HOW MUSICIANS ARE DESTROYING THE RECORDING INDUSTRY

I have stumbled across this article which may be of interest to lovers of recorded music;

HOW MUSICIANS ARE DESTROYING THE RECORDING INDUSTRY

by João Ganho

Let's get honest here: musicians don't hear the same way a sound engineer does. In fact, they are light years from us and they will never understand sound as we do in all their lifetime. They will never understand what a good recording is, muchless how to distinguish a good one from a reference one. As hard as a sound engineer works and as much talent he may have, a musician will always look at him at the end of a listening session with that awkward face of someone who does not get the sound engineer's proudness: "It's recorded, so what?!” Unfortunately, 99 percent of musicians don't give us a damn credit, albeit the outstanding stereo soundstage we recreated on record, the control we achieved to their uncontrolled dynamics or the wonderful performance they got because we managed to mask their flaws with careful microphone position or by inserting some cool effects in the mix.

Musicians take sound engineering for granted because they don't know what to listen to in a recording other than themselves. By opposition, a good sound engineer does not take a musician for granted because he knows a good record is not made only of his good sound engineering. Let's face it: musicians are complex human beings by nature and much of their talent and art is a result of this! But if they would know what to listen to in a recording, both our lives would be much simpler and they would be the ones to get the highest benefit from it. A talented sound engineer won't destroy his own career by recording a lesser musician, but even an unique and out-of-this-world musician may put an end to his career with a bad recording. And the worst part is that he will for sure never understand how everything happened because he can't notice what is bad in a bad recording.

A musician's inability to distinguish a good from a bad recording is a reflection of what they expect from a recording and from our work: their focus is so centered on their performance that they forget there is much more about the music. Recorded music is, or should be, made of several things other than their performance: space, soundstage, volume, tonal and frequency balance being the main ones. But in these hard times for those who spend a lifetime trying to improve recorded sound, musicians should also be concerned about these other things: distortion, dynamics, resolution, harmonics, clearness and intelligibility.

Let me get specific here: 99 percent of the time I watch a musician listening to their material I get the feeling they don't have a clue about how the sound engineer managed to get them that type of sound, much less what he was trying to achieve. Take the tri dimensional nature of the music for example: sound is compression and rarefaction of air molecules, being that the vibrating source may be located anywhere around the listener. In an odd way, when listening to recorded music musicians seem to get space in one dimension only: foreground and background, dry or reverberant, louder or softer. It is as they hear everything in mono and any stereo soundstage you recreate with rudimentary pan pot seems to be enough. They don't even get the difference between this in-your-face ping-pong stereo and a wide stereo soundstage achieved through delays and out-of-phase elements. This explains in part the modern age success of near-field monitors and the fact that every sound engineer is mixing with the speakers 1 meter apart from each other on a daily basis without any client asking if that is really the right way of listening to recorded music! Artists are not listening to the same things as some of us are, that is the sad truth.

Oddly enough, musicians are extremely sensible and prone to the musical performance no matter how bad the sound they are listening to. They have a unique and enjoyable way of filtering everything around the musical content. They spot a wrong note in a very noisy and medium-frequency dominant old recording of Furtwangler or a nano beat tempo change in a muddy recording of a drum set. They seem to have a noise-suppressor and restoration plug-in in the brain! The problem is when that organic plug-in gets in the way of their own recordings. And, to be honest, that is most of the time...

Never in the history of recorded music there has been so many bad sound engineered records out there. They sound truly lousy on their own, but things get worse if we think that never in the history of recorded music the equipment was so advance and almost capable of recreating a live experience as of today, be it a classical music audiophile recording or an extremely produced rock album. Musicians don't like to take the credit for this paradox and sure they are not alone, but the truth is that it is their posture of "I don't care about the tech side" the one to blame for most of it. Modern musicians divorced themselves from the technical side of the process of making an album with the excuse that "content is over form". This is true, but they forget they live and work in a record industry and, therefore, form is also a good part of the content. If they can't deal with this they should get out of the recording business as fast as they can because they misunderstand the medium.

Even an orthodox artist like maestro Sergiu Celibidache, who refused for most of his life to put his performances on record under the excuse that each one was unique and unrepeatable was more accurate and wise about the industry than most of modern musicians: rejecting the record concept based on this premiss of "it's only a copy of a complex reality" is the most valid argument and shows more knowledge about the medium than anyone else. On the opposite side, but expressing the same profound knowledge of the industry, stands Herbert Von Karajan. He recorded 3 complete cycles of Beethoven's symphonies only for Deutsche Grammophon (not counting the EMI years) because he wanted to keep up to date with recording technology.Like Celibidache, he understood that any recording creates its own reality, but he wanted to take full advantage of it. For this he knew there was a need for the best sound engineering he could grasp to. And he was the most informed person about it at the studio, getting to the point of stating about digital sound that "anything else is gaslight" - this was in the early 80's... Like these two artist from the classical music world, I could give you some more from the rock world such as Pink Floyd or Peter Gabriel, but let's stick to the main concern of my argumentation: any talented and professional artist knows the need to keep himself/herself informed about the medium he operates so he/she may take full advantage of it.

A musician to care about the technical dark side of the recording process or to know the medium is not as if he needs a master graduation on sound engineering or electronics. He only needs good listening habits and good recording references. Quite often, if you go to a musician's home you easily get to understand what I am saying here: most of them don't take the time to listen to music seated in the sweet spot, doing absolutely nothing else, much less in a satisfactory medium priced hi-fi equipment properly placed or calibrated;

and most of the times their recording references from a reduced record collection or from youtube are not about the recording but only about the performance. How does this translates to their record career? Not in the best way, I’m afraid.

By voluntarily putting themselves out of the tech knowledge, modern musicians are giving away all their credits at the hands of inexperienced or untalented sound engineers setting up the wrong microphones in inadequate acoustics, over processing the mix or mastering in a bad monitoring environment. And they will never get the main point in any art or business: people or consumers are not stupid and, even if it may take some time, they always spot and reject the low quality product. The average listener is unable to identify the goods or the flaws in a recording, even less get rational about it, but he always knows by instinct what tracks give him the goose bumps and which ones are to cut from the playlist. And music is sound. If it has bad sound engineering this will get in the way people perceive a song or a theme. Maybe I am being naive here, but how many times do you hear average listeners stating about a music they enjoy, "this performance is great"? They always say, "this music sounds good"! A record is exclusively about the performance exclusively for its own performer. Period. Recording musicians need to start listening to recorded music for real - it's not about the technical fuss and buzz, it's about the medium. Or just leave...

JG

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