"We avoid future mistakes with an understanding of the past". Benjiman Franklin might have said that. But I don't know for sure. I just read a funny email that stated that if you made up your own quote, and used his name as the author, people would listen more closely to it.....
Hope that it worked here. LOL
Anyway S8-N, it may be hard to fathom a world where 8 track cassettes, vinyl LP's, and bell bottoms were the in things. But the attitude was the same then as it is now. I think that you will find that most successful musicians have musical roots that are quite firmly rooted in the past. This is how we learn how to do things. It would appear that you may one of the youngest people that are posting on this thread. I have no problem with that. Just don't give us "old" guys any shit about living in the past. We have a lot more past to live with here. You are just getting into the things that I was doing over ten years ago. What were you doing ten years ago? Probably playing doctor with the neighbor girl, or catching frogs. This is the stuff that we grew up on. It is what made our foundation for music. We will swear by it for the rest of our lives. When you are "old", you will do the same with the bands that you are really into right now.
But if you were to really sit down and break down a lot of modern music, you would find that bands like Nirvana really just changed some Beatle's tunes around with some out of key singing. Pearl Jam mostly took from Zepplin and Neil Young. I won't even go into all of the bands that copied Sabbath.
The point is that a lot of us grew up with pop music coming into a very elevated state of technicality. Pop music has not changed much since the early 80's. It really couldn't because so many bands came out in the late 70's and early 80's and used up all of the note combinations......
Kind of hard to write songs anymore in the rock context because it has mostly all been done. So, we like to sit back and talk about the old days, when everything was fresh and new. So much of the production that is taken for granted now was cutting edge when I was young. Why, well I first was listening to rock, they didn't have digital reverbs. Many studios still had Chambers for reverb. They all had Plate reverbs. This is stuff that has been replaced mostly by Lexicon products. And what the hell, it is easier to use and configure.
But, easy accesibility to great sounds and tools tends to make people drop the ball in the production and writing aspects of recorded music. It just all sounds so damn good now. You don't even really need any talent to put out a really high quality demo these days.
Way back when, people has to discover all of this production stuff. They also had to perform their parts very well because digital editing was not around then. So, listen to those old albums and remember that they didn't have SSL console with full digitally controlled analog automation, and Dolby SR, and
PCM 80's. They were getting those great sounds with gear that is considered way to old school for most recent recordings.
I get to work on all sorts of new, cutting edge music in my studio. I am finding though every day that these newer artists are doing stuff that is pale in comparison to older recordings. They usually lack the imagination that was prevelent way back when.
Off the ever wearing out more soupbox for me...
Ed
