Bypass Everything
Sunday, 7 December 2008
About a week ago, I recorded and mixed an entire album. Not my material, I hasten to add, but a friend's new album which he kindly asked me to record and produce.
The equipment I use for recording is, by any engineer's standards, nothing but cheap and nasty rubbish. Upon hearing the manufacturers and specifications, most recording engineers would at best visibly wince and at worst launch into a frustrated tirade.
But I don't really care for that kind of argument. I'm very much of the David Briggs school of thought when it comes to recording.
For the uninitiated, David Briggs was the legendary producer who worked on the bulk of Neil Young's albums. He is often referred to, historically, as the greatest "non-technical" record producer of all time.
The story I'm most enamoured with is that of him walking into recording studios filled with racks of equipment and sprawling mixing desks with hundreds of parameters, asking for the schematic diagrams, and then figuring out how to patch from the microphones directly into the tape machine, in his words, to "bypass all this bullshit".
Briggs may have been a crude man, but he made a lot of sense.
The more paths a signal has to travel through to get to the device that is capturing it, the worse (or at least more unnatural) it will sound, unless of course those paths are pristine - which is where expensive high end recording equipment comes into play.
But even if those paths are golden, you have to remember that the sheer weight and depth of a recording is the sum of its parts; it's not all down to one single pearl of expensive equipment that will solve everything and turn an average recording into a great recording.
What will solve everything in a recording is not hardware, but passion.
I think that recording and mixing is as much of an art form as writing a song or playing an instrument. I also think that it is possible to bring as much feeling and sensation and emotion to the recording of a song, as it is to the creation and performance of the song itself.
But in order to do this, you need to divorce yourself from the technical aspects of the process. You need to treat the available tools as nothing more than pathways and unlocked gates; you cannot let the technology dictate the limitations, or the possibilities.
It took us a mere 3 days to turn this record around.
3 days included setting up, recording, overdubs and final mixing. It was made easier due to the fact that the artist was layering tracks within songs one at a time, but still, 3 days is a remarkably low count to make an entire record of any complexity.
And although he paid me for my time, essentially, it cost us literally nothing to record this album. I would estimate the value of the microphones, mixing desk, PC and audio interfaces at around $700 worth of hardware.
This is what I mean when I say that downloading is not killing recorded music. It just necessitates that music is recorded faster and cheaper and with more skill and risk than ever before.
And if you can't get it done fast, then you might as well buy some mics and a PC and create your masterpiece slowly that way, because after the initial outlay, it doesn't cost anything to keep running.
You can produce astonishing results on simple equipment - all it requires is some basic technical knowledge and a genuine care for the material. All you need is some fire, some inner belief and the willingness to take a few leaps of faith.
The end result we achieved in this case, whether or not you like the artist's songs or the performance itself, is perfectly listenable. It is completely ready for a public release.
Most importantly, and what makes the recording essentially valid, is that it is sonically true to the artist's vision (which is a very pompous way of saying that he loved the end result, so bugger everyone else).
Granted, it doesn't sound like a million dollar production. Maybe these humble sounds can't compete with high end commercial recordings. But since when was art about competition? Art should be about truth, and these recordings sound true to their intentions.
And there are flaws too. Sometimes he doesn't quite hit a vocal note, sometimes there's an off beat on the drums, or a tuning issue on the guitars, but so what? Since when was art about perfection?
You've got to treat art as wildly as falling in love.
When you fall in love with someone, it is not only their strengths, but also their flaws that you fall for. It is their small failings that also endear them to you. Why then remove all the flaws from a recording? It's like separating the human from their voice; the sound will be disembodied and the recording will sound unloved.
You have to keep producing work, even if it is flawed, even if it is made on terrible equipment and even if you have no money for anything better. You can't let notions of what is good, or right, or acceptable to others prevent you from doing what you want to do.
Now, this may all seem absolutely contradictory, given the recording of my album, which went directly against all I have said above. High fidelity equipment, a large, professional studio and a name producer at the helm. In that case, I wanted to make a big sounding studio album, simply because I love them, and that's what I did.
Despite that, there is a commonality. And the common factor linking these two seemingly opposed methods, is that Tony Cohen, like David Briggs, is a non-technical, emotional producer. And while I have no intention of becoming a world class record producer, nor am I claiming sit alongside them, I still think it worthwhile to aspire to heights sometimes.
Any good recording gives you a direct line to the soul of its creator. Like the source audio signal travelling to the device of capture, you must find the shortest route. And it is this direct pathway which you must adhere to, regardless of the barriers you may perceive.
Just like David Briggs and his gonzo recording methodology, both in art and in life, you must go straight to the heart of things.
You must bypass everything.
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Here is a link to one of my favourite tracks from the sessions referenced above. It's my favourite, both for its sonic qualities, as well as the song and the performance itself.
I believe Andrew RC will be releasing the album for free in the near future. You can e-mail him if you want to find out more.
The file is a single track contained in a ZIP archive. Download the file, open the archive, then drag and drop the MP3 file to your PC.