Reports of Rock & Roll’s Demise at the Hands of Pro Tools Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Yesterday, Douglas Wolk—whose byline I recognize and who, according to Beaujon and this online encyclopedia thingy, is sort of a dude—published an item on NPR’s Monitor Mix blog to the effect that, dammit, AutoTune and Pro Tools and click tracks and, you know, Twitter are conspiring to kill rock & roll.
Holding up the 48th second of the Beatles‘ “Rain” as an example, Wolk claims that, “if some band of 25-year-olds with radio aspirations wrote and recorded ‘Rain’ today…that take would probably be thrown out, or at least digitally edited to fix the screw-up.”
With respect to Wolk, this strikes me as a hollow, distinctly codger-y argument. (And one that cites exactly zero contemporary acts by way of illustration.) Couple points here:
1. “[The Beatles'] recording [of "Rain"] is a mess.” Not perforce true. Sure, it’s loose, and there’s a soupy-psychedelic lag to the arrangement, but the Beatles were always in tireless pursuit of shit like that. (As when John instructed George Martin to make “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” smell like “sawdust on the floor.”)
2. “It’s full of mistakes, accidents and inconsistencies that would be utterly unacceptable by the pop-music standards of 2009.” What “pop music” are we discussing here—the Jonas Bros., or indie rock’s more mainstream extrusions? ‘Cuz it seems to me we’re still in an era where authenticity, even salable authenticity, gets stored in the garage. manifested in tape hiss, &c. &c. The White Stripes were massive in spite and because of the over-discussed sloppiness of Meg White. And I’m no expert in the whole Jay Reatard thing, but doesn’t he tend to drop eighth notes here and there?
3. The Beatles is an odd band to tout as an example of studio imperfectionism. It’s true, their obsessions geared toward invention rather than toward metronomics, but after 1964, this was no garage band. These are the guys who lugged 40-piece orchestras into Abbey Road and spent over 30 hours recording this song.
4. Studio perfectionism isn’t a product of Pro Tools. And it’s not a phenomenon unique to rock, either—think Glenn Gould, whose OCD approach to studio work infuriated sound engineers and entailed unprecedented (and literal) cutting and pasting in order to effect a synthetic perfection that live performances couldn’t approach. (Christ, imagine what a pain he would’ve been in the Pro Tools era!)
5. “The lead singer’s wobbly notes, and the not-quite-in-tune bass guitar, would get fixed with AutoTune.” Sorry, how many current rock acts actually use AutoTune on a consistent basis?
What I’m wondering, I guess, is why we have to discuss this exclusively in terms of songs from the mid-’60s. “The high-tech ideal of popular music means no botched rhythms, no sour notes, no shaky dynamics, but also no ‘Sex Machine,’ no ‘Louie Louie,’ no ‘Rain.’” These are the only three songs Wolk even mentions in the post. I’d love for Fischer to chime in on the lo-fi implications of all this, and mebbe Riggs has something to say re: Emo or something like that. But this whole thing strikes me as a pretty straw-man mode of obituary.
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3:18 pm
Wolk’s got a Wiki page?
4:26 pm
Hi Ted–thanks for the response–very much appreciated.
Just to clarify, the kind of “pop music” that I was suggesting frowns on mistakes is the genuinely mainstream kind, as opposed to stuff like Jay Reatard that has subcultural buzz but not much in the way of radio traction. (The White Stripes are a special case.) I didn’t name any contemporary Billboard-rock-song-chart bands who are Doing It Wrong because I didn’t want to make anybody a whipping boy, but I guess I ended up with a straw man instead….
You’re absolutely right that studio perfectionism isn’t unique to rock. I think it’s totally appropriate for a lot of kinds of popular music–just not always the kinds that rely on real-time interaction between musicians.
And, as I understand, just about everybody in mainstream popular music uses Auto-Tune–the T-Pain effect is what happens when you set it so its pitch modification is perceptible, but most of the time it just nudges things so they’re correctly in tune.
Good point on the codgerism of citing exclusively four-decade-old songs (”Sex Machine” was ‘70). I pulled those out because they’re examples of the kind of broad, obvious mistakes that barely ever showed up on mainstream hits after live-in-the-studio performances became less common.
5:58 pm
I think the point we’re all trying to find is what exactly is the significance of actually using mix-mastering vs not using it, in terms of the aesthetics of the song. Do they make a song better or worse…if so why?
Is a song better because it’s in artificially-perfect pitch? That still isn’t going to fix the lyrics or the melody. This is something like saying that calligraphy would become monotonous if done by computer. Yes, a certain degree of individuality would be lost, and in that we might also lose some unique sounds, ear-catching sounds, and yes a certain element of musicianship, jazziness, eloquent imperfection may be lost, but if 5 seconds of Abbey Road are what makes it a great song then we’re in a lot of trouble regardless. Likewise if perfecting the pitch of the music actually sells a lot of records. But like most things this has good and bad sides. It makes some songs more enjoyable and other songs less enjoyable, and this is subjective. But the problem is in trying to make your subjective tastes the issue and not the presence or absence of mass-market appeal that results from the use of these tools. You have to consider that for everything that you like there are 5,000 people who hate it, who want it changed in ways that you would hate. So subjectively this point has merit for you, but for others it’s nonsense. And likewise for every song that is made worse through the misuse of digital editing tools, there are 5000 songs that are made better through the use of those same tools in good hands. That’s just how it is. Why? Because most musicians do not have good pitch or even good technique much less good ears and most people care a lot more about good musicianship on average than the occasional spectacular performance.
And your complaint applies to just about every human endeavor. The very good are made worse, and the average made better. But there are far more average performers than excellent ones. Just think that every now and then someone who is very restrained yet very talented in terms of editing hooks up with an excellent musician and brings us the best of both worlds.
10:27 am
Douglas,
Appreciate the response. Makes a bit more sense if we’re talking radio-play rock, but the inclusion of James Brown—which would’ve been a different billboard chart back then—made me think your argument had extensions beyond top-40 pop.
I’m all for human error (it’s my favorite kind) and absolutely agree that the resultant rough edges define rock more than fastidious virtuosity, &c. I also agree with your point that “a great band can replace one of its members with someone who’s technically a more skillful musician, only to discover that their instrumental chemistry isn’t there anymore.” (In another sense, this is why Tommy, the opera, when not performed by the Who, immediately assumes a veneer of schlock.)
Rock succeeds based on force of personality, and I think we can both come down in opposition to any hypersanitization of the latter. Keep the dream alive!
~Ted
11:46 pm
Protools and autotune are just tools. Listen to The Books, and then try to tell me that Protools is purely evil. They use Protools in the same spirit that the Beatles used Abbey Road Studios. The original purpose of autotune was to preserve an otherwise great performance that had an off pitch note that didn’t sound cool. Yes, musicians think about what mistakes sound cool, and what mistakes don’t sound cool. And they don’t want you to hear the crappy mistakes that detract from their laid back rock star mystery. For that reason, you will actually find autotune on a lot of recordings that you would not suspect. As for the Cher/T-Pain effect, I personally don’t like it. However, I like Peter Frampton playing through a talk box. And in truth, they’re both the same thing – artistic tools potentially turned into gimmicks by overuse.
10:39 pm
Pretty much very major label rock record is slathered in autotune.