droddey

dubdisciple

Again, I agree fully. I have been guilty of giving my kids the "they can't touch [fill in an artist]" and then usually i catch myself because I realize that it is one of the most subjective topics topped only by religion and politics. We like the music we grew up with because it's the music we grew up with. There are very few musical pieces I have ever heard that I could say NOBODY else could play that. In art of all kind we give credit, as we should, to people for doing things first..or at least first to popularize. An decent artist could paint a stroke for stroke version of the Mona Lisa that only an expert could distinguish from the original. That same artist could likely do things Da Vinci couldn't, yet that artist is unlikely to be seen as being as great as Da Vinci. Youth today simply have the advantage of being able to soak up all that come before them and the benefits of things that could not be created in the past. It's the same way in sports. Athletes today are simply bigger, stronger and faster. As great as Jesse Owens was, his world record in the long jump would be beaten regularly by high schoolers today. We measure greatness compared to contemporaries and somehow forget that as we age. We feel the need to somehow make our idols greater than they actually were.

Woh, there... Don't try to paint me as some old fogie stuck in the past. I'm far from it. Pink Floyd was actually before my time, not of my time, as were the Beatles even more so. But I love music well until the late 90s, but then it began getting pretty damn shallow, at least in the popular realm. I was heading towards 40 when the 90s ended, and I loved most of what was going on. Most of my collection is basically either 60s/70s or 90s. There was a lot more honesty in the music of the 90s.
 
Not that that's particularly suprising. Kids don't like music because of what it is, they like it because of what it isn't, for the most part. They want something different than what came before. The 80s were mostly the opposite of the 70s, and the 90s went back the other way to more back to basics, more raw emotion, as a reaction against the very over synthy, overly reverbed 80s. Not that everything sucks or is great in any decade obviously.
 
So it's pretty much expected that we'd get a swing back towards Justin Bieber and Gaga and so forth, after a decade of Grunge and such. I wish it didn't happen but it's the ongoing cycle. Perhaps my big problem with it is that it happened to coincide with the arrival in a big way of the tools of fakery. So you have a sort of perfect storm. A decade on the fluff side of the wheel (in the popular realm I mean), the destruction of the industry by theft which means that if you want to make it you better be able to sell perfume or cars or something, and the arrival of digital tools to allow people to pretend they are better than they are, and an era in which that's not even seen as questionable to do so because integrity isn't cool at the moment.
 
So it all comes out about as far to the other side of what I consider right as possible. There's a lot of stuff out there I like of course. But it'll never get close to the mainstream. Whereas, in the 90s, lots of stuff I liked was in the mainstream. Smashing Pumpkins, No Doubt, System of a Down, Radiohead, Portishead, Blues Traveler, Natalie Merchant/Imbuglia, Joan Osborne, Blur, Garbage, Beck, Bjork, and on and on.
 

trimph1


I still don't get the tools of fakery part. If you can't write or produce music worth listening to, how the beep are those 'tools of fakery' going to help? They won't.  Is there really a 'soundgooderizer' or 'Turd Polisher' out there that I missed?

Well yes, there is. They are all in that list I made up there already. The comping tools, the microsecond long process of doing a cross fade, the tools to line up vocals, the abiltiy to easily automate down to the word via a drawable envelope. Will these things help you write a good song? No, they won't. But how important these days is artists writing their own songs in the popular mainstream? How often is it these days that a producer (or production team) creates the song or contributes very heavily to the song, and then the artist's performance is massages into seeming perfection. 
And, even if they do write good songs, that doesn't mean that they can perform them well with out a lot of help, from what I've seen. Supposedly what's her name, ummm.... the young female singer whose name I'm completely blanking on... oh, Taylor Swift. Apparently she does write her own songs mostly, and I'll give her credit for that. But so many discussions come up about her really off performances on shows. I've not heard a lot of her records but I'm doubting she sounds horrible on them. So how does one explain the difference? She's hugely popular, so obviously something is polishing her into gold on a large scale.
 
Am I wrong and she's really a very good vocalist and I've just seen only the bad reports? Everyone has off nights, equipment problems, etc... but it seems to come up a lot with her.

I don't know. She seemed pretty spot on when she was here last fall.  I've seen lots of bands have off nights..big deal. To me they only show that they are only human. 

trimph1


I don't know. She seemed pretty spot on when she was here last fall.  I've seen lots of bands have off nights..big deal. To me they only show that they are only human. 

Or her sound tech guys did a crap job and didn't give her decent feedback. Trying to sing on key without audible foldbacks is just a biatch!

trimph1


I don't know. She seemed pretty spot on when she was here last fall.  I've seen lots of bands have off nights..big deal. To me they only show that they are only human. 

Well, yeh, so why can't she be human on the album? That's what I've been arguing about the whole time here. If you are a little pitchy, then just be a little pitchy on the album. Don't tune it. Lots of singers are a little pitchy. But we are in an era when those things can be fixed so they generally are, I think for reasons of perceived competitiveness, and so we end up with a lot less humanity in the music.
 
