 50s. Hell, one of my favorite reference disks to use even to this day is a 1961-1962 set of recordings made my Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges.
And again, using that "Jezebel" example, that was one song that was produced entirely different from the rest of the album (relesed by MGM), which, if I remember correctly, was a Grammy winner that year. No, there were direct and deliberate choices made even back then to make some things decidedly lo-fi as compared to the state of the art.
G.
miroslav
Cosmic Cowboy
Yeah...I guess, though certainly not as lo-fi focused as some bands are these days.
I think what they did back in the day was go for a more raw/edgy sound...which isn't necessarily always a total "lo-fi" intention.
M
mattdee1
Active member
I'm not even sure I agree with the premise of this thread; namely, that there is some kind of "lo-fi" revolution going on that started (roughly) with the Strokes debut album.
Have there been a lot of albums in the last decade that have a "lo-fi", garagey sound, and which probably could have been done in a more "hi-fi" manner if the bands wanted it that way? Definitely. But my reasons for not really agreeing with this thread's premise are:
1) As has been stated several times already, there have been "lo-fi" underdogs for decades, it's nothing new. As a side note, while it is true to say that Nirvana broke out in the early 90's by shaking up the stagnant hairspray/spandex movement, it had nothing to do with "lo-fi". Nevermind was the vehicle they rode in on, and that was a decidedly "produced" album. The production values manifested on In Utero were just as much due to the band members wanting to convince themselves they weren't corporate sell-outs as they did with anything else.
2) What percentage of musical "market share" are we really talking about with these lo-fi acts since the Strokes? Without hard stats in front of me, I'm tempted to say it's probably peanuts, and therefore should not be used as anything indicative of industry trends on a macroscopic scale. To assess gross trends, you need to look at multi-platinum bands like Creed, Staind, Nickelback, Three Days Grace, and other such clones, IMO.
At least, this is how it is where I live. The only time I ever hear any of the "lo-fi" stuff is when I seek it out, whereas I couldn't avoid Nickelback if I tried (and believe me, I have tried... oh, how I have tried). Of course, I haven't yet embraced satellite radio--I suppose the fairly recent advent of that technology has changed the game a bit.
Have there been a lot of albums in the last decade that have a "lo-fi", garagey sound, and which probably could have been done in a more "hi-fi" manner if the bands wanted it that way? Definitely. But my reasons for not really agreeing with this thread's premise are:
1) As has been stated several times already, there have been "lo-fi" underdogs for decades, it's nothing new. As a side note, while it is true to say that Nirvana broke out in the early 90's by shaking up the stagnant hairspray/spandex movement, it had nothing to do with "lo-fi". Nevermind was the vehicle they rode in on, and that was a decidedly "produced" album. The production values manifested on In Utero were just as much due to the band members wanting to convince themselves they weren't corporate sell-outs as they did with anything else.
2) What percentage of musical "market share" are we really talking about with these lo-fi acts since the Strokes? Without hard stats in front of me, I'm tempted to say it's probably peanuts, and therefore should not be used as anything indicative of industry trends on a macroscopic scale. To assess gross trends, you need to look at multi-platinum bands like Creed, Staind, Nickelback, Three Days Grace, and other such clones, IMO.
At least, this is how it is where I live. The only time I ever hear any of the "lo-fi" stuff is when I seek it out, whereas I couldn't avoid Nickelback if I tried (and believe me, I have tried... oh, how I have tried). Of course, I haven't yet embraced satellite radio--I suppose the fairly recent advent of that technology has changed the game a bit.
DrewPeterson7
Sage of the Order
Aye, but it represented, I think, the first step in a change in production style - drier, less processed sounding drums and vocals, more aggressive, rawer guitars, and a less pronounced emphasis on musicianship. I think if you draw a line from oh, a Warrant or Ratt album through Nevermind, eventually if you extrapolate that trend you'll end up in Jack White's studio.