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Old 08-04-2012, 06:24 AM   #2186
FKAB
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Jun 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by yep View Post
Sidebar...

Trivia question: what band recorded more number 1 hits than any other? More than the Beatles, Elvis, The Stones, and the Beach Boys combined?

A: The Funk Brothers, the then-anonymous house band/songwriting/arranging team behind Motown.

Home recordists take heart: all of the Detroit-era Motown records were made in the small (originally dirt floor) basement of Berry Gordy's humble Detroit home. I am paraphrasing from the film "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" when I say: "people always wanted to know where that 'Motown Sound' came from. They thought it was the wood, the microphones, the floor, the food, but they never asked about the musicians."

I am paraphrasing again when I say that it was widely thought that it didn't matter who the singer was, anything that came out of "Hitsville USA" (namely, that dirt-floor basement) was made of "hit." Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, the Temptations, The Four Tops, the Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, and so on were basically just rotating front people for the greatest band in popular music history.

I don't care what kind of party you're throwing or what the crowd is like, if you put on "Bernadette" or "Uptight Everything's Alright" or "standing in the shadows of love" or "WAR" or any of those old Motown numbers, people will get out of their seats and start dancing and clapping (maybe on the wrong beats, but whatever). Nobody knows the lyrics, nobody can hum the guitar riff, and it has nothing to with the production. The music bypasses the higher cognition functions and directly communicates with the hips and the hairs on the back of your neck.

The guitars are indistinct, the keys are hard to make out, the horns and winds vanish into the background, James Jamerson's incomparable bass symphonies are the definition of "muddy," but the unified whole is impossible not to respond to. One cannot be human and not react to "Heard it through the grapevine," "Heatwave," "Tracks of my Tears," "Shotgun," and so on.

This is American-style popular music at its apex, and unlike nostalgic hippie music or punk purists, all you have to do is to throw it in the CD changer to hear its real power and musical accomplishment. No explanation or cultural context required.

My point is not that everyone should aspire to sound like Motown. In fact I do not think it is possible or desirable to re-capture such a sound with any kind of production techniques. And my point is definitely not to argue that they were "good for their time" or anything like that. Throw it in the CD changer and see if it isn't just as good today. If you think it sounds "old" or doesn't hold up, ignore what I'm saying.

My point is that you could not MAKE a bad recording of this band. The recordings ARE bad-- they are muddy, overloaded, indistinct, midrangey, all of it. And you could put those recordings into a cassette player and record the output of an old 6x9 car speaker through a cheap mic and then replay it at a wedding and it would STILL get more people dancing than anything on the top 40 from any era.

The production does not make the song. The preamps DEFINITELY don't make the song. Hell, the SONG doesn't even make the song, in modern popular music. It's the performance.

The rest is just flash and sizzle.

End sidebar. More to follow.
While reading this thread again, and I have the PDF, I flipped over to Youtube and found "Bernadette", I opened my eyes...[listening to the mix] and the kids are jumping around the living room! No shit! Sorry about the complete quote, I couldn't decide where to edit it!

The more you know about Mixing, the less you know!

Last edited by FKAB; 08-04-2012 at 06:33 AM.
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