Newsgroups: uk.music.folk
Subject: Re: Too many CDs? Or " I can make a CD, so I will "
From: Dick Gaughan <dickg (@) dickalba.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 02:58:38 +0000

In <roK66.27095$0d.1848570 (@) nnrp4.clara.net> on Tue, 9 Jan 2001 20:19:13 -0000, "Hamish Currie" <hamish (@) lombardy.clara.net> wrote:

>I have read somewhere recently that "the availability of very modestly priced high quality recording equipment and cheap CD manufacturing means that just about anyone can make and release a CD at very low cost. This also means that quality control has passed from the hands of experienced producers into the hands of the individual performer who may be totally inexperienced and whose lack of experience inevitably results in complete subjectivity in assessing performance quality, a sure recipe for disaster."

As the writer of those words, I suppose I should at least attempt to back them up! ;)

Although I did actually say that, I am probably less concerned with that aspect of things than what is happening at the professional and semi-pro end and it was in reference to that that I made the remarks about "too many people making too many CDs" that you quoted in an earlier attempt to get discussion of this started.

<ObDisclaimer>
What I am about to say is a generalisation and, like all generalisations, is dangerous, full of holes and has numerous exceptions and is largely a personal viewpoint and should not be interpreted by anyone as my claiming to be making statements of universal fact. I am dealing in general principles as I perceive them, not specifics.
</ObDisclaimer>

The financial pressures on people trying to make a living from playing Folk Clubs are horrendous these days, and getting worse. I am one of the few still fortunate enough to be able to remain fulltime and scrape some kind of living. Static door prices, falling audiences, increased transport and on-the-road subsistence costs make it very difficult to survive.

There has therefore been an inexorable logic at work, which has brought about a major shift in emphasis in performance of "folk" music. One of the ways pro musicians discovered to supplement low income from live performance was in selling recorded work at gigs. This had several consequences, which I will try to discuss as briefly as possible.

Sales of merchandise began to provide a larger and larger part of income and there slowly began the drift away from the live performance being the object in itself - and providing the major source of income - to the live performance becoming a vehicle for selling CDs, which in many cases has become the primary income source. I used to hear performers describing a "Great Gig" as one where the house was full, the audience were wonderfully responsive etc. Now, more and more, I hear performers define a "Great Gig" as one where "we sold a shitload of CDs". Hands up those who can honestly say they have never sat through at least one gig and cringed when every single piece played was introduced by the performer with phrases like, "This is off our latest CD which you can buy during the break". The whole raison d'etre for the gig appears increasingly to be the selling of product.

Being an awkward (and disorganised) sod, I often forget to take CDs on tour and I am always taken aback when someone at a live gig makes a strongly-worded complaint along the lines of, "What do you mean, you haven't got any CDs with you?", with a look which indicates they believe I might just arrived from another planet.

Now, all that is neither a Good nor a Bad thing in itself but it has one consequence which relates back to Hamish's point.

As the sale of product is now a vital, if not primary, component of much live performance, there is sustained pressure on the performer to maximise sales potential. This means constantly ensuring that, on each return visit to the same venue, there is something new to sell on the presumption that most of the audience will have bought what was available on the last visit. So there is pressure on artists to produce new recordings at least every 12 months or thereabouts. "We have a tour coming up - we need new product to sell, let's get recording". One of the most frequently asked questions I have to deal with on tour is, "When's your next CD coming out - the last one was 18 months ago!" Since my first record in 1971, I have made a total of 10 solo records. OK, and a bunch in other lineups and bands, but I'm talking solo here.

When I started recording, making a record was an event and carried great significance. New releases were eagerly awaited and everybody in the "folk" world pretty much bought every new release. This meant that each new recording was undertaken with a great deal of thought and a large chunk of the material would have been road-tested, sharpened and honed before a live audience. So, much of the pre-production was done outside the studio in an environment where what worked and what didn't work were made fairly obvious through the best possible filter any artist can have - immediate audience response.

Granted, the restrictions on recording possibilities were largely due to economics and we are in a different world now. But the democratising of the means of recording has brought with it new problems - basically we are now in a situation when anyone who feels inclined to make a CD can do so with ease and low cost. This *is* a good thing. So is the Internet. But when everyone owns the equivalent of their own printing press, there is inevitably going to be a reduction in the signal-to-noise ratio and Usenet and the WWW are prime examples of this. Likewise with recorded output. One of the consequences of economic restraints on output was that there was some measure of externally-applied quality control, usually through the appointment of an experienced producer who could weed out some of the more extreme self-indulgent mistakes which inexperienced artists can be prone to. With the removal of the economic restraint, the role of producer has diminished. After all, producers cost money and a low-budget CD is unlikely to be able to afford one.

