A new DNA
You've heard pitch correction if you've listened to music on the radio in the past decade or so. There's no other way around it. The technology to "correct" pitches has been around for a bit, and it's somewhat insidious. You may notice it overtly in some songs as an effect, but more often than not it's used to create a "perfect" track, usually for pop singers who needed to get on to their fashion shoot.
The wonders of technology makes it available for individual notes in chords now, too. Direct note access gives this software the ability to pick out notes in a cluster and individually "correct" them. Now intrepid engineers can go after every last imperfection and get it exactly "right." From a purely technological standpoint, that's incredible. The geek in me is thrilled.
The bassist in me wonders why they don't just play it right in another take. It also looks strangely at the concept of chords, but that's another story.
Forgive the overuse of quotes above, but it's meant to illustrate the subjective nature of this tool. A lot more goes into a good take than just getting the notes perfect. This tool would have saved me a lot of time on past recordings (well, not ME per se - see the above mention of chords), but at it's heart it's just another tool. It has its spots for appropriate use, and there are times where it's probably better left in the box in favor of another take.
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March 18th, 2008 - 20:55
As an engineer, I know that sometimes things need to be “corrected.” Maybe hot lights or a player’s body heat bent a guitar out of shape mid-performance so that a brilliant performance wasn’t quite as in tune as it should have been. Maybe new strings or a recent setup job made the instrument less stable than it should have been. These things happen, and sometimes they’re worth fixing.
Sometimes, though, they’re not. Call me crazy, but sometimes I like a little warble or catch in a singer’s voice, as if emotion (gasp!) got the better of them. Sometimes, a not-quite-in-tune guitar part actually creates a bit of a natural chorus effect while adding to the character of a performance. Sometimes, it’s nice to remember that human beings are the ones making the music, and that recordings can be snapshots and not belabored, deathless sonic masterpieces.
March 19th, 2008 - 13:05
This new technology only tells me that we learned absolutely nothing from Bob Dylan or Lee “Scratch” Perry at all. Here’s my smug-ass take on it:
“Hi, welcome to Pop Music Pizza. What can I get for you?”
“Yeah, gimme a medium. A perfectly ordinary medium. I can’t tolerate size abnormality. I want it light on the sauce, heavy on the cheese.”
“Do you want any toppings on that?”
“Only if they are flavorless and mathematically evenly distributed across the entire surface of the pizza.”
“Hmm, I’m not sure if we -”
“Forget it then. Oh hey, are there any seasonings in your sauce?”
“No sir! Our patented Flavor Remover strips them out of the tomato paste before we start mixing it up. It may still contain trace amounts of oregano…”
“Trace amounts? A pox on your pizza! I’ll be taking my business elsewhere, thank you.” *leaves in a snit*
…and SCENE.
March 19th, 2008 - 13:19
To be fair, it’s got to be a Herculean task to learn anything directly from those two guys, given extreme language and behavioral barriers.
But yeah, I hate that kind of pizza.