gecko zzed
Grumpy Mod
In a recent post, one of the contributors had achieved decent results in recording and was wondering what else needed to be done. The responses were generally (and wisely, in my view) along the lines of "don't mess with what sounds good already".
This lead me down a train of thought that dwelt on how intrusive some engineers have become in the recording process. I think that in many cases, musicians have either forgotten or abdicated their responsibilities towards the musicality of their performance, handing this over to the engineer. And in some cases, the engineers have seized this with vigour, not allowing musicians to own their own musicality.
One of the reasons is that we can; we have so many toys at our fingertips that the urge to take charge of the product is almost irresistible. We get caught up in a kind of technology addiction with our tubes and racks and plug-ins and firewires that the process becomes the end, rather than the product.
We end up telling the musician what is acceptable, rather than them telling us. We repair, improve and enhance with gleeful abandon, recreating musical creations in our own image, twisting them to suit our personal views of what things should sound like.
This becomes self-perpetuating: you say to a musician, "you've gone a bit flat there, but nevermind, I can autotune that ok" or "that note is a bit early. I'll just nudge it along a bit". The musician is grateful and pleased that you can fix the potentially embarassing mistake, and thinks you are some kind of miracle worker. The next time they come in, they know that you can do this, and so become less concerned about delivering a good performance, expecting you to be able to fix things for them as you did before. Some of us are only too pleased to do this, because it gives us a chance to use our toys, and to show how clever we are. In this way we progressively take increasingly more control over the whole process.
I was talking to another sound guy about live mixing, and I mentioned my discomfort when people come up to me and say "thanks for the wonderful sound". It's not that I don't mind praise, it's more that I think I should be invisible. If people are listening to a performance, they should be awed by the performance, not the sound. The sound guy is a means to an end, where that end is the faithful, sensitive presentation of a band's performance to its audience. I believe a listener's commendations of the engineer are misplaced, because they are attributing musicality to the engineer, not the artist.
A band I knew recorded a demo CD. They had won a grant for this, which meant they could afford to fly in a reasonably well-established producer for the project. They gave me the resulting CD. I listened to it and was appalled. It was drenched in reverb and chock full of effects (e.g. guitars in sweeping pans from side to side). I wondered where the band was, but they were buried in this wash of technological wizardry. I thought to myself: "this isn't a representation of the band; it's a representation of a producer who is just showing off, dazzling the band with his tricks so that they are fooled into not listening to what they should be listening to, i.e. their own performance."
Technology is important, and better technology is even more important. But I think it is there for one purpose; to represent musicality with integrity, not to create it or substitute for it.
This lead me down a train of thought that dwelt on how intrusive some engineers have become in the recording process. I think that in many cases, musicians have either forgotten or abdicated their responsibilities towards the musicality of their performance, handing this over to the engineer. And in some cases, the engineers have seized this with vigour, not allowing musicians to own their own musicality.
One of the reasons is that we can; we have so many toys at our fingertips that the urge to take charge of the product is almost irresistible. We get caught up in a kind of technology addiction with our tubes and racks and plug-ins and firewires that the process becomes the end, rather than the product.
We end up telling the musician what is acceptable, rather than them telling us. We repair, improve and enhance with gleeful abandon, recreating musical creations in our own image, twisting them to suit our personal views of what things should sound like.
This becomes self-perpetuating: you say to a musician, "you've gone a bit flat there, but nevermind, I can autotune that ok" or "that note is a bit early. I'll just nudge it along a bit". The musician is grateful and pleased that you can fix the potentially embarassing mistake, and thinks you are some kind of miracle worker. The next time they come in, they know that you can do this, and so become less concerned about delivering a good performance, expecting you to be able to fix things for them as you did before. Some of us are only too pleased to do this, because it gives us a chance to use our toys, and to show how clever we are. In this way we progressively take increasingly more control over the whole process.
I was talking to another sound guy about live mixing, and I mentioned my discomfort when people come up to me and say "thanks for the wonderful sound". It's not that I don't mind praise, it's more that I think I should be invisible. If people are listening to a performance, they should be awed by the performance, not the sound. The sound guy is a means to an end, where that end is the faithful, sensitive presentation of a band's performance to its audience. I believe a listener's commendations of the engineer are misplaced, because they are attributing musicality to the engineer, not the artist.
A band I knew recorded a demo CD. They had won a grant for this, which meant they could afford to fly in a reasonably well-established producer for the project. They gave me the resulting CD. I listened to it and was appalled. It was drenched in reverb and chock full of effects (e.g. guitars in sweeping pans from side to side). I wondered where the band was, but they were buried in this wash of technological wizardry. I thought to myself: "this isn't a representation of the band; it's a representation of a producer who is just showing off, dazzling the band with his tricks so that they are fooled into not listening to what they should be listening to, i.e. their own performance."
Technology is important, and better technology is even more important. But I think it is there for one purpose; to represent musicality with integrity, not to create it or substitute for it.
