This two part article will cover these methods. I believe… and many others will agree, that in order to get great sounding vocals is to get it right, or at least the best you can, in the initial stages of the recording process before any mixing or fairy dust tricks have been applied.
In Part 1 my fiancée and song writing partner Georgie Gillis will cover the important performance techniques required when tracking vocals based on her 13 years experience as a vocal instructor, performer and recording artist. In Part 2 - I will cover the technical processes for recording great sounding vocals.
The Singer's Guide - 12 Steps To Prepare For Your Best Vocal Take By Georgiana Gillis.
They say Success is 90% preparation and only 10% perspiration”. Unlike the other instruments in your mix, your voice requires a very different kind of preparation. Whether you're a professional singer or hobbyist, the following tips can help you get the very best from your voice.
Before You Arrive At The Studio - Sleep Before The Big Day
Singing requires energy - fact. Tired bodies create flat notes. I always tell my singing students to approach a performance as if they were entering a boxing ring - pumped. When it comes down to it, you will want to channel all of your energy into a great vocal take. If you are ill, have not slept well or have had a late night you will not be able to give it your best.
Water Is A Singer's Best Friend
Water to your voice is like oil to an engine. Stick to still water as your drink of choice and always keep a bottle available for sipping. This can be done as frequently as you need during vocal takes. Beware of dehydration - your body will allocate water to other body parts before it reaches the mucous membranes aka your larynx. Room temperature is always best as it is absorbed more quickly than cold.
Don't Eat A Heavy Meal Before Singing
Approach eating and singing in the same way you would swimming. Don't eat a heavy meal right beforehand. A full stomach encroaches on your breathing space - not to mention diverting your energy to digestion. Ideally, eat little and often in the run up to keep energy levels high or if this isn't possible, make sure you eat your meal a couple of hours before recording.
Plan To Sing When You Feel Fresh
Usually not first thing in the morning or last thing at night, but in the fresh part of your day according to your own body clock. Your concentration levels peak and fall during the course of any given day. A good time to record vocals would be when you are usually at your most energetic. For most of us for e.g. that is not near the afternoon ‘slump' or late in the evening.
At The Studio - Use Gentle Vocal Warm Ups
Save yourself for the effort to come. Humming and speak singing are effective warm ups without requiring much effort. Humming creates nice reverberations that gently ease away any lingering mucous and can be done almost inaudibly (ideal if you are shy about warming up in front of others). Following that, ‘speak' sing something simple to get your voice nice and warm without being too taxing.
Save Your Energy
Try to save your best performance for the actual take. Adrenaline + excitement = conviction in your voice. It's hard to fake that if you end up having to endlessly repeat yourself. This goes for you too - try to make your journey to the studio the least physically tiring as is possible. If you must cycle, jog, walk miles to get there then make sure you're feeling rested before your take (and drink water!).
Don't Tire Your Voice
You're keen and you want to give your best effort but you should never max out your voice. A performance should sound effortless to the listener and straining your voice to reach difficult notes will tire your voice faster than you can say ‘blow out'. This seems like a no-brainer but so many fall trap to this. Resist the urge to ‘show off'.
Keep Your Lyrics To Hand
No matter how well you know your lyrics, always have easy access to them. This is because you are shifting your focus 100% to your vocal performance and the critical listening that goes along with that. Your memory may not be as reliable when you are feeling pressurised to perform well. You will also be concentrating on visual and/or auditory cues/instructions from your producer.
It's Time To Sing - Mark Your Breathing Points On Your Lyric Sheet
Using a pen or pencil, mark in capital B's where you can take a full breath and lower case b's where you can only get a quick breath. Even though you may have sung the song 100 times, recording is a different experience altogether and alters your focus as a singer. You may find yourself fixated for e.g. on your timing and your breathing may become an afterthought.
Are You Feeling Nervous?
Understand adrenaline and the affect on the human body. It is good for giving our performance that special ‘lift' and thus can be harnessed for a good outcome. But if we're too worried, we may become tense. Tension equals tight muscles - tight muscles equal sharp notes. When standing up at the mic, unlock one knee to relax your entire body. Alternate legs periodically as is comfortable.