And the pressure for pro and semi-pro performers to constantly produce new recordings means that inevitably quality control suffers at the pro end. There are now a great many albums which have 2 or 3 real gems and the rest are fillers. This is largely not the fault of the artists, it is the demands and expectations of what has now become a market place where they are having to struggle to survive.

--
DG

Top of Page

Newsgroups: uk.music.folk
Subject: Re: Too many CDs? Or " I can make a CD, so I will "
From: Dick Gaughan <dickg (@) dickalba.demon.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 01:08:40 +0000

In <3a5c5ec1_3 (@) news1.vip.uk.com> on Wed, 10 Jan 2001 13:09:39 GMT, j.adams (@) salford.ac.uk (Johnny Adams) wrote:

>I don't think there is any such thing as 'too many CDs'. The democratisation fo the recording and publishing process means that the 'audio snapshots' are littered around liberally for present inspection and for future generations to hear as a musical 'snapshot' of our times. Lots of people will have produced less than perfect results, both technically and artisticly. We only have to read the contents of '...and the rest' in fRoots to see the tip of this iceberg! - but the occasional gems are well worth it.

As I said in my earlier post, I agree that democratisation of the recording process is a good thing but we do have to accept that, like any major change, it doesn't come without a price.

The major part of that price is that when everyone and their dog make CDs, a CD becomes a commonplace and the chances of any of them being listened to are greatly reduced; it becomes a lottery and there is a possibility that the role of the CD will end up being no more than as an audible souvenir of a good night out. The WWW gives us clues as to where open access to publishing media is likely to take us. Sure, everyone can now have their own website and put up their words of wisdom for the world to see - but how many of those sites does anyone ever visit? There are only so many hours in a life.

There will still be the dinosaurs among us who will regard making a CD as something of more weight than that and will continue to regard making a record as an art form in and of itself, a separate medium, not directly related to live performance.

I agree with your point that the massive increase in CD numbers means an archive for future generations but, like old books, there will be too many for the casual listener to sift through and most will end up in libraries, accessed only by researchers and hobbyists. That is not to say that this is necessarily a bad outcome.

Anyway, once the bandwidth and compression difficulties still inherent in online digital transference have been sorted, the whole thing moves to a different dimension. And we can have this discussion all over again :)

--
DG

Newsgroups: uk.music.folk
Subject: Re: Too many CDs? Or " I can make a CD, so I will "
From: Dick Gaughan <dickg (@) dickalba.demon.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 16:02:09 +0000

In <K7$91mAqHbX6EALu (@) ifwtech.plus.net> on Thu, 11 Jan 2001 13:15:22 +0000, Ian White <Ian (@) ifwtech.com> wrote:

>I wouldn't disagree with any of that, but had the impression that Dick was thinking more about making what used to be called an "album."

Not necessarily. As you go on to rightly point out -

>That kind of structure is a step beyond getting the recording technically right and capturing "that elusive something else". Performers and producers could reasonably aim for it when recording to LP or tape, where the tracks are played in sequence. Nowadays, when CD tracks are often played randomly, it may become a lost art.

But the basic principles remain whether it be one track or a cohesive compilation of tracks ("album").

You're absolutely right - the advent of random track selection facility with CDs and now downloadable MP3 and suchlike have fundamentally changed the way we have to approach the aesthetics of production. We're having to move from a linear approach, by which I mean the idea that we start from side 1 track 1 and listen in a pre-arranged sequence through to the end. That may well still be the way most people listen initially to a CD but it can no longer be taken for granted. It's been clear for quite some time that the future is most likely to involve some kind of a cafeteria-style approach, where artists will have an online library of individual tracks and people will select which they wish to download. I find this very appealing and it'll be interesting to see quite how it all works out in practise. I keep a very close eye on current developments in this direction as there is a lot we still don't know about where it's going to go and it's an area where we will definitely have to learn from the audience.

The only real difference from a production point of view is that the need to relate individual tracks to the whole is less important and concentration can be given instead to each as a complete self-contained entity, which in some ways is quite a liberating thing. It's the approach I've been trying to take over the past few years, particularly on the last two solo albums of my own. I believe in doing the experimenting on my own stuff before inflicting things on anybody else :)

--
DG

Top of Page

Newsgroups: uk.music.folk
Subject: Re: Too many CDs? Or " I can make a CD, so I will "
From: Dick Gaughan <dickg (@) dickalba.demon.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 14:28:05 +0000

In <3A5D82E9.A7E379C6 (@) froots.off.demon.co.uk> on Thu, 11 Jan 2001 09:55:02 +0000, Ian Anderson <froots (@) froots.off.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>The "art" is the doing something different in the studio so that the record in its own way is as grabbing as the live performance. You have to replace the ambience./ buzz/ atmosphere of the artist in front of your face with that elusive something else. The mistake many so-called producers sometimes make is thinking that something else is an excess of unsuitable other instruments etc. But it's definitely a different art form and has to be approached differently.

