Medium != Message...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
One thing I’ve often said, when confronted with the type of person that gets in to the minutia of the recording process, perhaps at the expense of the big picture, is that a good song will survive any production process, while a bad song can’t be saved by the most sophisticated gear and recording techniques available.
This sort of idea is anathema to the Gear Queer, who is always certain that there is that one more piece of kit sitting out there, just beyond grasp, that will push things over the edge and make all the difference. We’re each of us guilty of this behavior, of course. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, etc. But the simple fact of the matter is that the work of art exists already, as a wave function, and whatever you need to collapse that bitch and bring shit out in to the cold light of day is what you need. There are records that wouldn’t exist without a massive, and relatively expensive, modular synth and a fairly detail-oriented production approach (see: A Funneled Stone), and others that would sound fucking retarded if they were anything but a guitar and a vocal. (See: Robert Johnson’s entire ouvre. Happy 100th b’day to Mr. Johnson, btw.)
Now, this entire approach could be perceived as my own way of justifying my several rather ridiculous recording habits, the which you’re all perfectly aware of. I approach photography and music-making in the same way, trying to squeeze something interesting out of a device not really meant to do what I’m asking of it, largely via a trial-and-error approach rather than any cohesive planning on my part. My general philosophy with respect to photography is the Shakespeare/Monkey method: if you take enough pictures, some of them are bound to be interesting, and quantity has a quality all its own. No particular reason this can’t be applied to music. (See: Wesley Willis.)
I guess what I’m trying to say, when it comes down to it, is this: I am of the firm opinion that there is interesting shit hiding in my brain. All I have to do is figure out how to get it out. While a new piece of The Shiny might make certain aspects of that chore easier, at the end of the day, the song lives in my brain, not in the gear. The medium is the messenger, not the message itself.
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"I am of the firm opinion that there is interesting shit hiding in my brain. All I have to do is figure out how to get it out."
Looks like I just found my new motto.
there's a lot of ways to skin a cat. no matter how you do it the cat get's skinned. bare hands, fancy scalpels, steak knife..
so, nice post, i agree with you. the gear may influence the outcome but it isn't the idea.
also, quantity - i try to follow through with all the ideas and finish them off even if i know an idea is not my best because maybe i go back to it later and it becomes something else or maybe i learn something or maybe the idea isn't as bad as i think. i don't know how many times there's a song i write that i think is kind of weak and that's the one everybody loves. wtf.
and my gear past is full of things bought and sold thinking they'd be the magic inspirational bullet. not so much any more.
This post triggers some of my own recent thoughts and processes, so please bear with me through this:
1) McLuhans title originally was "the medium is the massage", but as this sounded funny to the editor, he changed it to "the message". As such, the original title is much closer to your interpretation, Chris.
2) However, I like the word "the message", because I think the media tells a message about us, about the state of the society, as a reflection of what we are doing and where our focus is.
3) I fully agree to your sentences about good song/bad song (myself a mixing engineer for many years, so I am speaking against my own arts)
4) in my view, the interesting bits and pieces are not located in our brain, but in our feelings (or call it soul or heart, whatever, I am not religious). "Art" is the ability to feel in the first place, to store those emotions, and to be able to recreate those feelings for someone else who is sensitive to a specific form of art. may it be through music, painting, photography, literature, dance, etc... Art is about recovering your stored experiences, and transforming those into something which will "touch" others.
Tangental but...
@audioworld - i don't believe the book was ever titled The Medium is the Message (there may have been a later comp with the title). The book is called the Medium Is the Massage which is either (depending on who you believe) a misprint that McLuhan preferred to his intended title or a pun on mass age.
One of my favorite McLuhan quotes is from his cameo in Annie Hall when he exclaims "you mean my whole fallacy is wrong!"
I think I have come to view acquiring/playing with gear and song/sound creation as two different past times.
I don't feel I need the latest/greatest/newest gear to accomplish something/anything. I do, however, enjoy playing with the latest/greatest/newest gear in and of itself. Often the two are complimentary but not always.
Waldorf Attack vst ...always keeps me from buying some overpriced drum synth no matter how hard my tallywhacker gets when I hear it... kinda like eatin with ya eyes.
I dunno. New sound-producing gear usually provides me with the spark to create - and for a brief time feel that I've broken new ground - although it still sounds pretty much like me...
New recording gear doesn't excite me as much (save for monitors). It's just there to capture what I do, not fix it.
the spark to create, sure and some times genuine 'game changer' but sometimes "shiny new toy".
sometimes new hotness and a new 'system' for making things happen. if it sounds good, is fun to use then chances is are it will yield something interesting and be full of new discoveries.
the very least.. it's figuring out how something works and learning a new thing.