The Correct Approach
Singing while standing doesn't come naturally to all but sitting down obstructs your deep breathing space by as much as 30%. If you must sit and sing for e.g. at the piano, balance your weight on the front of the stool to tilt your pelvis down or in the case of a low chair, position one leg underneath you to open up your abdomen. Remember that breathing to a singer is paramount.
Performing To A Pop Shield
It will feel unnatural regardless of the type of singing you've done before. This is when you must combine your imagination with technical ability. Keep your distance and don't touch the pop shield - your producer will have positioned it proportionately to the mic. Close your eyes to sing when you can (you can still glance at your lyrics when you need to). When your eyes are closed, your other senses become more focussed - in this case your hearing which in turn heightens your ability to pitch. In addition, you can visualise something more natural to perform to - like an audience - blocking out the static mic in front of you as well as the studio environment.
Do's
Eat little and often beforehand to keep energy levels up or make sure you eat your meal a few hours before recording.
Hydrate - especially if you've been doing a lot of sport, it's hot or you've been drinking diuretics (for e.g. coffee, tea, alcohol, cola).
Wear comfortable clothing and shoes - unless you're filming there is no need to dress up for the studio. Anything tight around your waist will be difficult to breathe against and standing in high heels is tiring.
Keep your arms and hands at waist height during your vocal take so they can remain expressive - don't let them hang at your sides or put them in your pockets.Talk to your producer if you're unsure of what to expect or are feeling nervous. Ask them to explain anything you do not understand.
Don'ts
Absolutely no fizzy drinks before a vocal take - bubbles like to resurface at the worst moments.
Avoid chocolate, milk and anything else which coats your throat as you will be left trying to clear your throat - ‘ahem'.
It might be seen as rock'n'roll to have a heavy night the evening before you go into the studio but - alcohol + tiredness = bad performance.
Salty snacks and baked goods will undo your hydration efforts as salt dehydrates and bread absorbs fluid. Choose fruit and protein instead.
Showing posts with label technical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technical. Show all posts
Sunday, 2 October 2016
Monday, 22 August 2016
The Technical Constraints That Made Abbey Road So Good
What modern recording artists can learn from the studio's early days
On a cool, English Sunday afternoon, there was a crowd loitering on the sidewalks of this wealthy London neighborhood called St. John's Wood. Some people were waiting to use the zebra crosswalk made famous on the cover of The Beatles' Abbey Road” album. Others were using pens to scrawl messages on the front of Abbey Road Studios, where that album—and many others—had been made. Things like Imagine all the people,” and John Lennon Lives!”
I was there because of the music, too. In a rare public event, Abbey Road Studio's most famous room was being opened to the public for a lecture by Ken Scott, an engineer on The Beatles' seminal White Album.” I had assumed that the topic, a look at vintage recording techniques and equipment,” occupied a fairly esoteric niche when I bought my ticket. Judging from the long line to get into the building, though, it was clear that music nerdery (like many other nerdy things) had gone mainstream.
Abbey Road is famous for a good reason—but it's more than just a tourist attraction.
Joining Scott were two younger music engineers from America, Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan. Kehew and Ryan are the authors of Recording The Beatles , a 500-plus-page volume created from 15 years of research and housed in a shell designed to look like a old-school tape reel box. Recording The Beatles is, all at once, a labor of love, a celebration of music recording culture and, quite likely, the most detailed historical compendium of photography and information about the Fab Four's time in the studio. The book is also a subtle illumination of the dynamic relationship that occurs between people and their tools, a constantly shifting balance which can either enable—or thwart—inspiration.
Abbey Road is famous for a good reason—and each year thousands of visitors flock to take photos and scrawl messages on its walls. But it's more than just a tourist attraction. It's a building full of history lessons that could help creative people working today.
The sanctum sanctorum of Abbey Road is Studio Two, the room where the majority of The Beatles' recordings were made.
Standing at the threshold of Studio Two, it doesn't look all that different from a small school gymnasium: a big rectangular box with white walls, 24-foot-high ceilings, and a parquet floor. But as soon as we entered, any thoughts of dribbling basketballs fell away, as I began to remember images of John Lennon and Paul McCartney standing around a microphone at the far end of the room, working out their harmonies.
