giraffe said:
um.......
where can i find me some of these "competent musicians" who think that "good tone" comes from "technique" and "quality instruments" and a "good song" is a result of "practice" and "experience"??
seriously........... i want to know.
Just start hanging with musicians who have been at it for more than a couple of years, and who care about making music and not about being a rock star. The double-edged sword is these tend also to be the ones who aren't in much of a rush to record, unless they're working as session musicians for someone else. It's an inverse property law; the more the musician cares about
playing the music, the less they care about
recording it. Unless of course they already have broken through and become "recording artists"; but in that case you won't find them in most of our pimple-faced studios.
I tell you the difference is night and day between the guys I work with live (and have known for a long time) and most of my studio clients. The live guys, most of which have been playing for 20 years or more and many of which are also session musicians who have appeared on some suprisingly big name albums over the years, are by far the most fun and enjoyable to listen to and to watch play because they are really good
musicians in every sense of the word. When you get a great rhythm section and a great guitarist that just know how to feed off of each other's hooks and energies and actually work together as a team, and enjoy doing it, and have the chops to cash the musical checks their emotions are writing, it is truely a think of beauty. These guys couldn't give a shit about putting that stuff on tape. For them it's like sex; all they care about is making sweet love with their partners (the rest of the band and the audience), not recording it for a bunch perverts in raincoats to jerk off to later.
Now some of these guys do come to me with their own compositions and side projects so they can get their more creative ya yas out too. And these are probably my most pleasurable mixing jobs of all of them because of the quality and experience of the artist means that they know that good tone comes from the musician, from the technique, from the experience, and that
it's my job to capture that tone and not screw it up, not to try and create the tone artificially and after the fact.
Most of the regular studio clients I have, however, want to make a CD. The fact that they have to actually play music to get there is almost a secondary byproduct. To continue the sex analogy, these folks want to have a baby. The fact that they have to have sex with somebody to do it is almost happenstance. Sure they go through the motions and have fun and light up satisfied after the red light has gone out, but that's not really *why* they're there. They're there to plant their seed on CD. These folks are usually the ones who didn't first start playing an instrument until they got their driver's license and decided that once they learned "all the chords" (HA!) they were ready to record. These are the ones who think that tone is a matter of finding the magic bullet plugin, and that having a box full of sex toys under the bed makes up for lack of actual technique in bed.
G.
