EMU – Music Forum – Week 4

I thought i might elaborate on an interesting concept we talked about in forum this week: - A ‘Good Recording’ versus a ‘Great Release’ - A great recording will have excellent sound production, whereas a great release will have great songs. For example, you could have a great song with an average performance, or on the other hand, have a bunch of sub standard songs but the release has flawless production. In my opinion, how good the songs are is mainly attributed to the artists themselves and their song writing process. However, I think the next most important step in a great release is capturing the performance. What I mean by this is, capturing the artist’s energy/ emotion as they perform, and translating that onto the finished recording. There is nothing worse then a stale performance, or alternatively, a great performance over produced and loosing its feeling. I believe the energy/ emotion behind a performance is one of the most endearing aspects and it would be a waste not to try and accurately capture or loose it all together. The danger being that with over production and over utilising too many clichéd production techniques you will loose or ‘water down’ some of the performance energy. This in turn almost steals some of the life out of the recording. For example, not getting good takes and over correcting a performance may lead it to sound stale and lifeless, using too much compression leading to the squashing of the raw sounds and in turn killing the dynamics. Releases that don’t necessarily follow cultural & genre specific trends and retain the performance aspect of a recording, whilst still sounding unique and well thought out, may end up pioneering a new sound, as well as having great production/ flare / and retaining the integrity of the original performance. I would say this is the ideal outcome, and if history is anything to go by, would also be used by other artists and engineers as inspiration for future releases. It would be safe to say that most of the different musical genres have ‘benchmark’ CDs and recordings that have achieved this goal and have inspired proceeding releases. Of course there are many carbon copied, watered down, over produced/ underwritten recording being released into the mainstream market today. The reason this happens is because people know what has been cost effective in the past and want to move units and sell singles. A lot of ‘Top 40’ releases are guilty of this, but some of the most successful have ‘stepped outside the square’ and haven’t just looked at bang for their buck or what the record label wants. For example, they may want the vocals to be by far the loudest thing in the mix, sometimes even to the detriment of the rest of the tracks, or the beat must be louder then the artist desires on their recording. It is also handy to know what you are up against as well. Therefore also extremely useful to learn some of the clichéd production techniques (of which if are not blindly overused, may be very effective) so you may experiment with them and try and take them into knew territory.