On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 12:25:01PM -0400, Ricardus Vincente wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-06-10 at 10:41 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
>
>
> >
> > i can't claim to have heard a *lot* of your vocal performances dave,
> > but it seems to me that you're getting better and better, or at least
> > were having a very good day with this one. minor production issues
> > aside, really nice.
>
> What if there ARE no production issues, and everything you're hearing
> was intended? Then my friends, it's called ART.
>
So true.
Recently a friend attempted to lure me out of musical retirement by asking me to help mix a record. (It was kind of fun, but, alas, I've lost my taste for the detail work, like cutting and tweezing and trimming individual syllables out of vocal tracks, etc).
Apparently the trend nowadays in indie pop is to drown entire mixes in reverb (and use old analog tape, so the mix sounds like you're hearing it through thick wall of gauze).
On sparse mixes I like ambience, or if the song's feel calls for it, but if there's a lot going on in the mix, I tend to reduce the reverb to asymptotically approaching zero. That was not what the guy wanted, so I don't think I'll be doing much mixing for anyone.
Analog fetishism, on the other hand, has been discussed here at length many times, and I don't intend to rehash it. However, after recently listening to Wish You Were Here, I was struck with how much time, work, and money the Abbey Road/EMI engineers put into making analog tape sound as clear back as digital can get now-- even the cheapest consumer digial gear today can get that clean today.
In matters of art and taste, one can't really argue.
-ken