Re: Fancy Music Processing Product

Steve Underwood wrote:
Randy Yates wrote:
Steve Underwood <steveu@xxxxxxx> writes:
[...]
If you can't look at a demo of little Johnny's efforts at the school
concert being cleaned up, and extrapolate to the potential uses
experts could make of the same technology, I think there's something
wrong with you.

Oh yeah, there's something wrong with me alright. I can't see how
diddling notes on a screen with a mouse is ever going to substitute for
the expertise a talented, dedicated musician with a lifetime of
experience and specialized knowledge of his instrument brings to the
table.

Think back to the era of musicianship that bands like Yes, Chicago,
Emerson Lake and Palmer, Blood Sweat and Tears, Kansas, Three Dog Night,
etc., brought to the world and then fast-forward to current day artists
that use PitchDoctor, record-scratching, digital looping, and other
silly-assed modern-day recording gimmicks (not to mention compression)
and tell me whether you think such technology has produced better
musicians or not.

If thinking that a musician should ply his trade by learning how to play
his instrument the hard way rather than simulating it on a computer is
being a dumbass, then I'm a dumbass.

You are being completely unrealistic. Those guys took months in a studio to make an album, and did huge numbers of takes. What they played live was almost always a dumbed down version of the studio version, so that it was repeatable. Much of their studio time could have been reduced, if they could fix up the odd fluff easily. New tools could, of course, be used to go beyond that. Like doing a foot to the floor, super fast and complex version of something the musician couldn't hope to get right in one go, no matter how many takes they recorded. Then again, people have always done that, since they've always patched together different takes to get a complete perfect one. New tools just push things a little further in the direction of "unplayable live".

There is hardly a live album made without studio overdubs to fix up all sorts of errors, or to add back some the complexity of the studio version.

All of this applies just as much to classical recordings, as to rock ones. There aren't many of those recorded in a single take.

When tape replaced the Sculley lathe, conductors (Toscanini I know about from technicians who worked with him) were delighted that flubs could be patched by re-recording a couple of bars instead of a whole movement. The wonderful flute solo in the Westminster recording of Bach's B-minor Mass was patched with a copy of the same notes from some other part of the score. There was a lot of touch-up done with a razor blade.

Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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