Am I digital?
Contributed By Loki
What is really important here anyway?
It was three in the morning, and there I was, Drinking a cup of coffee, smoking a cigerette, and looking at my computer screen. "Something doesn't sound right" I thought. "Let me look through the wave and see where the bad spot it."
Can anyone see the Mistake here?
Now, almost all of us are using the computer as the medium by which we record and make music. We've got high dollar set ups with mixers, A dual processor computer with tons of DDR ram, Soundcards with multiple ins and outs, and tons of Software. In fact, some of use don't use any hardware to make our music, it's all done on the PC.
Working with FruityLoops (http://www.fruityloops.com) I made a drum beat and layed down some synths, I then exported that to a stereo wav file and imported it into Sonar (http://www.cakewalk.com) to mix it in. I then opened up some of my softsynths, then the software EQs and Effects I have. I sat in front of my computer hitting keyboard shortcuts, moving my mouse to mix and turn knobs on the computer screen. Time went by and I realised it was 7am.
Now I don't have anything against the digital domain, but we have all seen what I am talking about before. We spend more time focusing on the knob tweaking, synth programming, beat slicing, sampling, and all this other stuff than we do on actually creating the music. Using a computer to mix has a flaw, and that is you can see the wave. Now, instead of mixing by what you hear you mix by what you see... "oh, that looks too high, take it down a few Dbs...".
The Point I'm trying to get across is this:
Process should not be more important than product, and for a musician time is best spent making music, not learning how to program a new soft synth.
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| User-submitted comments |
| alley kitten Jun 18, 2003 04:48 pm |
can be the opposite too... Well, it can be the opposite as well, at least for me. getting a new synth, either software or hardware, triggers my creativity and makes me do something i find more interesting than older songs. maybe that is just me. |
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pixelpixie Jul 07, 2003 06:50 am |
digital error While i see Lokis point to a certain extent, i am not sure that the whole piece makes sense to me. I agree that while the process is king, the extrpolation of the idea is an organic thing in itself. if one mixes by sight, then one will make robotic music, whereas if one makes music from the heart, then you will not. all music undergoes a process, as the soul cannot make noise without the use of the brain and hands, it's just now we can afford to do it at home. i know many engineers (as all members most likely do) who sit in the studio at all hours, irresepective of the hard/software involved. i was once a luddite, cursing computers, samplers et al for their 'murder of music'!. Well, now i'm not, because i learnt to use one and because i found a way of expressing myself within the frame. i see no difference in knowing how to tune drums and how to tune a wave, they all add or detract form the piece, although they could be ignored. process IS important, as this is the time we work on our expression, or we'd all be garage bands that recorded our song in the first rehearsal fi process was defunct. don't forget, how much time do we spend working with our bandmates (those here that have them)? well, this is process, so a large amount of time working on the individual sounds is as important as the key, notes and where the bridge is going. but, to paraphrase Loki, do it with your ears and your soul, because anything you do after that will be based on binary. |
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Hue May 12, 2004 10:54 pm |
Hellyez! I am just now getting into this type of recording, so I must admit after bouncing tracks for so long I will welcome the available visual input, however after reading this article I feel somewhat vindicated for working with so little, for so long . Now I find myself converting sound waves, to electric signal, to numbers, to light, to numbers again, and back out to signal, and waves... not to mention cassette, to disk, to hard-drive, to disk, and sometimes back to cassette ! By the way, nice Judith trick ! Love that song !!! |
| Doc Hearl Nov 22, 2006 05:35 pm |
I Agree I was almost whipped into submission by the tantalizing temptation to throw out my analog gear, save space, and give in to the digital domain and its pristine cleanness. No more hands on! No more fader fatigued fingers! I almost gave it up for right hand, mouse induced carpal tunnel syndrome...ALMOST. Couldn't do it! It IS about 'the music'. It's all about raising these songs we call children in a nice, warm analog environment to be all they can be...to be unique in their existence...to be real...not cloned from the samples of some sound bank that's been used over and over again, until after a while, even the most creative innovations from the writer's mind begin to sound like 'Same song...Different way'. Thanks, Loki. I had just about decided to sell all my analog gear until I read your words of wisdom! |
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whosyourdaddy00 Apr 12, 2007 01:49 am |
