Effecting, Affecting...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
In the interests of moving along from the remarkably tedious discussion of insurance in the previous post, I’m forced to essentially manufacture a topic. Luckily, this is within my blogging skill-set, and you’re welcome, at this point, to admire the deft hand I apply to the task.
The picture above is of one of my unicorns, the Sequential Circuits Pro-FX (ambient version). It is for sale currently. It seems that whenever I have coin lying about to blow on stupid shit I don’t need, I can never find one of these. But when I don’t, lo and behold, there they are. Now, anyone with a reasonable purchase on, you know, reality and stuff, would say “hey, Chris, that’s a mediocre pair of digital delays and a small spring reverb. Do you seriously think spending CDN$1600 on that is a good idea when you can easily replicate that with commonly available vintage effects?”
No. No, I don’t. But a unicorn is a unicorn, and there you have it.
The larger point, though: I have long been of the firm opinion that any sound can be made in to any other sound with the cunning use of effects, if you know the mechanics behind what is occurring. You don’t need a comprehensive understanding of the physics of sound, but rather a fairly modest knowledge of why, say, a kick drum works. For instance, you recall my posts a couple weeks ago about the instruments I’ve been welding. Here is a short excerpt from the drum part for a track I’m working on.
Every single sound you hear in this track started from SpringThing, recorded with the Barcus-Berry transducer mic. I basically have every guitar pedal I own slapped on the output of the transducer, and am merrily using everything available to me in Maschine once I’ve recorded one-shots, then stacking a whole raft of Audio Damage plug-ins on the outputs of Maschine. The point being that if you look at the instrument I started with, and listen to the result, there is no apparent way the latter could have come from the former; the one possible exception is the “ride cymbal” sound, which is obviously a Biro pen hitting a stretched spring, through a high-pass filter and a grain delay. Isn’t it?
My question is thus: is this “cheating?” Are you all about the purity of the recorded sound? Or do you break out the carving knives?
22 comments
In this context, I find music to be no different from something like painting or cooking. I've always loved how in art, one takes raw materials and utilizes them to infinite potential. Just the other day, I was chatting with a friend of mine who is a 52 year old drummer. He was under the mindset that a Drum Machine is cheating and insipid but I was able to convince him, after several beers that it was merely a different tool. To my point, I think that processing sounds is no different than seasoning you meal. Everyone loves being asked "how'd you do that" in awe, right?
I sit in the middle on this. I use effects heavily in everything I do. One could even say that effects are my main instrument. I'm also not one for rules in art to be applied to all art. To me, rules exist in art as part of the personal challenge, but your rules and my rules may vary. So whatever you can get out of effects seems fair game, depending on what you want to do. It's also a lot of fun to take a single sound source and see how far you can take it. I do that often.
But, I think there's a value in retaining the unique qualities of each sound. If I create an elaborate means of capturing a source sound, just to get a kick drum sound unlike any other kick drum sound, I feel I've failed and missed the point. I'd want to get a sound, even if it turns out to be a kick drum sound, that is particular to the sound that went in. My enthusiasm for something like Spectrasonics' Omnisphere has always been tempered by that. There may be the sounds of lightbulb pings or burning pianos embedded therein, but if the end results are the same kind of lush, electronica-friendly, film soundtrack-like sounds, what's the point?
I suppose in those cases, I can see the value of seeds of creative impulses, trying to start from anywhere to get to somewhere. And I can appreciate how we might hear something differently just by knowing the source. So I remain seated in the middle (which i think is the natural place for the the youngest of three to sit, or at least the likeliest).
That SCI FX box doesn't seem worth $1600 to me. Add shipping on it for anyone who doesn't live near Vancouver and you're looking at close to $2k. That said, maybe it is worth $2k, since these things don't pop up for sale often, just feels like inflated "vintage principle" pricing to me.
Sound design is an art in and of itself. I fail to see how any logical musician could consider it some form of a cheat.
How different would Star Wars have been if it weren't for Ben Burtt?
Anything that requires that much work and creativity (i.e. to go from A to Kick Drum) can't quite be called cheating. In fact, rolling your own sounds the way you're doing is probably the hardest possible path you could have gone down, and makes the use of drum machines and the like (i.e. the more obvious choices) look like cheating.
Now using Autotune to correct a pitchy vocal: that's cheating. Slicing up a live drummer's take to lock it to grid in order to fix bad timing: that's cheating. Quantizing MIDI: that's cheating. Now that's not to say I'll never do any of these things, but when I've done it, I at least recognize it as cheating.
Not cheating. Just another source of generation.
Is calculus "cheating?" If you use calculus to find the area under a curve, for example, you're taking a Large Number of slices of that curve, adding them together, and calling that sum the "area."
I'm with Funkybot. My viewpoint exactly.
-CR
There's no such thing as "cheating" when it comes to sound. If you're lucky, you can get what you want immediately. If you're not, or you're very particular, it might take a while. Up to the artist.
To put it in painter's context, is it cheating to buy the color you want in a tube instead of mixing it yourself from scratch, or from red, yellow, and blue?
