Thoughts on Recording (From Someone Who Has Not Yet Made a Great Record)
April will be the one-year anniversary of when I started playing with TOAD-EATER. Next month we're to start work on our first LP (tentatively titled "Warts & All"), the first full-length album I've done with any group. I'm not concerned about the material, we have good stuff, and I'm not too worried about the performances (tho I want to get a few more practices in)... but I'm anxious about getting it all done before the band goes on hiatus in May. And I've grown obsessed with the idea of capturing the "right" sound, tho I haven't yet determined what is "right."
I was listening to the first Bo Diddley LP a couple nights ago, and thinking about recording engineers. EVERYTHING on that record is overdriven, distorted, blown out. At its best, it becomes a wash of noise, and the rhythmically-driven music becomes one big sound, far greater than the sum of its parts. It's what you'd call "amateurish" or even "lo-fi" (gasp!) today. And it's (of course) one of the greatest records ever made.
The desperate battle for "separation" and "accurate reproduction" in recordings has effectively killed rock 'n' roll——or at least tried pretty damn hard. The best rock bands create ONE BIG SOUND* like Bo Diddley: Ramones, The Stooges, AC/DC, Chuck Berry... power through simplicity, but also power through recording techniques that required ping-ponging and other methods that resulted in multiple sounds being combined on the same over-saturated track. Bo Diddley didn't need to use Van Halen (oh that's another one) levels of distortion——the board he recorded into did it for him. And it did the same to his soulful voice, the same to everything Jerome did and everything James Clifton did and everything every fucking unbelievable musician did on those recordings. And turned it all into one big mush of sound. And the world is better for it. AND IT WAS ALL RECORDED LIVE.
Recording digitally results in compromised records. That's not to say you can't make a great record that way, but it's harder; You have to resist the temptations of tracking, of flawless punch-ins, of quantization, of amp modeling and sampling and drum triggering, of every thing that can "improve" your record while vacuuming the soul right out of it. You can still work digitally (hell, you should. it's way cheaper and way faster) but recording as if you are is a trap.
I think there might be something to be said for mono, too. We turned that record up real loud and it shook the whole trailer and sounded good no matter where you stood. A mono recording——and one with integral lo fidelity elements——democratizes music. I can't say it better than my friend Ryan did:
"...those of us who have owned shitty old cars with one blown speaker love mono!"
Today's recordings (those being most records made after 1970-something) are so complex that you need a good system (or at least an acceptable pair of headphones) to listen to them. The music of Bo Diddley (or Chuck Berry, or Buddy Holly, or Richie Valens, or The Coasters, or the Ramones, or CCR, or The Rolling Stones (thru the '70s) or the early Beatles) sounds good coming from a hi-fi in your rumpus room, or a portable record player at the beach, or a transistor radio under the covers at night, or public address system at a football game, or a goddamn walkie talkie. This is due to simplicity in musicians' individual performances, groups working together, listening to one another, and recording simultaneously, but also simplicity in mixing.
I don't listen to a lot of modern music (sue me) but I think the modern-day focus on texture (over anything else) is a knee-jerk reaction to the cleanliness of digital recording. Go on Rate Your Music (be sure to put a clothespin on your nose first) and pick any of this year's top albums. I'm willing to bet there will be all kinds of alien little sounds——ping ponging synths, near-imperceptible pads, scratchy and crunchy velcro-esque sounds——peppered throughout the recordings.
Modern music listeners are OBSESSED with these textures, I believe, because they don't get any texture from anywhere else. There's no record player with its pops and crackles, there's no distortion from a tube preamp... at best there's a lack of fidelity from low quality streaming audio files and the evil that is Bluetooth. Producers are feverish to insert anything that might feel organic into their quantized, sanitized recordings. And I guess it works.
Or does it? Back in the trailer, we had gotten about three or four songs into that LP. My friend:
"It's like I'm hearing The Beatles for the first time. How have I never heard this before?!"
Well you haven't heard it because Bo was, and is, too threatening for oldies radio (imagine "Dearest Darling" or "Hush Your Mouth" playing in between The Marcels' "Blue Moon" and Bobby Day's "Rockin' Robin") and his hypnotic, thrumming music is far more explicitly sexual than anything the other provocative rock 'n' rollers of the day (Elvis, Chuck, even Little Richard) achieved. Just listen to the response he elicits from this drunken frat crowd at Cornell in 1959.
But I digress. What makes that first LP such an orgasmic, Earth-shattering experience? As far as I'm concerned, it's straightforward: A great band having fun, playing exciting, well-written, simple songs, performing live in a room, recorded unpretentiously. It's the same for most any other band I listed. You can get more complex, add extra percussion, twiddly guitar bits, whatever, and still make great music (god knows the Ramones did) but this core must remain, and it must be priority numero uno. Far too many bands let limiting factors (genre conventions, instrumental heroics, digital recording techniques, "neat" sound effects, poses ("I have to sound cool/hip/socially conscious!"), social media popularity and trends) stop them from making the great music they're driven to make.
We don't dance very often anymore. Why is that? For me, as the number of inorganic elements in a tune increase (this includes behind-the-scenes things like sample replacement or click tracks) the less motivated I am to move. I'm most motivated when hearing music that is totally spontaneous and live, especially jazz or (as I heard for the first time recently) African drum music. Music should be communal and social. It belongs to everyone witnessing a performance, sharing that moment. That's what the greatest records can do too.
I digress. Er, I have digressed. A whole lot. Making a great record is as simple (ha!) as capturing a great band as minimally as you can get away with. I think we achieved that with our demo. Now it's time to do it again.
I think I'm gonna see if I can get 'em to do a mono mix. For my shitty car, at the least.
*I wanted to take this opportunity to share a really great record I don't think gets enough attention: The American Revolution by David Peel & The Lower East Side. I picked this up a year or two ago assuming it'd be a fun sixties "pro-pot, no pigs" psychedelic relic.
What I got was a really great and powerful garage rock record! The band did a lot of street performing (I'm honestly not sure how often they got on stage) and therefore is tight with simplistic instrumentation. They do their usual thing (screaming + guitar + percussion) with a guest rhythm section doing just enough. It's very primitive, and it rocks!