flapo1 said:
Again it's just a matter of taste, and as eeldip said, both are equally valid standpoints.
No, they're not.
As someone's personal preference, any view is as irrelevant as anyone else's. As a
strategy, however, indifferent production and engineering is plain suicide, from the second you start a project anyone else but you is going to hear.
I've been having this same argument for thirty years with people whose music is never going anywhere.
Production (in the broad sense, including arrangement) and engineering are hugely more important than the artist, the material and even marketing. People don't believe this because great production and engineering are almost undetectable, and the act gets all the credit.
Bad production and engineering are like filth and crud on a window which obscures everything you want to see. It strangles even the best performance. Musicians, in their egocentricity, think that people are going to listen to a bad recording just to experience the amazing music. They won't. Sometimes they won't even know
why they turn it off either, but they do anyway. Trust me, if people have heard good engineering and production, they won't listen to bad engineering and production.
Even really raw acts cannot survive bad production. That's the sign of a really great producer, getting the vitality of a young act captured and processed in a way that sounds like it just spontaneously happened...but the trained ear can hear that the "spontaneity" is almost all brilliant production - it just
sounds like an incredible one-take masterpiece by an inspired band. Even in the unlikely event that a band really is that good, the producer has to be even better to catch it perfectly.
Bad production may also be homogenous, sterile, unimaginative or inappropriate for an act, too. I can think of plenty of careers that croaked solely because of a wrong - not bad - producer for the job. I can even think of an entire genre - Country - that nearly killed itself off through the stifling, unimaginative overproduction of that sickening "Nashville Sound" that made all artists sound alike.
Presentation is
everything in music, and that means that you need to produce and engineer a piece appropriately to the artist, material and market (this is where eeldip and I agree) but - above all - to the prevailing professional minimum standards of the industry.
The reason I say that a garage act's home studio recording should err on the side of slickness is simply as a judo move against the pervasive expectation that it's going to be the naive, sloppy junk that everyone's come to expect of small-time project recording.
Once you get the contract, you can get the high-$$$ producer who can give you true state-of-the-art rawness that will knock everyone out.
