Brief Summary

In this article Julian’s experience of training young engineers raises questions about how learning, working and socialising online can affect everything about recorded music, from the players, to the engineers, to our perception of success.

Going Deeper

It was over ten years ago that I heard the phrase which inspired this article. I was with Luke at a trade show event. We had just seen a drum manufacturer’s demonstrator give what can only be described as a virtuoso performance of dazzling technique. The demo was met with approving gasps from an audience which predictably enough was composed almost exclusively of drummers.

Luke, himself a drummer, leant over to me and quietly said “yeah, but I still wouldn’t trust him with a Kinks song…”

And he really had a point. It was a humorous one and I’m confident the demonstrator, as an experienced session player, could have been trusted not to blastbeat his way through Waterloo Sunset. In my experience good session players do exactly what is asked of them, but it did put me in mind of many examples when I’ve asked myself exactly what some musicians are trying to achieve when they play? Are they demonstrating their knowledge and skill, or their judgement?

Too Much Information

In a previous life I ran a music tech course. My students were (mostly) enthusiastic and eager to learn, absorbing knowledge wherever they found it, often indiscriminately. An important part of my role as I saw it was to channel this enthusiasm in the right direction. My formative years were pre-internet and I squeezed all the value I could out of the information I could glean about recording, mixing and of course playing music. The information came drop by drop and we took our time drinking it in, getting everything we could from it. A limited amount of knowledge, deeply examined. These days the supply of knowledge is more like an internet fire hose to the face and it’s easy to lose perspective. Everything might be important and it takes time to figure out the difference between the things which shout the loudest and the things which matter every day.

So back to drummers. Actually this point could just as easily be made about any flavour of musician. The music business is competitive. You have to be good to succeed. But that doesn’t mean that music itself is a competition. And turning music into a competition rarely makes it better. This isn’t new. YouTube definitely feeds this ‘music as a competitive sport’ narrative but it’s been going on for as long as music has. When I was an eager teen it took me a little while to figure out that, for me at least, Eddie Van Halen’s two handed tapping was impressive but ultimately boring. Paganini was the shredder of his day but Paschebel gets the plays. Ultimately what we’re all trying to do was best summed up by Frank Zappa when he said of music that you get a piece of time and you get to decorate it. That sounds offhand but it’s actually pretty deep.

Decorating A Piece Of Time

Seeing all stages of the creation of music as decorating a piece of time encourages us to think of the whole and to step back from, frequently counterproductive, concentration on the details at the expense of the bigger picture. What are we trying to achieve here and who for?

So back to the room full of drummers. Drummers playing to impress other drummers is missing the point of drumming. Any complexity which is introduced into music just to impress peers or to showcase the ability of the player is probably not serving the music well. Just because something is hard to do doesn’t make it pleasant to listen to. The old joke about Jazz-Fusion illustrates the point - “would you rather play three chords to a thousand people or a thousand chords to…”. Funny, though in fairness it’s a big world and there is room in it for any music anyone chooses to make.

Given the wealth of knowledge we have instant access to, today we should be seeing the best players we’ve ever seen. Easy, direct access to the most talented people has led to a generation of extraordinarily talented players. But what I see is an awful lot of great players who have learned in near isolation. Playing on their own, learning from YouTube. And where once people wanted to be like their heroes and play in a band to live audiences, the ambition seems to be to play to an audience on YouTube.

But What About Engineers?

The point I’m making here can be extended to engineers and producers who learn and ultimately work in isolation. To have a career in studios and to retreat in your mid to late career to your garden studio is one thing, but to start and to remain there throughout your whole career is something else. It’s amazing to consider that all the technology is in place to be able to work remotely, from training through to working. In a very short time we have gone from audio engineering to being fundamentally a social activity where people have to come together, to being a solitary one. The exception should be ensemble recording, where people playing in a room together necessarily need someone to set microphones and someone to direct the session. Unless of course they don’t even play together, which is possible.

Electronic music has been largely created in isolation for as long as it has existed but virtual instruments have reached the level where, for many people they are not a compromise at all. Musicians recording and collaborating remotely is a post-pandemic norm rather than anything new and the technology gets better and better. The only thing which remains stubbornly problematic is real time jamming over the internet. Progress is being made but network latency and the distances involved remain stubbornly limited by physics.

Music production and engineering is changing from a group activity to a remote one, and carries the risk of becoming further isolated. Even worse if the freedom to associate with like minded individuals online risks becoming an audio engineer’s echo chamber then do we risk mixes which showcase how clever the mix is rather than how good the music is? The ultimate test for me of whether or not a mix is good is to play it to someone. They don’t even have to speak, just by virtue of them being there I get a refreshed perspective. It just isn’t the same sending someone a wav file.

Does The Audience Hear The Mix Or Feel The Music?

In my experience most people (as opposed to audio engineers) don’t respond to how music sounds, they respond to how it feels. One of the most interesting developments I’ve seen recently which to some extent completes a circle of separation by bringing musicians back together online are NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. Bringing live music, often with quite large bands (Chic have done it, that’s hardly singer songwriter with an acoustic guitar territory!) into a space which really isn’t suitable for it underlines the importance of real time interaction between people in a shared physical space. And returning briefly to the kind of unnecessary details only of interest to engineers, in the same way as the SM7B has become a visual motif for podcasting and youtube, I’d expect to see more and more MKH416s being used. They are clearly the favoured solution for maintaining separation in this very tight performance space.

So in the same way as a good drummer plays for the song and sits on a simple beat because it’s “not about them” and a bass player rarely gets asked to slap, as engineers if we spend the afternoon riding levels, and listening to the big picture rather than demonstrating a clever drum processing trick, we’re probably doing it right. Do we need to concentrate less on things which are interesting to our peers and more on things which are necessary to the job? Things which wouldn’t usually attract a lot of clicks online? Share your thoughts, I’d like to know.