Musicians these days are finding it easier than ever to create music. Digital recording has stepped up and in some cases surpassed analog recording. As a musician and studio engineer, I’m amazed at the technology available and how much the price is coming down every day, allowing us to come pretty close to the quality we will find in a studio with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of outboard equipment. We now have the ability to lay down “the perfect track” for every song we record. There is no worry about the number of available tracks you can use to record. No worries about the amount of money you are going to shell out to record in a pro studio because we can get nearly the same results in our own homes with just a little bit of knowledge and persistence in honing our mixing/engineering skills. If a guitar riff is a little out of time, we can micro-edit the performance and put it right in time. We can loop a couple bars worth of music and use it for the entire song. We can pretty much make our tracks..... PERFECT! No off-time beats. No flubbed guitar lines. No cracks in our vocals or a missed note on bass guitar. These days, it’s like artists are expected to Auto-Tune the vocal track..
But, is that better? Is a perfect performance, every little nuance being in time and in tune really... REAL? How many of us can lay down a “perfect” track in 1 take? 20 takes? NOT ME! But I can go back and fix it later. With the tools available to us musicians now, we CAN cover up our mistakes and create a flawless product that will compete with studios that would cost us thousands of dollars to reach the same results.
The question I ask - “Is a flawless recording REAL?”
To answer this, let’s take a look at the way music was and how it is now.
Back in the early days, there was no going back and overdubbing. There was no way to record multiple tracks. It was all live and if you screwed up, oh well, it made it into the recording. If the engineer messed up the balance of the mix, guess what - that’s what made it into production unless the performance could be repeated again by every musician involved from the beginning to the end. As the art of audio recording developed, we got multi-track recording and the ability to go back and overdub and fix mistakes, but we were still limited by time and money! Even though an artist could go back and fix their performance, many mistakes were left in the recordings due to the constraints of time and money being spent on the studio project. Take a listen to songs from the 50’s through the 90’s and in almost any recording you can find something that would be considered a flub - a drum strike slightly off beat, a guitar note that gets dampened to early or rings out too long, a vocal line that was slightly out of tune - you get the idea.
These days, since the late 90’s and prominently into this millenium, we musicians can play god. We can create our art as closely to the image of perfection we hear in our minds. No out of time notes. No out of pitch notes. Everything - PERFECT!
I recently had my studio computer crash and have been forced to find different ways to record my music in order to get my creative fix. I downloaded a 4-track recorder app for my Android Phone and within a few minutes had recorded an acoustic guitar backing track and a lead solo on acoustic as well. The song is just two tracks, recorded on a cell phone, and was licensed to publishing library. Whether or not it makes it into a film or tv show through the library is another story, but it was signed! The track has mistakes in it (at least I hear mistakes), is not in “perfect” time and each take was done on the first try. If you strap headphones on and listen closely, you can even hear my clothes dryer going in the background at one point! My point is, that this is the way recording used to be done. Listen to old Elvis or Buddy Holly or James Brown. Listen to Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath - they are humans, slightly in and out of time, and it sounds REAL!
Dave Grohl and his band Foo Fighters said it best in the documentary they released about the making of their latest album. Dave decided to go back to basics and record fully analog, something not too many bands do these days. In some of the interviews, they were basically describing that when you have the luxury in digital to micro-edit a musicians performance, it squeezes some of the life out of it. We are human, not robots, after all! We don’t strum in perfect time. We don’t sing in perfect pitch. We all fuck up, and without that in our music, we all sound, well.... a bit stale and a bit rehearsed!
So I hereby challenge my musician brothers and sisters to challenge themselves for at least one song, put down the click track and record in the time that your heart feels when you are playing your song! Don’t stop when you mess up, just pick it up at the previous bar and keep on recording! Let your heart and soul pour out of you and into your recording, with complete disregard for a slightly off-tune note you sing. Record in one take. Record your guitar and vox at the same time. Do what we don’t do anymore in the art of music - make it sound REAL!
........ Oh, and please, please, PLEASE - shut - off - that - fuckin' - auto-tuner! talk about fuckin' LAME!! Invest in some singing lessons instead of an auto-tuner. Trust me!
