New magazine: LC end rant about "purity and honesty&qu

[TV Lenny]

i poured myself a drink just so i could do a spit-take.

I just spit my coffee when I read this.

[RefD]

i poured myself a drink just so i could do a spit-take.

I just spit my coffee when I read this.

[Brian]

I think they did know it was a joke, the last line gives it away.
Probably spoofing an email you would have got from some dumass joker, like me, who would have sent something like this:

OH, you wanna drag "The Bee-ah-ti-lays" into this, eh? Well, if they woulda had plugins, they woulda shat their pants! SHAT them!
They woulda used the click track as an instrument and MADE it work, in one channel.
Just imagine the beatles with auto-tune, screw it, just re record their tracks with auto tune on it and post them. The rubber would hit the road hard. I challenge anyone to do it.
Most of the new technology is great when used on "talent" and nothing more than a crutch for those with a lack of opportunity for proper training and ability.
A a way to fix weak shit.
Coaching and practice are too much to ask these days for most of the people I see these days. They "don't have time" for that kind of stuff.
One day we will speak with robotic voiceboxes anyway when the cancer eats our faces off down to the voicebox and our fingers fall off from scratching the itchy parts.
That is so stupid.

[JGriffin]

Just imagine the beatles with auto-tune, screw it, just re record their tracks with auto tune on it and post them. The rubber would hit the road hard. I challenge anyone to do it.

It's been done, there's a thread about it.

Lennon pushed for the development of ADT because he was too lazy to double-track his vocals. You think he wouldn't'a used Autotune?

[TapeOpLarry]

The letter to TO was real. He claimed he'd read crazier shit in audiophile mags. I don't read those kind of mags. Those people are crazy.

[apropos of nothing]

It was a really great end rant.

[Brian]

The letter to TO was real. He claimed he'd read crazier shit in audiophile mags. I don't read those kind of mags. Those people are crazy.

True, they are.

dwlb, yeah, he woulda used it, but, it won't stop our fingers from falling off from scratching the itchy parts of the cancerous sores from the robot voicebox.

I really would love to hear autotuned beatles tunes, they might be better, might not, but it would be interesting to me.

[JGriffin]

dwlb, yeah, he woulda used it, but, it won't stop our fingers from falling off from scratching the itchy parts of the cancerous sores from the robot voicebox.

I really would love to hear autotuned beatles tunes, they might be better, might not, but it would be interesting to me.

you don't have to look far.

[RodC]

LOL, I think the new logo should look more like a penis.

[Brian]

dwlb, yeah, he woulda used it, but, it won't stop our fingers from falling off from scratching the itchy parts of the cancerous sores from the robot voicebox.

I really would love to hear autotuned beatles tunes, they might be better, might not, but it would be interesting to me.

you don't have to look far.

Bless you, my friend!

[Brian]

OH CRAP! The person who did that will, as the people under the stairs parents said," burn in hell, BURN in HELLLLL!"

That was awful.

I wonder if anyone has made a more serious attempt.

[TapeOpLarry]

Another reader thinks the end rant is serious:

Dear Editor:

I read LC's Purity and Honesty in Recordings column (manifesto?) with interest. It rightly points out the excesses of many people who work on DAW's. But I think the premise that only recordings made according to the guidelines laid out are "pure and honest", and therefore worthy of consideration, calls for a response:

1) Do digital tools and techniques cause the current flood of bad product?

Digital technology has this effect, but for different reasons than those stated: Digital recording and internet-based distribution have radically democratized the process of being a "recording artist". Now virtually anyone can make and distribute an album. However, the proportional content of genius and artistry in the human race remains relatively constant: say, less than 1%.?Most of the art made most of the time is bad, and sometimes it takes historians centuries to figure out where the good art was in a given era.

In the bad old days of analog recording and major label hegemony, regular people could not afford to make and distribute their own albums. Therefore, only 80 to 85% of all commercial releases were crap. That number was artificially low! As the number of albums released approaches the size of the population, the proportion of bad product increases to resemble the natural distribution of artistry in the population, i.e. <1>99% bad!

2) What about ?"Studio" albums?

Imagine a world without?Sergeant?Pepper, Dark Side of The Moon, etc. These records were done using the available technology of their day, but they were obsessively composed in the studio out of bits and pieces, in a way that does not even vaguely resemble live performance. This process can be done with analog tools or digital ones. It can be used to make junk, or great art. But the process and the tools are not the issue. They just constitute a different creative medium than live performance.

3) Innovative ways to screw up:

Engineers spent decades learning to get analog recording, with it's inherent noise floor, poor dynamic range and awful frequency response, to sound good. Now engineers are going through the same process with digital recording. Except that the noise floor is gone, the frequency response is great, and the dynamic range is >100 db. There are whole new sonic areas where it is possible to ruin a mix, that didn't used to exist! More and more it's what's in the engineers brain, not the limitations of the equipment, that counts.

4) How honest is honest?

The very act of selecting and placing a mic in front of a sound source is editorial in a highly selective way, as is any EQ, compression, gating or reverb subsequently applied to the signal. Any sort of multichannel studio recording already presents a picture of the performance that has been highly skewed by the engineer. Add to that selecting and editing among multiple takes, overdubbing even minimally, and your "honest" recording sounds nothing like what you would get if you threw up a Blumlein mic array in front of the same band at a club, and made a live to two-track recording.

Once you are in the studio recording to multiple channels, it seems like a false distinction to say that this kind of processing and editing is pure and honest, but not that kind. Discretion on the production end is essential, but it can't be reduced to a formula.

Conclusion:

Making "pure and honest" recordings according to the guidelines LC sets out, is no guarantee that those recordings will be of any artistic merit. What makes a piece of art "real" has to do with the connection between the work and the audience, not with the technical methods of construction.

There is nothing wrong with having or using the new tools, but having the knowledge, artistry, integrity, coherence of vision and restraint to use them to make great albums is always going to be rare. That inspiration is what we should strive for, rather than following a dogmatic set of technical guidelines.

Sincerely,
XXXXX

[JGriffin]

Another reader thinks the end rant is serious:

I don't really disagree with what that guy said, in fact it's an appropriate response to some of the fundamentalist stuff that gets posted on TOMB...but he clearly didn't get the point that you were parodying that kind of thing.

The printed word is such a new and untried technology, though, that it's easy to see how he might become confused.

[Brian]

What got me is

in the bad ol days of analogue

and then goes on to quote a meager "digital" noise floor number of 100 db.
I guess he didn't know that analogue could go as low as 160 db (dolby SR) on some well aligned and tweaked machines and as much as 140 db on some without NR.
Bad ol days.
In the bad ol days the idea, in my jobs, was to sonically keep the gear out of the way of the performance, full stop. We used to make sure that every take was a good one as best we could and if we couldn't get one we came back to it later or on another day. I used to be valued for an ability to hear subtle pitch issues and very minor flubs and get them retakeificated.
Now I have to deal with over-inflated office ego types who couldn't get a good take if I bought it for them and gift-wrapped it, and "don't have time" because that last one was "good enough" to fix it later. They get bothered spending 4 hours in the studio. I used to get 48 hour sessions, no sleep and loved it.
Now it's mostly time spent in "try to hide the weaknesses of the performance" mode.
I can't stop that. With all the new studios springing up what would anyone expect?
I already got weird about it. I'm so over it now, if I don't want to spend my time doing patch work, I just don't.
So?

[RefD]

"retakeificated"...

*slams own head in car door til passing out*



actually, i am about to succumb to sugar coma after my oldest daughter's 3rd birthday party.

that was some munitions grade icing on that cake!