And I also have to think that mixers and producers at some level cannot help but like things being the way they are. If songs need days of tweaking in order to get them to a competive level of polish, then that makes possibly more important than the artist, at least to the companies writing the check anyway. If human performance isn't acceptable other than in off the beaten path indie music, then the master wave editor becomes a lot more important.
 

There are still technically amazing musicians out there. We just have diversity. Have a listen to these guys:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko0kdCf0zTE

And listen to some of their other covers too.

I really can't see pitch correction or audiosnap ever having the ability to make this kind of amazing performance if they musicians aren't up to scratch. People hear this and they KNOW the musicians are amazing. They hear pop stuff, they enjoy it, but they understand the processing being it at least to some degree. If you have an engineer that is able to take a mediocre performance and make something as amazing sounding as above, then hell, props to the freaking engineer for an amazing job! Sure he probably won't get the credit he deserves, but that's life.

There is more to musicianship than playing instruments well. It's also WHAT is played. Someone with the imagination to create a great music piece has every right to do what it takes to make that a sonic experience, even if it is an illusion. Mixing engineers are illusionists. Everything is an illusion to some degree.


Dean, you mention the point here is honesty. I agree in that if an artist does use these tools, they should be honest about it if someone asks them. It's a bit rude to say "yeah a drummed that well!" or "yes my singing is that good!" It's fair I guess to avoid answering it if it's not directly asked, and don't publicise your techniques widely, but if someone asks "did you use pitch correction on your vocals?", then tell the truth. Otherwise, I see no reason to not shout it out to the world. Keep it private unless someone asks you, then tell them the truth. Bottom line, use the tools, but be honest!

That was posted a while back on Gearslutz. The reaction was interestingly very mixed, and sometimes kind of extremely so. I dunno. To me, in some ways at least, that's the kind of music that's probably the most easily swizzled. If you want music that's hard to screw around with, it seems to me it's more stuff that has lots of natural room ambience and fair amounts of bleed because it's recorded all together, or at least the fundamental tracks are. That's of course almost the antithesis of how music is made these days, with almost everything laid down separately to a click, which makes it easy to manipulate.

But yeh, super tight grooves of that sort are certainly indicative of good musicianship, assuming of course that that's actually a recording of them playing what you see. Often that's not the case. Not saying that they couldn't do it, but you shouldn't assume that what you hear is what you see.

To me, this is the kind of thing that would be VERY difficult to create in the computer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydc1DkrtxP8

This type of music is all about feel, and everything is be recorded live, so any mistakes are going to be there in the ambeince channels and in the bleed. Of course the actual studio version of it is not so much like it this. It is pretty heavily processed. I really prefer these live versions. Brian Blade is stupidly good on the drums. I love when Trixie goes over and gets on the other kit and suddenly the drums go stereo. And you hear a small glitch when she probably bumps a mic a something getting into place.
 
And, just for the record, at that particular point at least, Trixie was just stupidly gorgeous. Here's one to watch. It's fun to watch and is a good example of what someone who can really do it can do, even in a Karaoke bar.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmv1VhrtYRo
 

Not at all, that's exactly what I think, in fact. What I dislike about droddey's argument is that I think it's a bit misanthropic on the one hand, and a bit anti-art on the other. People are always creating art in whatever circumstances they are in, with whatever means the have available, and I think the idea that current circumstances and means make current art somehow dishonest and invalid frankly objectionable and ignorant. He's merrily writing off pretty much everyone. Not simply as stuff he's not interested in, which would be fair enough, if a bit unadventurous. But rather as stuff that's invalid, dishonest, and contemptible. He and the horse he rode in on can go and take ride on that, frankly.

 
 
I agree 110 %
 
Was just hoping the guy wasent a turd.
 
I say we give him a a paintbrush, one color of paint, and a sigle canvis.
Im shure the misantrop would shine through in the "Battle of the Paintbrush's" 

Wow, anti-art and misanthropic? You have to be kidding. If you knew anything about me you'd know that my position here is driven from completely the opposite position. I'm for art in music, and think that there's not enough. I love a lot of music that most folks think is so artsy fartsy they hate it. I don't see how 'art' is that much of a concern in the mainstream of the last decade or so. It's always there off the beaten path in every decade. But in some decades it manages to be popular as well.
Have you listened to any of the stuff I've said I like in this thread? It covers a wide range, hardly a single color. I've studied the history of popular music probably a lot more than most folks around here, so I know from whence what came from what and how we got to where we are. It's cyclical. We are overdue for the next back to basics movement really. The next White Stripes or Ramones or something. Not that I'm particularly looking forward to another punkish movement. But with things have been like they are for the last decade, if we can actually have another turn of the wheel with the music industry being so whacked these days from theft, then it may be a fairly extreme one.
 
Somehwere out there now are some kids cutting themselves with razor blades and dreaming of setting fire to the careers of folks like Justin Bieber, and eventually one of them may succeed. And then that music will become so popular that it makes the next generation of kids want to puke and they'll go back the other direction again. There'll still be good stuff going on all the time under the RADAR, as there always is.
 

Without any examples of people doing this thing you claim that is being done all over the place, this is just a load of wind.