For melodic pop music, Studio Two has physical, tonal qualities which transcend its humble appearance. It emphasizes the midrange,” Kehew says, ”and has a warm, short reverb unusual for a room its size.” These reverberant qualities are so well known that Abbey Road's rental contract actually prohibits any sampling of its distinctive acoustic signature. As I stood in the room, I could hear the echoes of the vocals and kick drums on some of my favorite recordings of all time.
To my left was a collection of vintage recording equipment arrayed in the corner (courtesy of the EMI Archive Trust ). The first item on display was a gramophone, circa 1925, and the collection progressed chronologically through a series of tape recorders, effects, and microphones before arriving at mixing desks used into the 1980s. If you included the modern mixer across the room being used to run the PA system, the gear present provided a fairly complete historical timeline of the last 90 years of recording science.
In many ways, this exhibit at Abbey Road Studios embodies both the history of music recording culture and so many of the changes which have transformed it in our modern era. EMI Studios, as it was originally called, was renamed Abbey Road Studios in 1970 after the Beatles album which made it famous. In the intervening years, its producers have had to navigate massive economic shifts in its industry. Their challenge: Find a way to use cutting-edge technology while, at the same time, stay true to the studio's historical roots.
"Question it. Try it. Listen. Buy weird bad gear and great quality gear—see what it does for you."
When each of the tools in that display was first introduced, many music experts were totally wrong about the impact they would have on creative culture. Records will kill live music,” they said as the phonograph gained popularity. Tape recording was initially viewed with suspicion by recordists accustomed to using disc-cutting lathes.
As digital technology arrived, many people thought it would surely relegate analog recording equipment to the scrap heap. In what seems like a stunning example of shortsightedness, some of Abbey Road's most noteworthy gear was sold off in a 1980 sale as memorabilia” at bargain-basement prices. One example—A 4-track recorder used on "Sgt. Peppers'" went for just $800 (that's $2,300 in today's money).
Why does this pattern of poor prediction repeat, time and again? At least part of it seems to be due to the gap between when a new tool is first introduced and when people gain an understanding of how to use it artistically. This is, perhaps, an explanation for the (incorrect) idea that technology is ruining the soul of music.”
What new tools do is force a reconsideration of the relative strengths and weaknesses of old tools. After some time goes by, creative professionals generally develop ways to blend the best aspects of both the old and the new.
Kehew agrees that every tool can have a place as part of an artistic palate. Old is not good or bad,” he said. Question it. Try it. Listen. Buy weird bad gear and great quality gear—see what it does for you. I love Jon Brion's quote—‘I don't want to be Lo-Fi or Hi-Fi, I want to be ALL-Fi!'”
Scott touched on this in the lecture too, recounting that this was the approach that caused Beatles producer George Martin to turn down Abbey Road's first 8-track recorder for use on the White Album. The 4-track recorders used for years by The Beatles had been specially modified to help create some of their signature sounds. Because the new 8-track recorder lacked those modifications, Martin declined to bring it into the session. His thinking, Scott said, was that it would be better for the process to maintain continuity.
In an ironic twist, Scott mentioned that The Beatles themselves had a different idea. They decided to use the 8-track without Martin's permission, which got Scott and another engineer into a fair amount of trouble. The fact that the device was used to track parts of While My Guitar Gently Weeps” probably helped accelerate the forgiveness. Even though new technologies can kill off old ways of working, it's ultimately up to humans to decide the hour that they should.
It was the 60s,” Scott said of the incident. Rules were meant to be broken.”
Justin Lancy
At the beginning of the Beatles era, technicians had to complete what amounted to an extended apprenticeship program—and were even required to wear white lab coats (Winston Churchill once quipped that Abbey Road made him feel like he was visiting a hospital). Prospective engineers were brought up through the ranks slowly and instructed on the "rules of the process" at each stage.
But as the 60s went on, culture—specifically counter-culture—began seeping into the studio and changing that dynamic relationship between the engineers and their tools. Over time, the room became filled with incredibly skilled people who were willing to break any rule if it helped their artists create new and interesting sounds.
It was this combination of playfulness, openness to risk-taking, and deep professionalism which enabled Abbey Road's technicians to respond to seemingly off-the-wall requests from The Beatles. Engineers began to record amps inside cupboards to get unique sounds. The studio's tape recorders were rewired to automatically double-track performances. The tapes themselves were sped-up, slowed-down, sliced, and looped—to great effect. Even a joke, Scott says, was turned into an engineering puzzle that he had to solve when John Lennon took him up on his suggestion” to fit the entire band in a small utility closet for the recording of Yer Blues.”
