Great stuff, Peter! You give an idea of what it is we can provide- an opportunity to soar away from the crushing restraints of everyday life. A respite from logistics, numbers, and paperwork and all that. The sense of infinite possibility. When I find that on a record, I play it again and again and again.
brianbrick wrote on Wed, 05 January 2005 21:03 |
Producing starts with listening to the organic thing that makes the band/artist awesome. Grabbin' a little piece of the magic and sticking it on "Tape" is the goal.
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This is totally on the money. The magic what we need to get recorded.
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Then everybody is happy
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Except the artist or musician who is upset because they revealed more of themselves, more of their dreams and their failures and weaknesses, than they are comfortable with people hearing. In other words, they fucked up. As we know sometimes the fuckups are the best part- a note sung uniquely off pitch in a way that is really microtonal, and tells the story better than a note that's in our usual tempered scale. One of ringo's wonderfully human drum fills. Things like that.
It's taken me years of listening to myself fuck up over and over again to be able to really enthuse and believe in a wonderful fuckup that's really a crack in the veneer where soul shows through. One hint- if things could never come together quite that way ever again, you may have something there.
This is what intimate really is- seeing the things you're only seeing because you're close to an unguarded person, or a person whose guard has slipped temporarily. Things we usually are embarassed about and try to hide. And if the person trusts you with these revelations, that's a special kind of intimacy.
My own approach to production is extremely limited and extremely effective with a very few folks that I have a unique artistic and personal resonance with. Before I ask them to bleed, I bleed for them. I perform for them, or with them, opening myself wide bleeding up like I want them to feel free to do.
There's something about a session where every person present is living the music. This is why I have repeatedly broken the "rule" that a person will put in better performances if they are not doing the recording, just the performing. Having someone there who is not deeply and personally involved in the realtime flow of the music is a total liability.
The engineer of old, riding the fader during tracking and breathing with the singer, is deeply involved in the realtime flow. The engineer of today, standing back and waiting to press stop while making sure everything's getting recorded and no overs, is not involved in the realtime flow. Not necessarily- I'm open to exceptions, and encourage everyone to become one! It sucks to be living the music while people are disconnected from it in the control room. To look up during a take and see the engineers chatting while you are performing, sucks.
I worked with an engineer who would sit in front of the band on the tracking room floor, completely swept up in the music. We would know we had a good take when we looked up after the performance and he was crying! He cried a lot. He also performed bit percussion parts on some takes, live with the rest of the performance. I was producing the engineer's musical performance! This guy knew drum tuning too, and was up there pushing his knee into the calfskin bass drum heads. Some of those were incredible unrepeatable performances. Nothing professional about it!