{"id":5417,"date":"2015-01-13T18:02:24","date_gmt":"2015-01-14T01:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5417"},"modified":"2015-01-14T01:32:21","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T08:32:21","slug":"the-needle-and-the-damage-done","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5417","title":{"rendered":"The needle and the damage done"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"4track\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“Who cares about science? This is music. We’re talking about how you feel.” So said<\/a> Neil Young in introducing his high-resolution Pono<\/a> player. Good luck, Neil, but I fear you’re a little downstream. In the end it’s more about the recording\u00a0than\u00a0the playback. This is from Tom Whitwell’s article<\/a> “Why Do All Records Sound the Same?”:<\/p>\n

\n

What makes working with Pro Tools really different from tape is that editing is absurdly easy. Most bands record to a click track, so the tempo is locked. If a guitarist plays a riff fifty times, it\u2019s a trivial job to pick the best one and loop it for the duration of the verse.<\/p>\n

“Musicians are inherently lazy,\u201d says John [Leckie]. \u201cIf there\u2019s an easier way of doing something than actually playing, they\u2019ll do that.\u201d A band might jam together for a bit, then spend hours or days choosing the best bits and pasting a track together. All music is adopting the methods of dance music, of arranging repetitive loops on a grid. With the structure of the song mapped out in coloured boxes on screen, there\u2019s a huge temptation to fill in the gaps, add bits and generally clutter up the sound.<\/p>\n

This is also why you no longer hear mistakes on records. Al Kooper\u2019s shambolic Hammond organ playing on \u201cLike A Rolling Stone\u201d could never happen today because a diligent producer would discreetly shunt his chords back into step. Then there\u2019s tuning. Until electronic guitar tuners appeared around 1980, the band would tune by ear to the studio piano. Everyone was slightly off, but everyone was listening to the pitch of their instrument, so they were musically off.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(Meanwhile, back at the ranch<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Image: John Vincent<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Who cares about science? This is music. We’re talking about how you feel.” So said Neil Young in introducing his high-resolution Pono player. Good luck, Neil, but I fear you’re a little downstream. In the end it’s more about the recording\u00a0than\u00a0the playback. This is from Tom Whitwell’s article “Why Do All Records Sound the Same?”: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5417"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5429,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5417\/revisions\/5429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}