Take something flawed, work on it 'til every part is ‘improved' then listen. It's worse. How could that be?"
A sort of positive feedback loop was happening: Culture was driving the development of technologies which, in turn, emboldened that creative culture to go even farther to create new tools and techniques. This embrace of the unorthodox didn't mean that the Abbey Road staff abandoned everything they had been taught in the white coat days,” though. In fact, Scott says it was that training which gave engineers the necessary skills to successfully and intelligently break the rules and develop all those new sounds and techniques.
But has that cycle continued? Scott, Kehew, and Ryan each pointed out that, since that time, the dynamic interaction between tools and culture has evolved in ways which may now be undermining the mindset that made Abbey Road successful.
In some ways, the process of recording music is very much the same as it was in the time of The Beatles: Stick a microphone in front of someone or something and hit the RECORD” button.
When you listen to recordings from a generation or two ago, though, you often hear all sorts of rough edges: large dynamic transitions between loud and quiet, the sounds of oversaturated tape and tubes, instruments bleeding together. Chunked notes. Vocals that are out of pitch. Drums that drift in and out of time. Mistakes. Lots of mistakes.
Today's creative paradox is that this human element, which often makes a song distinct or artistically interesting, is the thing which is almost always erased from modern productions.
Do mistakes make music better?” I asked Kehew. Not really, he responded. It's just that, when it comes to what people like about music, there was actually only one thing worse than these imperfections: perfection.
I've done it and seen it many times," he said. Take something flawed, work on it 'til every part is ‘improved' then listen. It's worse. How could that be? Every piece is now better. But it's a worse final product.”
It was because artists were often stuck with the mistakes they made that they sometimes decided to embrace them.
This tendency towards incessant improvement has been encouraged by the power of modern tools. These days, sounds are almost always passed through a computer at some point in the recording process. These computers have their own working paradigms—things like cutting-and-pasting, the automated repetition of tasks, and infinite undo”—which gives them incredible power to alter performances. It also adds more potential for overpolishing and something recording engineers refer to as "option paralysis," a state where the sheer number of choices available prevents decisions from being made. Almost any element of a recording can be changed, right up until the moment that a song is released to the public.
The limitations of Beatles-era technology were substantial by comparison, and they forced a commitment to creative choices at earlier stages of the recording process. If, for example, an engineer wanted to exceed the number of recorded tracks that their tape machine allowed, two or more tracks had to be mixed together and bounced” to an open track elsewhere.
Cuts were physical, done with razor blades and tape. Mixes were performed by engineers in real time. Big mistakes at any point in the process could force an entire recording to be scrapped.
It was because artists were often stuck with the mistakes they made that they sometimes decided to embrace them. Once while recording a Beatles song called Glass Onion” Scott accidentally erased a large number of drum parts that had been painstakingly overdubbed. Certain that he'd be fired, he played the tape to John Lennon. To Scott's surprise, Lennon said that he liked the unexpected effect created by the glitch—and both the track and Scott stayed.
Scott was clear in his opinion: It isn't so much the use of these new tools as it is their overuse that serves to undermine musicality.
The trick,” Kehew says, "is a savvy or talented producer or engineer knows when to be bold and stop. To let character and roughness and lack of polish exist. I can bet most people spend more time polishing something than writing or creating the substance of it. The only cure is to work faster, more often, so you don't treat every damn thing as being so precious that 'It Must Be Perfect For All Time.'”
I asked Kevin Ryan if he was able to heed Scott's warning in his own work. He laughed and acknowledged that knowing the risks of overusing digital tools didn't make it any easier for him to resist that temptation. Kehew's final word on the subject was, I thought, an especially Beatle-like principle for not overworking something: Let it be what it was,” he says. If it's not that good, you shouldn't be recording it.”
Justin Lancy
Today, Abbey Road straddles a line between modern culture and English Heritage. It has become Pop Music's Westminster Abbey: partly a tourist attraction, partly a working cathedral where all the traditional rites and rituals are still observed.
