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Old 12-13-2008, 01:55 PM   #83
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lawrence View Post
Often this is dead true. There are exceptions to that in some genres like folk and classical where the objective is to just capture the performance in a pure form. But yeah, point taken.

Pop music recordings are often like movies, partly an illusion. It's entertainment. Those actors in the movies aren't really doing some of that stuff either, it's part editing and part fakery.

As opposed to a "concert", a stage play.

There's movies and then there are plays. There's pop and then there are live classical recordings. Unfortunately in music, many people (the listening audience) don't always realize how much of an illusion it really is sometimes.
Yeah. I'm trying hard to avoid value judgments, here, because so many of these kinds of threads turn into philosophical debates. If punk rock bands that sound like a barbershop quartet are your thing, then you can still do it better or worse, regardless of whether I think it is a worthwhile endeavor.

And even in "purer" music, or music that does not immediately announce itself as "produced," there is often a lot of illusion at work. Some famous arranger or composer once said something like, "there's no sound in the world as small as a philharmonic." It was said in the context of making arrangement decisions, that if you wanted a big, in-your-face, dramatic sound, the way to get it was with fewer instruments playing better-defined parts. If you wanted a "soft," distant, less-personal sound, the best way to get it was with the wash of a hundred strings. This was someone who really understood the concept of level-matching, whether he knew it or not.

Careful listening bears this out. A close-miked cello or viola can actually have a very aggressive, throaty, ferocious sound that gives electric guitar a run for its money as king of the "power" instruments. In order to get the same kind of power from an orchestral patch, you have to overlay timpanis and cymbal crashes and horn stabs to get the whole orchestra playing one giant power power chord. Which makes a nifty preset on a Yamaha keyboard, but is a completely unrealistic and fairly silly use of an orchestra.

Get a good acoustic guitar player and singer in a room and try to reproduce the performance on "black horse and the cherry tree" by KT Tunstall. Unless you also have a very capable delay or looper running, it's not gonna happen. Which also means that this apparently intimate, authentic-sounding folk track is actually dependent on amplification, i.e. there is no way to "capture" this sound as a pure performance, because it doesn't exist as soundwaves in open air until it's already been recorded, processed, and amplified.

There are some beautiful records that have been made with minimalist far-field miking techniques (and this is still the norm in orchestral and choral recordings), but they do not produce the sparkling, 20-foot-tall acoustic guitars and massive "voice of God" vocals that have become the norm even in a lot of jazz and modern folk recordings. And speaking of far-field...
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