"if you take enough pictures, some of them are bound to be interesting"
Yeah, but at $2+ a shot this photography thing has started getting 'spensive! Polaroid cameras are directly leading to the starvation and ruination of my family. But hey:
http://ansiblecomm.com/2011/05/07/hipster-cred/
Also, how is the Yunon? I have bought two, and neither have worked. If I buy another one, I'll probably have enough parts to Frankenstein together a working one. Worth it? Or is it just another toy camera?
-William
Anyone ever read T.E.Hulme's Romanticism and Classcism?
I recommend it. I'm sure he wasn't thinking about converters when he wrote it, but the themes hold true...
That should read 'Classicism'...
Apologies-fat fingers+iPhones=typos.
As I found out during a concert of Daniel Higgs: One elemental part of all art is sharing illumination. The artist has exerimented some kind of illumination and is sharing it with the audience through his performance. In case of Daniel Higgs this was a long improvised chant about the bible while he played one-note-drone on a travel-harmonium.
I think that sometimes the things you want are not actually going to make it better, you just think they will.
I often use Robert Johnson as an example of why you shouldn't get carried away trying to get the "perfect" (in the audiophile sense) sound. How much would those recordings suck if they were done with today's digital gear? Actually, not at all, they'd still be amazing, but I'd say they wouldn't be nearly as good with a "better" recording.
The people who recorded that stuff would have probably loved to have had digital recorder and a 414, but I'm glad they didn't.
bb
Put another way: What's the limiting factor in your music? Is it your equipment, or is it you?
Inevitably if you have even the most basic equipment (ie. a computer), it's you. This realisation hasn't stopped me spending nearly my entire wealth on music equipment, but I'm better than I used to be.
The most brilliant retort I ever had to me going OMGWTFBBQ over the announcement of some new gadget was: "so much great music has been written without it." Instantly made my gear boner shrivel.
Nonetheless, the gear influences the process.
@CR
your post is kinda mixed up.
Are you talking about artists or are you talking about engineers?
A killer song is a killer song all right, but a bad recording (compared to today's standards, not to a recoding from 80 years ago) is a bad recording too.
The winning situation is a good song and a good recording. A good song without a good recording it's probably doomed to be unheard.
So I really don't get the point. Unless you're making fun of audio engineers who believes in the esotheric properties of the latest compressor or eq. I don't think that an artist will ever think about it unless it's a producer itself. The artist will always think about tracks or tunes first.
@cymatics: Now, _that_ is heavy duty. I'm gonna use that shit.
@wgparham: The 5 pictures in my Flickr account were all I was able to get out of the Yunon. I shot a 27-exposure roll in it, and the camera totally broke apart when I took the roll out. When I got it processed, those were all that came out. The rest were black, as if the shutter hadn't opened at all. The roll was color, too, Kodak Gold 400, but the colors were so awful I monotoned the pics. So "more trouble than it is worth" would be the answer to your question, I think. But analog photography is the triumph of hope over experience. If I come across another Yunon, I'll no doubt try it again.
@pierlu: Is there any difference any more? In electronic music, the artist is the engineer is the producer is the mastering engineer, usually. Ever since I was a wee little electro-punk, I've filled multiple shoes on all my projects, even when I was in thousands-a-day mixing studios with name producers and tea boys. Same with all my peers. So the multi-tasking artist/producer is all I have experience with, sorry. I imagine there are artists out there that don't engineer or mix, but I don't know any.
-CR
@cymatics ""so much great music has been written without it." Instantly made my gear boner shrivel."
Awesome. Even if I have to use it out of context, I am looking forward to working this into my day, somehow.
Getting some new gear is usually just what I need to spark some creativity if I'm in a rut. A good change in work flow can really make you look at the process differently, although I also have a whole closet full of stuff that I only used once or twice. As always, balance is key.
@CR
So I guessed all right. you're talking about electronic music. I was confused by your reference to robert johnson.
I think that electronic music is pretty much related to the machines you use to make it. EM is almost completely devoted to the way you organize things and the way you can do it strictly depends on the tools you're using. If I'm just making things in the same way I would do with a regular group, well, I'm not making electronic music, I'm just using a much more refined version of General Midi.
So, to some extent, it's not exact to bring the focus on composition versus machines. Electronic music it's all about composing with machines and finding new ways of interact with them.
So I guess that one person, when working with em has to have a split mind. The first one has to be the artistic part, i.e. the one that takes are of the way you deal with machines and effects trying to make the most out of it in a musical way that's meaningful.