Abbey Road is still producing hits though—even as tighter budgets and rising costs have caused many other recording facilities to close. An almost unbelievable number of influential artists and projects have worked (and continue to work) at the studio. Even if you eliminated the entire Beatles oeuvre the list is impressive. Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon” was tracked there. Acts like Kate Bush, Elton John, Oasis, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Green Day, U2, Radiohead, and Kanye West have all recorded there. Countless film scores, too—Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lord of the Rings.
Were these artists attracted to working at Abbey Road, at least in some small measure, because of the notoriety of The Beatles? It's hard to say for sure, but there are probably more compelling reasons why so many great projects have emerged from St. John's Wood.
The people who worked at Abbey Road during the era of The Beatles enjoyed taking risks with whatever tools they had to work with. They felt that great work always required a lot of skill, imagination, some serendipity, and—above all—a human touch. It's that spirit which seems central to creating enduring work and will hopefully continue to be a tradition that, as Kehew says, honors the past and inspires today's ideas.”
I love history,” he says. But never get hung up on what happened before. Today and tomorrow are as exciting… and always will be.”
On a cool, English Sunday afternoon, there was a crowd loitering on the sidewalks of this wealthy London neighborhood called St. John's Wood. Some people were waiting to use the zebra crosswalk made famous on the cover of The Beatles' Abbey Road” album. Others were using pens to scrawl messages on the front of Abbey Road Studios, where that album—and many others—had been made. Things like Imagine all the people,” and John Lennon Lives!”
I was there because of the music, too. In a rare public event, Abbey Road Studio's most famous room was being opened to the public for a lecture by Ken Scott, an engineer on The Beatles' seminal White Album.” I had assumed that the topic, a look at vintage recording techniques and equipment,” occupied a fairly esoteric niche when I bought my ticket. Judging from the long line to get into the building, though, it was clear that music nerdery (like many other nerdy things) had gone mainstream.
Abbey Road is famous for a good reason—but it's more than just a tourist attraction.
Joining Scott were two younger music engineers from America, Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan. Kehew and Ryan are the authors of Recording The Beatles , a 500-plus-page volume created from 15 years of research and housed in a shell designed to look like a old-school tape reel box. Recording The Beatles is, all at once, a labor of love, a celebration of music recording culture and, quite likely, the most detailed historical compendium of photography and information about the Fab Four's time in the studio. The book is also a subtle illumination of the dynamic relationship that occurs between people and their tools, a constantly shifting balance which can either enable—or thwart—inspiration.
Abbey Road is famous for a good reason—and each year thousands of visitors flock to take photos and scrawl messages on its walls. But it's more than just a tourist attraction. It's a building full of history lessons that could help creative people working today.
The sanctum sanctorum of Abbey Road is Studio Two, the room where the majority of The Beatles' recordings were made.
Standing at the threshold of Studio Two, it doesn't look all that different from a small school gymnasium: a big rectangular box with white walls, 24-foot-high ceilings, and a parquet floor. But as soon as we entered, any thoughts of dribbling basketballs fell away, as I began to remember images of John Lennon and Paul McCartney standing around a microphone at the far end of the room, working out their harmonies.
For melodic pop music, Studio Two has physical, tonal qualities which transcend its humble appearance. It emphasizes the midrange,” Kehew says, ”and has a warm, short reverb unusual for a room its size.” These reverberant qualities are so well known that Abbey Road's rental contract actually prohibits any sampling of its distinctive acoustic signature. As I stood in the room, I could hear the echoes of the vocals and kick drums on some of my favorite recordings of all time.
To my left was a collection of vintage recording equipment arrayed in the corner (courtesy of the EMI Archive Trust ). The first item on display was a gramophone, circa 1925, and the collection progressed chronologically through a series of tape recorders, effects, and microphones before arriving at mixing desks used into the 1980s. If you included the modern mixer across the room being used to run the PA system, the gear present provided a fairly complete historical timeline of the last 90 years of recording science.
In many ways, this exhibit at Abbey Road Studios embodies both the history of music recording culture and so many of the changes which have transformed it in our modern era. EMI Studios, as it was originally called, was renamed Abbey Road Studios in 1970 after the Beatles album which made it famous. In the intervening years, its producers have had to navigate massive economic shifts in its industry. Their challenge: Find a way to use cutting-edge technology while, at the same time, stay true to the studio's historical roots.
