The Living Rockumentary

Tony, here's my theory on "bad" sound in songs we love. When you buy an album from a band and you listen to it for the first time, THAT sound becomes what the song is. You don't stop and think how it could be different or better, you just accept it as how this album sounds and then you listen to the songs. You, as a recording musician, know that the reverb is over the top on that Bobby Fuller Four song, but in the musical part of your head, that is just how that song goes, and you love it. When you are presented something in a completed package from a band you don't know personally, you don't reconsider the mix or the arrangement or the recording quality, you see the whole picture and that's how it is.

That's why mixing is so tough, because you don't have that preconceived sound already. Especially when you are mixing in a band. Can you imagine if I put that much reverb on a SFTD recording? You guys would never have it, and vais-versa. In SFTD, we have been presented the songs first in a live format and that has sort of defined the songs for us, and we think of the songs as seperate instruments doing different parts and we hear the drums like we hear the drums on stage, and we hear the voices like we hear the voices when we song from the inside of our heads. I think on the first four songs we did a good job on ignoring all that and trying to just make the recording their own thing. I have the feeling that one of the reasons the Beatles recordings were so cool is that they didn't play the songs live a bunch before hand. They didn't even think of the songs like that, they were presented in the studio and then they worked on them for recording purposes only.

If you listen to a lot of local or start-up bands' recordings, they sound very stale. They may have gotten good drums sounds and guitars and bass and vocals, but they are tryign to present a sort of cleaned up version of the live sound. It all comes back to how the song gets defined in yoru head. I can't imagine hearing "Time Is On My Side" without that crazy loud reverbed tamborine, but at some point someone made the decision to put that in there and go with it. If we had been there and that had been our recording, we may have all said "That's too loud" or "Too much reverb". But I love that part that someone somehow convinced the panel that they should keep. I might hate it if I had been there at the start.

That's why we have learned to love "bad" sound, because it is what is familiar to us. That's why Brian's friend loves the vinyl version of Frank Black, because at some point, to him, the sound of a record became defined as what music is "suppose" to sound like. That's why the guy I used to work with always turned the treble all the way up on the little cassette player at work, because it sounded more like AM radio, which to him is what Rock and Roll is supposed to sound like.

Particle board is wood that is made out of pressed tiny particles of scraps, rather than one nice solid chunk of wood. It's the hot dog of woods.