EMU – MTF - Week 9 Blog

This week is Music Tech Forum Steve touched on different musical genres and their respective characteristics regarding style/ mixing and production. It was interesting to note the different periods of time, as well as different geographical locations that, in turn, ended becoming benchmarks for certain styles and genres, some times even spawning their own sub-genres.

Among other genres, one I found interesting was Jazz production. The drum kits used appeared dry and notably bright in a lot of the examples shown. Also, there wasn’t a lot of Kick Drum in the mixes. We learnt this was to leave room in the mix for the Bass (most probably ‘Double Bass’ when we are talking about Jazz). Production wise, less overdubs and effects, like compression, were used and in general the essence of the Jazz genre was usually maintained by capturing the special kind of ‘live and spontaneous’ aspect. Another thing to note was the panning in the mixes in the examples we were listening to in class we’re panned accordingly to have that live feel, to keep all the elements sounded organically separate. When listening to these recordings they created the feel of being in the same room as the artists when it was recorded. This was because the production style utilised was mainly focussed on capturing the musicians in a natural, roomy and pure kind of way.

We also touched on Reggae and Ska. Some of Reggae’s hallmarks were loud bright sounding cymbals, guitars and keyboards with radical panning, rhythmical delays and the use of flangers/ phasers. Sharing similar characteristics as Reggae, Ska was a bit faster but retained the ‘off-beat’ feel on the drums, only at a faster pace.

Trying to steer away from my usual focus of Hard Rock/ Metal, I might add that the production traits of Blues recordings also stood out. Blues production has its fair share of close miking, additionally we also learnt that the ‘Green Bullet’ mic (Shure) was very popular. The main element that stood out with Blues was that it was ‘no frills’ and performance driven. That is just the nature of the essence behind the music. We heard examples of artists like BB King, Leadbelly, John Lee Hooker and Muddy waters. The employment of distorted/ overdriven harmonics and that raw ‘stompfoot’ percussive feel really adds to the whole idea behind the blues movement. I personally really appreciate the way this genre retains the heart and soul of way back when it began, almost to the point that they still use the same production techniques and ideology even today.