Frame that.

So many people who try to "capture the feel of a live performance" on record make the cardinal error of presuming that this can be achieved by simply applying the principles of live performance to recording. It can't. A recording studio is a completely artificial environment. In essence recording is about the creation of an illusion, the illusion being exactly the same as that involved in theatre, film or television - that the event being witnessed is actually taking place right there at that moment. Not in a literal sense, but in a perceptual sense. As with any art form, a "natural" presentation can only be achieved by use of unnatural practices. And the basic paradox is that in order to achieve a live feel, non-live techniques have to be employed.

An elementary example. I have worked with people who have aggressively insisted that the addition of any kind of reverb is anathema. My reply is, "Do you normally perform to your audience in an acoustically dead space which has no sound reflections?"

If you want to make a record using exclusively live performance techniques, record a gig in front of an audience. Then, unless you're very, very lucky or very, very good, you'll realise what the problem is in trying to capture the essence of live performance on a recording.

In a dedicated recording space, a truly natural recording will end up sounding unnatural as the technical requirements of the medium are entirely different from those of a concert hall. This is why so many "folk" recordings end up sounding flat and lifeless and why so many seem to think that the way to create presence is by compressing everything flat and adding bland washes of synth pads etc. As an exercise, watch how most people go about recording Highland pipes. Trying to mic and record them in a "natural" way will result in truly dreadful problems in trying to mix them in a way which makes them sound natural and faithfully reproduces the character of the instrument. That can only be done by abandoning the mindset that the principles of live performance can simply be ported across to recording.

As a matter of interest, my usual studio reference listening is Tina Turner. Even if what I'm recording is an unaccompanied song. *Especially* if what I'm recording is an unaccompanied song :)

The attitude, "What do we have to learn from people like Quincy Jones?" is simply arrogance born of ignorance. Don't anyone ever fall into the amateurish trap of believing that "pop" recording techniques don't apply to "folk" recordings - and before anyone jumps down my throat, note that I said "recording" NOT "musical arrangement" or "aesthetics". A lot of that music might be dross wallpaper but the people recording and mixing it are the most highly skilled on the planet and have forgotten more about psychoacoustics than most of us will ever learn. Folkies need to develop the humility to understand that we don't know it all and that others working in other fields might be able to teach us a few things. Not about how to *play* our music but about how to do it justice in recorded media. The disasters occur when folk-oriented musicians and producers confuse the production techniques with the musical techniques and, instead of learning the former, try to mimic the latter.

--
DG

Newsgroups: uk.music.folk
Subject: Re: Too many CDs? Or " I can make a CD, so I will "
From: Dick Gaughan <dickg (@) dickalba.demon.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 01:08:39 +0000

In <3a5c8121.3755022 (@) news.u-net.com> on Wed, 10 Jan 2001 15:51:09GMT, library (@) ngcb.u-net.com (Chris Rogers) wrote:

>I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I'd rather hear a good song from a duff recording than vice-versa and, if that means someone in their bedroom with a 4-track rather than hours spent in a state of the art studio, with producers, engineers etc., than I'm all for it.

Well, I agree with every word of that. Crap with pretty wrapping is still crap. I do not believe in the idea that the medium is the message; to me the most important factor in recording is performance and my own approach to recording/ production has come full circle. Like others, I spent a couple of decades in studios chasing the fool's gold of technical perfection. What I learned from it was that if the performance is not up to scratch, no amount of orchestration, clever arranging and technical wizardry is going to make it so. As a general principle, beware of any engineer or producer who utters the words, "That's OK, we'll fix it in the mix". Get it right at the recording stage and there'll be nothing to fix so mixing time can be used to mix, not to solve problems of performance. I'm quite tyrannical about that these days, having learned the hard way :)

But, as I said earlier, unless a record company is paying the bill, a producer is usually an expense many people can't afford. A decent engineer can make all the difference in the absence of a producer but bear in mind that most engineers are not producers - although they can overlap to quite an extent, they're different jobs and a lot of the time, particularly during the recording stage, the producer and the engineer are actually listening to - and for - quite different things. That is, if they're doing their respective jobs properly.

--
DG

Top of Page

 

The following links are to other websites and I am not responsible for what you might find there. Sites do change without warning and it is impossible for me to keep checking that links go where they should.