And then there's the technician side, which is the one that takes care of the "marketing" aspect of proposing sounds to the public, trying to match the artistic expression to what the public is used to hear.
To mix those two attitudes is something that requires much experience, so much actually that it's probably better to keep those aspects separated, accomplishing them is separate stages of the work.
But I reckon (for having make that mistake myself several times) that em is too often mistaken for something sounding good, instead of something musical in itself.
end of rant
I dunno. You seem to be limiting it to people that make trance or whatever. Nowadays, the only fundamental architectural difference between an autechre song and the latest Top 40 hit by J-Lo is that the latter has vocals. The sound palette, writing, and recording processes are fundamentally the same, despite the fact that the latter seems to require a lot more people. (Hint: it doesn't, not really.)
That said, your basic point is sound: you have to be able to see both the forest (the song as a whole) and the trees (the technical construction of the song.) _My_ point is that if the forest is in good shape, individual trees don't make a whit of difference one way or another. The consumer is listening to a VBR MP3 on iPod earbuds, or in a car stereo where one of the speakers is hanging from the door by its wires. He doesn't know the difference between a Prophet 5 and Pro-53. He just likes a good hook.
-CR
Yeah, I agree with you. But my point is that lately almost no one is making electronic music anymore. I think the tecniques are so common ground that it's simply music with computers lately. Think about James Blake.. he makes cute music with an electronic twist, but it's by no means electronic music. That's more evident when you see that he use a band to perform live (or at least, he did on a radio broadcast from what I can see from youtube).
Just now appreciating the use of Stretta's album as an example in Chris' original post, on a couple levels:
"A Funneled Stone" is a case where the process was just as fundamental to the piece of art as the musical composition itself. It's good music to civilians and professional typists alike, but it's going to be doubly interesting for other musicians.
So the intended audience is just as important to the message as anything else.
The second level is that A Funneled Stone was created using a nice analog modular setup, one to be lusted for.
I recently became lusty myself and spent a few hours poking around Soundcloud to check out some modular synth tunes.... only thing was that is was hard to find any actual "songs". Maybe ninety percent of what I found were synth "demos".
Which is cool. It's just that the Synth Demo has become a sort of genre of its own, and so an example of when the message is mostly about the tool or the gear.
NUTRITIONAL YEAST
@Carlos0Serrano: "I recently became lusty myself and spent a few hours poking around Soundcloud to check out some modular synth tunes.... only thing was that is was hard to find any actual "songs". Maybe ninety percent of what I found were synth "demos". "
I think Stretta himself may have made that point when he created A Funneled Stone. And one reads little weenie comments on Gearslutz (etc) a lot to the effect that modulars aren't capable of making "real music" pretty often.
Modular synth demos are even less "demos" than "accidents" and "noodles," it's just that SC doesn't have those as a category when posting, so demo gets the defacto. I know that in my own output in said Cloud (dance-robot-dance) I do more what Chris described earlier. Plug it in, turn it on, poke it til it does something interesting. And hopefully I was recording when that happened.
I believe the challenge is to have something interesting happen for a long enough time that it feels somewhat like a performance. There seems to be a real sense of pride among the modular crowd when something "interesting" can be sent into the world where nothing had to be edited.
Which gets to the gear. I do most of my recording when I'm playing with some new module thingy and figuring the thing out. A thing about the modular is that it kind of demands that new toys regularly come and unfortunately go. One thing can easily be replaced by another. In the time I've been playing with a modular, not a single new thing has ever made my "demos" better. Spending a week reading about gain-staging and db levels made my stuff better. Learning the guitar and chord theory makes it better. Listening to rhythms while I walk the dog and taking that into the studio makes it better. The toys sure do make it all more fun though.
@MrBiggs: True! Man don't get me wrong - if I had that kind of Typewriter I'd sure as hell be posting up noodle after noodle.
The thing about those modular pieces are that they are actually listenable, especially for the enthusiast. Mostly cuz they just usually sound fucking GOOD.
My main point was that the modular is an instrument that for many reasons is itself part of the art piece. I guess if we all just had only pianos we would spend a few hours a week posting up different demos of plucking and muting techniques, etc. , and a full composition every now and then.
All depends on the audience.
@MrBiggs one more time:
Ok - just checked your SC and your blog; now I hear you.
I think I was imposing an expectation that there be "songs" when what you guys (modular crowd) are doing with SC is simply trading experiments and ideas. Really a group of builders as much as musicians.
My comment upon rereading reminds me of picking up a guitar at a party and jamming out a little bit, and some drunk guy comes up, "Dude! Play somethin'!" As in, a Led Zeppelin song. Ha! Didn't mean to be that guy.
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