"Question it. Try it. Listen. Buy weird bad gear and great quality gear—see what it does for you."
When each of the tools in that display was first introduced, many music experts were totally wrong about the impact they would have on creative culture. Records will kill live music,” they said as the phonograph gained popularity. Tape recording was initially viewed with suspicion by recordists accustomed to using disc-cutting lathes.
As digital technology arrived, many people thought it would surely relegate analog recording equipment to the scrap heap. In what seems like a stunning example of shortsightedness, some of Abbey Road's most noteworthy gear was sold off in a 1980 sale as memorabilia” at bargain-basement prices. One example—A 4-track recorder used on "Sgt. Peppers'" went for just $800 (that's $2,300 in today's money).
Why does this pattern of poor prediction repeat, time and again? At least part of it seems to be due to the gap between when a new tool is first introduced and when people gain an understanding of how to use it artistically. This is, perhaps, an explanation for the (incorrect) idea that technology is ruining the soul of music.”
What new tools do is force a reconsideration of the relative strengths and weaknesses of old tools. After some time goes by, creative professionals generally develop ways to blend the best aspects of both the old and the new.
Kehew agrees that every tool can have a place as part of an artistic palate. Old is not good or bad,” he said. Question it. Try it. Listen. Buy weird bad gear and great quality gear—see what it does for you. I love Jon Brion's quote—‘I don't want to be Lo-Fi or Hi-Fi, I want to be ALL-Fi!'”
Scott touched on this in the lecture too, recounting that this was the approach that caused Beatles producer George Martin to turn down Abbey Road's first 8-track recorder for use on the White Album. The 4-track recorders used for years by The Beatles had been specially modified to help create some of their signature sounds. Because the new 8-track recorder lacked those modifications, Martin declined to bring it into the session. His thinking, Scott said, was that it would be better for the process to maintain continuity.
In an ironic twist, Scott mentioned that The Beatles themselves had a different idea. They decided to use the 8-track without Martin's permission, which got Scott and another engineer into a fair amount of trouble. The fact that the device was used to track parts of While My Guitar Gently Weeps” probably helped accelerate the forgiveness. Even though new technologies can kill off old ways of working, it's ultimately up to humans to decide the hour that they should.
It was the 60s,” Scott said of the incident. Rules were meant to be broken.”
Justin Lancy
At the beginning of the Beatles era, technicians had to complete what amounted to an extended apprenticeship program—and were even required to wear white lab coats (Winston Churchill once quipped that Abbey Road made him feel like he was visiting a hospital). Prospective engineers were brought up through the ranks slowly and instructed on the "rules of the process" at each stage.
But as the 60s went on, culture—specifically counter-culture—began seeping into the studio and changing that dynamic relationship between the engineers and their tools. Over time, the room became filled with incredibly skilled people who were willing to break any rule if it helped their artists create new and interesting sounds.
It was this combination of playfulness, openness to risk-taking, and deep professionalism which enabled Abbey Road's technicians to respond to seemingly off-the-wall requests from The Beatles. Engineers began to record amps inside cupboards to get unique sounds. The studio's tape recorders were rewired to automatically double-track performances. The tapes themselves were sped-up, slowed-down, sliced, and looped—to great effect. Even a joke, Scott says, was turned into an engineering puzzle that he had to solve when John Lennon took him up on his suggestion” to fit the entire band in a small utility closet for the recording of Yer Blues.”
Take something flawed, work on it 'til every part is ‘improved' then listen. It's worse. How could that be?"
A sort of positive feedback loop was happening: Culture was driving the development of technologies which, in turn, emboldened that creative culture to go even farther to create new tools and techniques. This embrace of the unorthodox didn't mean that the Abbey Road staff abandoned everything they had been taught in the white coat days,” though. In fact, Scott says it was that training which gave engineers the necessary skills to successfully and intelligently break the rules and develop all those new sounds and techniques.
But has that cycle continued? Scott, Kehew, and Ryan each pointed out that, since that time, the dynamic interaction between tools and culture has evolved in ways which may now be undermining the mindset that made Abbey Road successful.
In some ways, the process of recording music is very much the same as it was in the time of The Beatles: Stick a microphone in front of someone or something and hit the RECORD” button.
