RawDepth said:
I don't think the studio engineer should try to be the impressionist or the surrealist. We should let that up to the performers. Instead, we should focus on capturing the performance from its best angle and delivering it in its best light. The goal should indeed be to not distort it too far from where it started. ...Or, in other words, to keep it natural.
Does anyone else feel this way?
Yes. And No.
It really depends upon the project. There are a lot of good points form both sides of view in this thread, but the fact is that it totally depends upon the project and, as Tom says, the relationship between the performers and the engineer. Or, to put it another way, who (by concensus agreement) is PRODUCING the album?
The producer - and I mean producer by the traditional definition, not in the violated and twisted definition adopted by third-generation hip hop - is to the music production much what the director is to a film production. He calls the shots as to the "sound and feel" of the production and coordinates with and directs both the performers and the engineers to acheive that sound. The producer hat can be worn by a seperate individual or (as is usually the case in smaller projects like those done by most folks here) can be donned by the artist(s) or engineer, or both.
Who plays the part of producer is one of the first decisions that should be made long before the record button is ever hit, because whatever vision for the final sound that they have is going to determine just what needs to be done in performance, in tracking, and in mixing.
There are many times when the job of the tracking and mixing engineers are more documentarian than anything else. There are other times where they are the 6th man in a 5-piece combo, where the engineer's performance, what they creatively contribute to the sound, is just as integral as the performance of any of those on the other side of the wire (see Alan Parsons). Most times, the engineers are a little bit of both and fall somewhere in-between.
In the case of Aja, Roger Nichols was chosen - hired, if you will - by producer Gary Katz (who in turn collaborated with Becker and Fagan) as the Executive Engineer for the project. Nichols, in turn, brought in other engineers - most notably Al Schmitt - for their specific sound specialties. The choice of Schmitt, especially known at the time for his success with George Benson's "Breezin'" album among others in the smooth jazz genre, was no accident...any more than was the decision to populate most of the Aja album with A-list jazz session players that were not actual members of Steely Dan (Larry Carltion, Wayne Shorter, etc.)
In other words, Schmitt as engineer was no more a part of the band "Steely Dan" than the session players who we all actually hear as "the performers", but he was every bit as much a part - if not more in some aspects - of the resulting sound as either Becker or Fagan were.
As far as there being rules and no rules, it's real easy to contradict one's self in that subject. For example, Fordie emphatically states (semi-correctly) that there are no rules. Then in the next breath he states the rule (semi-correctly) that metallurgy just doesn't sound right without heavy compression. I'm not jumping on Ford, it was just an immediately available example of the kind of philosophical oxymorons we are all guilty of at times.
Of COURSE there are rules. And of COURSE most of those rules can be successfully broken, making them seem like they're not really rules. This is true in any form of creative engineering from architecture to cooking to filmmaking to urban planning. Accept it for what it is. There are rules. The rules can be broken. The trick is to be good enough at your craft to know
when to use the rules,
when to break them (when you're even better), and if you're really good (but only then),
when to create new ones.
And the only way to know
when, IMHO, is to know *
why*.
With compression it comes to to (IMHO) not where or when or how it's being used, but why. The use of compression (or the lack thereof) as a form of creatinve sound generation, from lightly compressing vocals to heavily smashing infinite guitar distortion is mostly fine. Using compression non-creatively, as marketing tool with only secondry consideration (if any) to what it actually does to the sound is - or at least
should be, IMHO - out of bounds.
That is, there should be a rule against compression for competitive volume's sake. Period.
And like any rule in creative engineering, it can be broken
. But breaking that rule should be the rare exception, not the new rule.
G.