Process should not be more important than product while i really mostly agree, i'm gonna play devils advocate.... some would say, the process is what the good part is in other things, say mom and daughter cookin' together...yeah dinner gets made, but it's more the bonding that's the meat and potatoes of the event. musically, i'm very fond of my earlier recordings form highschool days and earlier, i remember how fun it was to make it....the end product was shit, but i learned something every time... to perfect your art, you gotta see a clear vision of the end product...the more detailed you can see/hear it in your head, the better....cuz after that you gotta know the route to achieve that vision...the more knowledge/experiance you have the easier (and quicker) you can realize your endproduct. it's frusturating, and i know this is a really old post, but i've seen you struggle with midiums alot here lately. i've always used what ever i had at my disposal (even simple handheld mini tape recorders, they're great 'notepads' and later you can go back and sift out the BS. i used to just goof around on an instrument until i stumbled on something that sounded cool, then build off of that....now i find i have more ideas gooin' through my head at all hours of the day, that i can't possibly keep up with them...so now i can actually hammer something out without even playin' an instrument (mostly these are grooves and beats, with simple chord progressions)....the more i practiced it the better i got. i'm feeling like you're mad at the computer for the wrong reasons....you gotta make the best of what you have available at that moment...that's the job of an engineer, it's problem solving using only the tools you have at your disposal that instant. that's a very different job than beein' an artist/songwriter that fact that you're juggling both is what's causing it....one way around this is to focus like a laser beam on the writing first....hammer the song out before recording it (this is called pre-production) cheers! |
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Loki Apr 12, 2007 05:24 pm |
title Yo! You make a couple of good points, and it was enlightening for me as wel to go back and re-read my original rant. The issue I was having at the time, and somewhat still have to this day, is that with all of these tools so easily at our disposal it's very easy to forget all about the pre-production stage and just go in and add and subtract sounds at random almost. This was one of the big reasons for my change in mediums, as well as musical styles. That rant was written when I was doing primarilly electronic music, and the major reasoning for this was because of what I adressed in the rant. I guess to put it simply, I was thinking at the time, and still am, that it is mor eimportant to have a good song, and good musicians, than it is to spend your time tweaking knobs all night, and it's far more important to trust your ears than your eyes. |
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Dualflip Aug 09, 2008 12:06 am |
Late comment but i want to know what you think Well, perhaps im not the common digital lover but im not a digital hater, as everything i think there are good and bad things about the new digital recording. Leaving aside the "analog is warmer" or "the digital is cleaner and practical" ways of thinking, i want to share two stories i had with some engineers i truly respect, one of them is an old school type of engineer, the other one is the im all digital type. So the first one, once i was sitting with him drinking a cup of coffee and the "analog world" topic came in. We were talking about old 24tks 2 inch tape recorders, and how good they sound, as always, when an analog topic is being discussed, the digital topic kicks in, so i started talking about digital recording in contrast to the analog type, i was saying something like "Yes, i love tape recording, but the advantage right now is that with a protools or a cubase, etc, anyone can..." he sudenly interrupted what i was saying and completed my sentence: "anyone can make a common piece of shit". I laughed an understood what he was trying to say, he wasnt trying to say that digital recording is a piece of shit, but that nowadays the budget digital solutions allow a common musician to record what ever he wants, with out the need of paying big money in studio time, which i think is a very good thing, but in contrast to the old approach, where everything was recorded by experienced engineers in big studios, now we have a lot of crappy albums (also a lot of very good ones) made by people that dont know what the hell they are doing and decided to record at home. In contrast to that anecdote i also experienced the counterpart. I know an all digital engineer, which again was drinking a cup of coffee with me and the same topic came in. I was asking him something like "Why is it that you hate analog so much if its so much better sounding than digital?", he replied the following "Ohhh no you got me all wrong, i love analog, but i wouldnt get anywhere near it if i have good plug-ins and a nice DAW, what i like about digital is that the sound can be almost like analog without loosing a kidney on gear and going all crazy when i need to make a recall". Again he made a very good point, i think both opinions are valid, and as long as the music is good and the ears are the ones making all the decisions, it doesnt really matter what type of tool you are using. And thats what we have to understand, digital or analog, protools or sonar, 2" Tape or ADAT, they are all tools that help us do our jobs, is like a painter that uses a good brush or a bad brush, oil or water paint, they are all tools but still he can make a masterpiece and people wont really care if he used this or that, they will only care if the painting is good and with emotions, the same thing happens with music. Cheers !!! |
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