Johnny B wrote on Thu, 29 December 2005 08:07 |
Since when was digital ever useful? Perhaps its useful for decimating 3D analogue sound waves...chopping them up, slicing and dicing them, and turning them into neat little zeros and ones that will be sent thru bad digital math and come out sounding...thin, cold, brittle, and ice cold.
|
Look, this is not that complicated.
The chopping up and slicing and dicing is not a problem. Neat little zeroes and ones are your friend. You can get all 'Jurassic Park' with them, it's very liberating. You can do crazy things that cannot be done conveniently in analog.
Bad digital math is the problem. Even changing the gain of a track on the fly, much less fancier stuff like equalization, gets you a special kind of bad digital math that relates to treating the sample values like 'pieces of the audio', which they're not.
They are only pointers to the underlying wave shape which won't ever exactly correspond to the sample. What you want to be focussing on is RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN samples. That will retain the sub-sample timing information.
People don't usually do this, they write code to edit 'samples' individually.
Thanks to being on the losing end of an argument with Sony's Paul Frindle I started doing it, and digital done properly loses nothing, nothing whatsoever to analog. Not 'vibe', not warmth not depth not anything. It was all about minute jitter/timing irregularities produced by not considering the relationships between samples... when I fixed that, bingo.
I mean, listen to my CAPE tracks, even as mp3s (the teams have full res versions). Campfire/Galactic/Arsenal/Transmission. Most or all were mixed digitally but I counteracted that- I'd be able to do even more, with stuff either mixed analog or mixed with minimal bad-digital-math. The comparisons that were coming up for people were Dark Side of the Moon, Dixie Dregs, etc. People were being reminded of analog masterpieces. What I'm talking about here is not airy-fairy intellectual stuff, it's visceral. MY JOB is to hit people with the most musical experience off whatever music I'm given to work with.
For the reasons I outlined, historically analog is way better at doing this, but I think I'm establishing that it's not an axiom- you just have to do digital exactly right to completely capture the magic. When we're talking Pro Tools, that's pretty much digital done consistently wrong, though they improve bit by bit (ack! pun not intended)
Now if we're talking about whether it's sad to take musicians and plunk them in Pro Tools and put out casio-tone versions of their musical thought, that's another story, a whole other bookshelf. But please let's not call that 'digital' as if there wasn't the capacity to record exceptional digital.
The funniest part is, I'd be able to get more, much more, out of a recording that was done digitally but Albini-style, all documentation and as purist and unprocessed as a jazz session or classical gig. Frankly, if you sat a band down in front of two really good mics and sampled it through a damned good converter at merely 16/44.1K I would be able to take that recording, run with it, and you'd freak and swear it had to be great analog throughout.
It's digital overproduction that's bothering you guys.