When you listen to recordings from a generation or two ago, though, you often hear all sorts of rough edges: large dynamic transitions between loud and quiet, the sounds of oversaturated tape and tubes, instruments bleeding together. Chunked notes. Vocals that are out of pitch. Drums that drift in and out of time. Mistakes. Lots of mistakes.
Today's creative paradox is that this human element, which often makes a song distinct or artistically interesting, is the thing which is almost always erased from modern productions.
Do mistakes make music better?” I asked Kehew. Not really, he responded. It's just that, when it comes to what people like about music, there was actually only one thing worse than these imperfections: perfection.
I've done it and seen it many times," he said. Take something flawed, work on it 'til every part is ‘improved' then listen. It's worse. How could that be? Every piece is now better. But it's a worse final product.”
It was because artists were often stuck with the mistakes they made that they sometimes decided to embrace them.
This tendency towards incessant improvement has been encouraged by the power of modern tools. These days, sounds are almost always passed through a computer at some point in the recording process. These computers have their own working paradigms—things like cutting-and-pasting, the automated repetition of tasks, and infinite undo”—which gives them incredible power to alter performances. It also adds more potential for overpolishing and something recording engineers refer to as "option paralysis," a state where the sheer number of choices available prevents decisions from being made. Almost any element of a recording can be changed, right up until the moment that a song is released to the public.
The limitations of Beatles-era technology were substantial by comparison, and they forced a commitment to creative choices at earlier stages of the recording process. If, for example, an engineer wanted to exceed the number of recorded tracks that their tape machine allowed, two or more tracks had to be mixed together and bounced” to an open track elsewhere.
Cuts were physical, done with razor blades and tape. Mixes were performed by engineers in real time. Big mistakes at any point in the process could force an entire recording to be scrapped.
It was because artists were often stuck with the mistakes they made that they sometimes decided to embrace them. Once while recording a Beatles song called Glass Onion” Scott accidentally erased a large number of drum parts that had been painstakingly overdubbed. Certain that he'd be fired, he played the tape to John Lennon. To Scott's surprise, Lennon said that he liked the unexpected effect created by the glitch—and both the track and Scott stayed.
Scott was clear in his opinion: It isn't so much the use of these new tools as it is their overuse that serves to undermine musicality.
The trick,” Kehew says, "is a savvy or talented producer or engineer knows when to be bold and stop. To let character and roughness and lack of polish exist. I can bet most people spend more time polishing something than writing or creating the substance of it. The only cure is to work faster, more often, so you don't treat every damn thing as being so precious that 'It Must Be Perfect For All Time.'”
I asked Kevin Ryan if he was able to heed Scott's warning in his own work. He laughed and acknowledged that knowing the risks of overusing digital tools didn't make it any easier for him to resist that temptation. Kehew's final word on the subject was, I thought, an especially Beatle-like principle for not overworking something: Let it be what it was,” he says. If it's not that good, you shouldn't be recording it.”
Justin Lancy
Today, Abbey Road straddles a line between modern culture and English Heritage. It has become Pop Music's Westminster Abbey: partly a tourist attraction, partly a working cathedral where all the traditional rites and rituals are still observed.
Abbey Road is still producing hits though—even as tighter budgets and rising costs have caused many other recording facilities to close. An almost unbelievable number of influential artists and projects have worked (and continue to work) at the studio. Even if you eliminated the entire Beatles oeuvre the list is impressive. Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon” was tracked there. Acts like Kate Bush, Elton John, Oasis, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Green Day, U2, Radiohead, and Kanye West have all recorded there. Countless film scores, too—Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lord of the Rings.
Were these artists attracted to working at Abbey Road, at least in some small measure, because of the notoriety of The Beatles? It's hard to say for sure, but there are probably more compelling reasons why so many great projects have emerged from St. John's Wood.
The people who worked at Abbey Road during the era of The Beatles enjoyed taking risks with whatever tools they had to work with. They felt that great work always required a lot of skill, imagination, some serendipity, and—above all—a human touch. It's that spirit which seems central to creating enduring work and will hopefully continue to be a tradition that, as Kehew says, honors the past and inspires today's ideas.”
I love history,” he says. But never get hung up on what happened before. Today and tomorrow are as exciting… and always will be.”
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