To expand on Funkybot's comment:
Machine correction is kind of perverse. It's one thing to use these tools to fix up an otherwise great performance with one blemish.
But the point of the above - playing something by hand, or getting human expression through the voice - is precisely what is removed by excessive machine correction.
Plus it's often faster just to have your performer do another take or punch in or edit/comp. That stuff is probably "cheating" too, but it's more efficient.
These days I'm much less concerned with "how" it's done and much more concerned with whether the output is affecting/interesting. To me, that's the harder trick. It's easy to get distracted with signal chains and chasing the mirage of "exactly the right sound".
There isn't just one way to the top of the mountain.
I do think it's really difficult to get a good kick drum out of something besides an actual kick drum, or a X0X box. While there's something to be said for coming up with a concept and following it through, I'm not sure I'd sweat cheating by using a readymade sound when it's what works.
Look at Dogma 95 in film making; I watched a bunch of Lars Von Trier movies before I even knew about Dogma 95 and liked them for what they were. They weren't enhanced for me by his po'faced adherence to a set of arbitrary aesthetic rules.
On the other hand, you have made coming up with ground rules for pieces part of the creative process -- the limitations on your choices focus the mind. That's cool too.
There's a certain school of recording that emphasizes finding the right microphone choice and placement to get a sound, minimizing the use of gear to achieve a sound. That's another self-imposed limitation on the toolset, which guides aesthetic choices. There's a deep structural equivalence between that and running sounds through every pedal you own. They're both ways of getting to a sound.
When you're making music, the results are the results. It doesn't really matter what you do to get them, in the end -- most of the choices you made aren't even audible to a naive listener. People listen _through_ all the stuff you did to make the music happen _to_ the music.
Not that I have the patience, but some people will listen to every recording of the Grateful Dead playing "Morning Dew" and have an idea of which is best, which is closest to the platonic ideal of "Morning Dew." The particular notes played or the quality of the recording are just details.
In fact, with some musicians all the studio fuckery they layer on their work puts a wall between the listener and the actual music. I don't believe that's the case with you Chris, but it is good thing for everyone to keep in mind.
I don't even mind Autotune because it's cheating. Cheating schmeating; what's wrong with it is using it to cover up the inadequacies of singers chosen more for how they look than how they sound. Using it creatively is fair game, and the results are the results.
And as regards the Pro FX, I can definitely see why it would be on your hit list. This site has the deets and pics http://electricmusicbox.com/profx/main.htm
What is interesting and unique about it is the CV control and patch memory. Don't think there's many things out there It looks like something that could be a great creative tool.
That patch memory thing is actually insane, if you think about it. It's not easy capturing the state of a box like a Pro FX especially with 1980s digital technology.
Sequential was always out on the far edge of what was possible with the technology of the time; that's why their shit breaks and is expensive to fix. There's one chip, a many-channelled A to D IIRC that is the Achilles heel of both the Prophet and the Studio 440; I guess someone made a plug compatible board to replace it because if you're not careful they overheat and burn themselves up.
I've mentioned this before, but I impose these sets of restrictions on myself largely to keep things interesting. I could shit out Slightly Random Instrumental Electronic Track #438 every day of the week; it would only take me a couple hours from start to finish. If I make it purposefully hard, not only are the results almost always outside my normal sound and structure palette, but I enjoyed the puzzle.
This, in and of itself, creating an act of creation, is important to me. I don't recommend it for everyone.
EDIT: Plus it's fun.
-CR
Definitely not cheating. However, I think highly of creating different, challenging rule sets, or oblique strategies, for yourself because I am a firm believer that by doing this you will come up with stuff that would escape you if all you ever did was sit down and look at your entire toolbox and just got on with it. It can be as simple as limiting yourself to making a track with one box or one plugin, or a certain set, or whatever. You might not even end up using the finished result as is, but in the process of making it you'll have something that you'd never have if you always poked around in every compartment of your toolbox. Now, I guess if you've done this and cave in and use something else too, then you're not staying with your own self-imposed rule set and hence you're cheating. But that's probably because you came up with a new idea that you just had to try, so 'cheating' in this sense is usually a good thing. The process of creating music of course also has different considerations for different people in different situations. Sometimes you just have to bring out all the big guns...
I've always wanted one of those SCI FX boxes, been patiently waiting for one to show up for peanuts... I have a rule about buying vintage gear....which is that unless its something I really need (ie: never) I'm only going to buy it if its absolutely bottom dollar (several times less than eBay prices). Consequently I end up buying a lot of "broken" vintage gear...but most of those are easy and inexpensive to fix... You'd be surprised at the stuff I have ended up for nothing with even with the ease of determining an item's actual value via eBay these days..
I've always had a sweet spot for SCI, after owning a Pro One for awhile...one of the only synths I got rid of that I regret...never find their stuff for peanuts anymore though...
