So I've been staring at the blank page, or more accurately DAW project for years now. It's hard to look at yourself in the mirror and accurately evaluate your own flaws, but that's what's needed in order to get past a block. With this blog I've laid out everything I know about modern recording technology. But I feel like I haven't said enough about music, well that's because sometimes music puzzles me. Why some sounds are accepted and some are not, why some combinations of notes sound pleasant to one person and unpleasant to another? It seems hopelessly subjective, but there are some things that are generally agreed upon. One that is very hard for me to accept is that analog distortion tends to sound a hell of alot better than digital distortion! They're completely different animals, but a vast majority of people will recoil in horror when they hear digital distortion.
Personally, I don't mind it. I wouldn't care one little bit if a radio was tuned to static rather than pop music. I prefer the white and pink noise cascade of an untuned radio over most modern pop music. But I'm starting to understand the appeal to pop music, it's pleasant and carefree attitude. Often the production behind mainstream artists is more of an artform than the actual artist themselves. This is something I can get behind, but I don't think I'll ever understand why everything needs to sound so... similar. To the point where it doesn't seem to matter which artist is playing, you can hear ten songs in a radio playlist and they all sound like one meta-band jamming to a single vibe. It's some kind of groupthink, mob-mentality, and I think there might even be a touch of black magic behind controlling this force. But hey, as long as it's a good vibe...
I have to accept that my music will always be a minority thing.
The problems this implies are multiple in nature. For one, when you set out to make a noise track, who exactly are you pleasing other than yourself? How do you know when you're finished? I assume the answers to these questions are as personal as they are for any other kind of artist. Maybe someone can help me fill this part in. But this leads me to the heart of one of the major dualities I've discovered while thinking and writing about music: Representationalism vs. non-representationalism.
Big words, scary shit. But in the context of recording, it comes down to this: When you record a sound, say an acoustic guitar, do you want your end product to sound like an acoustic guitar? If yes, than this is an example of a representational recording. It's like drawing a portrait, as opposed to a Picasso painting. Now, say you sample a string on an acoustic guitar, and pitch it down until it's a bass note, than you apply some kind of filter effect and modulate it, this is an example of non-representational recording
The problem for me is that most pop music makes use of pitch correction, heavy editing, and other effects that make the recording less than representational of the performances. My main point is that as technology has gotten more and more advanced, the palette of music that is commonly available is getting more and more homogenous rather than less. If you have these incredibly expensive studios that can transform almost anyone's performance into a polished sounding, radio-ready recording... why aren’t they being used to turn the sound of breaking glass into music?
I suppose I'm just as vain as pop musicians in many ways. There's no real need for anyone to be perfect, to try follow my production advice to the T. It's just MY ideas, some arbitrary rules that should theoretically lead to a more ideal sound. Yet perfection doesn't really exist, it's an abstract ideal nobody really reaches. So why try? I can think of a few reasons but it's hard for me to care anymore. I feel like giving up on being a conventional musician, and start crafting noise into sound-art. This seems depressing to some people, but for me it's incredibly liberating. But I'll never stop playing, practicing, jamming with other people, trying for the sake of trying.
There is a social element to music, to playing in bands, to "trying to make it big" or even pretending you are for the duration of your set. This is maybe the only non-selfish, non-narcissistic aspect of music I can think of. Even though from the outside it might seem like the essence of egotism, narcissism, to think you are a rockstar when you're not. The point though is that it's not real, but to a certain degree you need to pretend like the show is real. The ambiguity is what makes it all possible, just don't get lost in it.
