Life is hard for a recording engineer

[Jumping Frog]

Well, I know there are some musicians, roadies, and possibly recording engineers in the audience. If someone never appreciated your artistry . . .

This one cracked me up:

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZhO08wO8Bvg[/youtube]

[Dave2]

One of friends "in the business" posted that on Facebook a few days ago... Hilarious, and mostly true :-)

[K.Mooneyham]

I know its meant to be humorous but I do think its at least partly true. I remember this band back in the 90s called "4 Non-Blondes"...they had one hit or maybe two...anyway, I heard them on a live-at-the-beach show on MTV (back when they played music) and the woman singer sounded like she was a cat that was strangling and trying to sing. Maybe it was just a bad day for her, but she certainly didn't sound anything like the song on the radio!

[The Annoyed Man]

Oh my.

[Maxwell]

I used to run sound for a 5 piecs band here in South Texas many years ago.

This is waaaay more true than anyone wants to admit.................

[olafpfj]

I was head sound for the Los Angeles and San Fran productions of the musical wicked as well as les miserables in '05.

You all have no idea the miracles I would have to pull off nightly...and that was with some rather talented people.

Far too many "artists" are completely products of very talented sound engineers. Make me mad and I'll turn the FX off and hang you out to dry.

Funny though that I always get the blame when I fail to make the Singer sound less hung over. You need some serious thick skin!!

[Songbird]

I used to sing with a jazz group in Midland. We were pretty good, but we DID love our sound guy!

[filmtex]

Antares Autotune. Worse thing to happen to music ever. I thought this was hilarious. Thanks for posting the video.

[olafpfj]

Antares Autotune. Worse thing to happen to music ever. I thought this was hilarious. Thanks for posting the video.

Oh they've been pitch correcting vocals long before autotune it was just horribly tedious and therefore expensive.

Gone are the days when the Beatles called the label to say they were ready and proceeded to record a hit album in 2 weeks.

[ffemt300]

So true. It's amazing what can be accomplished in the studio, post mix.

[The Annoyed Man]

Gone are the days when the Beatles called the label to say they were ready and proceeded to record a hit album in 2 weeks.

But I can't help but think that is largely due to the fact that we now have a generation of so called "artists" who've never known any other way of doing things than of just showing up, and putting their fates in the hands of a skilled engineer. They are being packaged for their appearance and dance moves and hair style more than their sheer singing abilities. The Beatles were massively talented. Yes, they wore fashionable clothing and hair, and located themselves at the cultural edge; but none of that matters in the studio. When the artist is massively talented, and the engineer has a much easier job. In fact, he doesn't even need those technologies like autotuning. I would go so far as to say that the rise of these recording technologies is a response to fixing lack of talent. You don't need to adjust pitch if your singer sings on pitch. When you get fed a steady diet of pitchy singers, you develop a technology to deal with it.

I am the owner of a very rare bootleg album of the Beatles live at the Hollywood Bowl circa 1963-64. It is completely un-engineered, other than the fact that it was recorded on a reasonably good tape recorder with not more than two microphones, maybe only one (I haven't played it in a while, but it might even be recorded in mono rather than stereo). The screaming girls are nearly as loud as the band, so the mics were located somewhere in the audience, not in front of any speakers. The boys were pretty much pitch-perfect through the whole show, including those parts where they were deliberately "bending" notes as part of their singing technique. I say "pretty much" because they sounded human, not mechanical. In fact, one of the reasons that I can't stand modern hip-hop and R&B is that the voices are so heavily filtered that they no longer sound human. To my mind, the very BEST that an engineer can do is to avoid "over-producing" a voice so much that it loses its humanity. When the artist performs live, they should be no "better" than they are in the studio. If an artist can't sing on pitch on stage, then they have no business in a studio to begin with. The engineer shouldn't have to compensate for an artist's lack of talent, trying to turn a toad into a prince. Rather, the engineer's job should be to guild the lily.

One of the reasons that old Marshall and Fender tube amps are still in use and old Acoustic Control solid state amps are not so much is that the latter were so clean back then (relative to the older tube amp designs) that they actually lacked the "warmth" of tube amps. The tube amps were preferred by guitarists and audiences alike back then. Nowadays we have amp modeling in solid state electronics. What are they modeling? Tube amps.....with all their imperfections. I have nothing to base this on, but it is my belief that this is simply because whenever a tonal sound approaches absolute perfection, the less the human psyche is able to relate to it. If this were not true, then all human music would sound like digital beeps, which we are certainly capable of reproducing. But we don't, because nobody would buy it.

Or, maybe I'm crazy. The last time I was in a studio was about 8 months ago or so. I had a guitar part on two songs. Did about 2-3 rehearsal runs for each song, and then nailed the final take........not because I'm a superb guitarist, but because I didn't try to play anything beyond my capabilities. Some singers would do well to sing the same way. If you don't have it in you to do one of those de rigeur gospel vocal runs that are so popular (and over done and boring) these days, then leave that stuff at home and bring your A game to the studio. If you don't have and A game, then you don't belong in a studio......OR on stage.

The very best artists never try to do something that isn't in them from the get-go. That is what made the Beatles so great, and so many of the schlocky "artists" today so mundane and forgettable. The Beatles were able to reproduce their studio performances in a live show, without filtering. Whoever decided that lip-synching a live performance was the right thing to do ought to be taken out and shot, by the way.

The partnership between a great artist and a great engineer is a thing of beauty. Whenever a great engineer get's paid to make a mediocre performer tolerable, it's a crime against nature. On the one hand, thank God for good engineers; they make my life more bearable. On the other hand, if there were fewer of them, there would be fewer bad "artists" foisted off on the music buying public.

I gotta go take a shower and get ready for church.

[Abraham]

Yikes!

If that's how it's done today, maybe that's why I so rarely listen to music when once I was a big fan? Perhaps, I unconsciously recognize the synthetic sound and find it unappealing...?

On the rare occasion I do listen to music it seems they all (especially female singers) pretty much sound like musical clones.

[Songbird]

Well said, TAM! On a regular basis I have to explain to my students why singing like their "idols" is neither healthy nor realistic. What's not technologically engineered will usually result in their vocal folds being fried before they're 25! At least when they leave my class they can sing on pitch and do it safely!

[JALLEN]

Real musicians don't require that stuff. Wannabee's can't do without it.

It's astonishing to see the difference between amateur musicians, even fairly good ones, and the real pros. It is not unlike the difference between the Texas Rangers and the Ft. Worth Cats.

I spent most of Thanksgiving weekend at the Dixieland Jazz Festival here. There were 25-30 bands playing in various ball rooms, all weekend. Most were weekend musicians, who play gigs nights and weekends but have real jobs. A couple were very good, most were pretty good, some were not so good. There was at least one group of full time professional musicians who were unbelievably superb.

The Beatles were good musicians. The Stones are good musicians. Some of the others aren't so.