I recently had a conversation with a friend & colleague regarding recording processes. He’s a fellow guitar player and; as odd as it feels for both of us to refer to ourselves in this way, we are composers. Rock & roll composers.
His question for me was; essentially, how good is good enough?
As in, when it comes to recording an instrument, and the ‘take’ in question is ‘flawed’ in some way – as they often are when they are performed by humans – where is the line for an acceptable take vs an unacceptable take. The easy answer is ‘well, if I did what I was trying to do, then it’s worth keeping’ and we are both inline with that. For me, the question is: Is it charming?
There are happy accidents and not-so-happy accidents in this business, but we both feel that if we get too ‘nitpicky’ with every passing note, and cut out every mistake and replace them individually, that we risk engineering the soul out of the song.
That’s a difficult decision to make in the era of quantization and auto-tune, where no mistakes are left to chance in most popular music, but it’s easy for us as artists to forget that there’s a rich heritage of raw and archaic practices. Once upon a time in 1955, when a young Elvis Presley, Bill Black, and Scotty Moore gathered around 1 single omnidirectional microphone in a room and performed their best renditions of songs, that the one that had the ‘best feel’ was what was chosen by the producer, regardless of mistakes, botched endings, and off-key flubs.
There’s a spot in The Kingsmen’s hit “Louie Louie” where the drummer apparently hit his thumb with a drumstick in the middle of the song and yells “FUCK!” loud enough to be picked up on the tape. Decades of AM and FM airplay later, it’s still there, never having been edited out.
And these recordings became iconic.
Surely, that was then, and this is now – but there’s something to be remembered there – The soul must stay intact.
In the end, it’s important that we’re proud of what we’ve made. We intentionally record on high quality instruments, into state of the art microphones, into an industry standard recording program. We hire fantastic mixing engineers, and fantastic mastering engineers. We hire great artists and have our records pressed by reputable companies. All the elements for a great recording are there, and our efforts in the studio should match those elements.
Unanimously, they do match those elements, but as I am currently partaking in yet another recording project with The Confusionaires, these thoughts and propensities come back into the foreground.
These things can be much easier to say than do.
Wish me luck.
The Conscious Pilgrim 