Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the death of "Feel"...
Posted by Trevor_Raggatt on 24 March 2008 - 2:38pm.
One of the most fascinating of recent podcasts (for me anyway)was the one focusing on music technologies - and in particular th erise of AutoTune and maximisers. Well, that's all well and good but I just came across THIS video/product. Flippin' heck! If AutoTune and ProTools jiggering with the recorded performance has been considered to rob much modern pop from a lot of it's individuality and feel, what will this allow producers/engineers to pump out?
http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna&L=0
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Photoshop for music
It was only a question of time, I suppose.
It's what you do with it, innit
The thing is, it's up to the users what they do with it. The original Melodyne could only deal with a single line of notes and one of the things Peter Gabriel used it for was to extract notes from birdsong and either have other instruments play those notes or make the birds appear to sing specific notes. You can be quite creative with it if you want to.
Lots of people in the music tech world are really excited about some of the creative things we'll be able to do with this. Melodyne, AutoTune, Pro Tools, Drum Replacer, AVox... these are all just tools to use and it's up to the people who use them whether it makes good things or not.
Exactly...
...and we all know what a huge number of folks are going to do with it. And it isn't being tasteful like Mr Gabriel.
Peter Gabriel is a great example...
of someone who has always embraced the latest technologies, but knows how to employ them in such a way that they compliment a piece of music rather than overwhelm it. However, I would suggest his last two or three records would have benefited from a less 'considered' approach.
However, I can see this latest gadget being put to some truly terrifying uses by those with dollar signs in their eyes.
We're not all Lee Oskar.
You are a band who have been given a very limited number of days in the studio, have a singer with a rudimentary grasp of the dynamics of the harmonica, a song that needs a harmonica part, no budget, a limited address book and melodyne as a plug-in on the mixing desk. This is the take that will be heard, not just today, but forever. What do you do?
Yes indeed, tweak a couple of bum notes. Absolutely! But...
...you're the runner up in the latest series of Big Brother and the man with the fat cigar and his trousers hitched up around his armpits says, "Tone deaf? No problem. Just sign the record contract..." What do you do?
Hell, what do WE do?
That's one scary level of tweakability!
Thanks for posting this
I found the video so interesting. What an amazing bit of kit!
In the right hands, I'm sure this will produce some really great stuff.
But yes, it'll get in the wrong hands and it'll produce plenty of homogenized dross too....
Here's a question...
...electronical studio effects adjusting the sounds of things - good or bad? Hendrix? Cream? Small Faces? Peter Frampton? contd on p.95
What we're listening to is never what was actually recorded. We have never sat in the lap of Johnny Cash, although we may, conceivably, have been in the same room as The Buena Vista Social Club. All the vocals you have ever heard on record, or on bootleg live recordings, have been eq'd, reverbed, slapbacked and honed to the best possible commercial (ie 'buyable') level ever. Aside from the Word podcast, obviously. What's up, kids?
But you see, it's not the creative use of effects...
...that's the problem. (All hail Hendrix's right foot) Or even the studio process per se... (All hail St George! All hail Rick Rubin! Hell, even All hail Alan Parsons!). They are parts of a creative process - painting pictures in sound (Oh God, I hate myself for typing that... it'll be sonic cathedrals next!)
It's the supposed drive for perfection which leads to the "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and" nature of so much moden POP (in particular). The curse of the "quantize" button, in particular whereby everything happens on the beat... dead on the beat... precisely... every single time. And then gets cut and pasted into the next time round the verse and chorus. No laying back into the groove on the verse and then pushing forward into the prechorus ready to give some urgency and drive to the big hook. Imagine the Purdie shuffle if he could only play square on the beats and the off beats...
It's not those that use the stuff inspirationally and creatively that's the worrying thing - fixing up bum notes on a live recording? Great idea. It's the scope for uninspired abuse and homogenisation that's the worrying thing.
A few more questions
Thing is, if they were to fiddle with the recording after the event with this stuff would you be able to tell? And if it was a great record anyway would you be that bothered or upset? And would it happen without the artist's approval (as opposed to deliberately due to artist's creative experimentation) with the music we who are of this 'community' listen to, or is it just the not so good stuff that gets the treatment? Exactly what music is getting the treatment with the software currently in use I wonder?
Old CGI
Think of it like special effects in films, computer generated that looked amazing ten years ago isn't so impressive now. When AutoTune first came out it had the effect of making everything it processed sound slightly "glassy." All this technology is going to get better as we go along and at the moment, you'd probably have to listen quite carefully to be able to tell.
It takes some level of skill to hide the fact that something has been processed, and despite appearances Melodyne cannot achieve the impossible; if someone was singing in a literal monotone then it would be tricky to make a realistic sounding performance out of it. I know because I had to do that on a CD for a local children's theatre group - after I delivered the original version there was a "we can't sell this, it's out of tune" sort of response.
I know that Melodyne has been used on some live music DVDs to fix pitching without having to re-record a vocal in the studio, and some of these DVDs are ones which may well be in the collections of Word readers.
Interesting
Any examples? Name names!
Careless talk, etc
Can't, I'm afraid. Still trying to get my professional career off the ground and that would be a definite "you'll never work in this industry again" moment. At least until someone else involved mentions it in an interview with a magazine or something.
OK then I understand
shame though