As far as the ethics of using effects to come up with new sounds... Isn't that the point? There's a remix I did that the version I did was based entirely on one synth loop (not a dance song to begin with, or to end with either...fyi). Just that loop, treated with the TDM version of the Eventide Harmonizer...I was able to create phrases for verses and choruses...and basically inspired the whole remix. From there I was able to take it home and write some beats, a pad, and a bassline, and re-arrange the vocals into some kind of doom-tronica 11 minute masterpiece. If I had not processed that loop in that way, I would not have arrived at the final song...or at least would not have been at all the same.
Sometimes starting with something relatively uninteresting and treating it in whatever madness you have access to is important in getting out of your routine. For example...anyone can put together a decent sounding beat in Reason (and I love working in Reason, as far as software goes)...so sometimes I'll hook up this awful cheeseball Korg PSS-50... Which is very uninteresting sounding in itself...and not very programmable either. Oh wait...hmm...it has an external input as well (I guess for jamming along with your cheeseball backing band)...well what happens when I run the headphone out into this...and there's a level control for the external input...dial in the master volume and external in volume and you've got feedback...but at certain points you have a level of grungy fuzz that is cool...certainly different than what I probably would have dialed in had I used Reason. Don't like the preset pattern? Of course, the computer is the ultimate sampler...or if I want another degree of tedium, then there's the Akai S612 for further sonic destruction...
Bit of a straw man you've built there, Chris. What you call cheating is a question aesthetics. Like, I don't appreciate the sound of Autotune but can accept it's a contemporary aesthetic.
I like your suggestion that developing a project should require establishing a few ground rules though. I've just finished something similar in making an album from noises recorded at playgrounds and it required me to throw a heap of Audio Damage into the mix:
http://bassling.bandcamp.com/album/for-100-years
I'm mostly in the "I don't believe there is such thing as cheating" camp. My constant rant is that making music is like making movies; either you record everything live to 2-track, or you "cheated". If you overdubbed you've cheated beyond any consideration that what you've produced is a record of a performance. Either you filmed a live play or you made a movie. The actor that played Superman can't fly. If you've made a movie or a record, I know it's not real. I don't expect it to be real, I expect it to be good.
I always find it interesting that in these discussions people bring up Auto Tune or Beat Detective when those are much less altering that the CGI that makes Superman fly. What about loops and libraries? Someone has actually made a large part of the track for you. That seems so much closer to the definition of cheating than tuning or timing correction.
bb
I don't like Auto Tune because you can usually tell, and if you can hear it it sounds bad. I would prefer a slightly off pitch performance over inhumanly perfect... I don't mind drums that are cut to a click though I tend to avoid going nuts unless the client requires it... but I don't like Sound Replacer...again you can usually tell, and its weak points tend to show if the engineer is lazy in its application. In moderation they can be useful tools but in practice they seem to be overdone/relied upon too heavily...but whatever floats another's boat... Whether or not that's cheating, its more like "Why did you even bother recording a real person in the first place...isn't this what MIDI was invented for??"
Love the Springthing clip. Impressed and inspired.
I think the "I can always hear Auto Tune" argument is like "I can always spot fake boobs", it's an illogical statement. You can tell the ones you can tell, the ones that are done well you can't tell. What you don't like is poorly done tuning, whatever method they were using. Who does?
Before Auto Tune I knew people that sat and meticulously tuned vocals by comping every syllable and using an H3000. Now we can use more of an actual performance the way it went down and just fix the parts that are out. Another the thing about the tuning and timing tools we have nowadays is that at least the band members get to play on their own records, which was not the case in the past way more often than people think. A famous story is a big producer saying to a band member "this is going to be a great record for you, it's just not going to be with you". That rarely happens anymore.
bb
I think the question isn't so much whether using lots of FX is cheating but whether we like our creative constraints flexible or immutable.
For me to be creative, I need to create opportunities to explore. Constraints are useful in that they allow me to develop mastery of the tools. Those constraints need to be chosen so that, once mastered, the tools open up enough creative space to explore. If the explorations get boring, then I change the rules and start over again.
I always thought i was in the 'no such thing as cheating, only aesthetic choices' camp.
But i've noticed something funny in the last few years. I only ever finish songs where i do i all from scratch.
Too many effects and it just sounds like effects. And music i start this way i never finish
But maybe i should just force myself
etymology:
art (countable and uncountable; plural arts)
(uncountable) Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature
........
what do you wanna do?
is it art or not? well, art is based on cheating. always was.
always will.
otherwise paint-by-numbers or listen to whale-songs.
Aristotle defines techne in the following manner:
"ince (e.g.) building is an art and is essentially a reasoned productive state, and since there is no art that is not a state of this kind, and no state of this kind that is not an art, it follows that art is the same as a productive state that is truly reasoned. Every art is concerned with bringing something into being, and the practice of an art is the study of how to bring into being something that is capable either of being or of not being.
. . . For it is not with things that are or come to be of necessity that art is concerned nor with natural objects (because these have their origin in themselves)
. . . Art . . . operate in the sphere of the variable."
I'm into "carving" since I think of the entire studio as my instrument.
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