Recording ethics: Is all fair in "fixing it in the mix?"

[MIDI Life Crisis]

As a performer (as I know many of you are) all I can say is it is MUCH more rewarding to play most of the right notes in realtime. Recordings are wonderful, but I think they can be somewhat over rated and somewhat over valued. But that's just the "old world" in me talking.

[Phil O]

I hear you MLC. I think some of the best musical moments I've had were when I was with an original band. We performed the music of a singer songwriter in the band who had a very open mind. All the players had lots of freedom to express themselves and contribute to the music. This fellow was a good writer both musically and lyrically and performing his music was a joy.

But I think it gets back to the comments someone made a while back about performing and recording being two different forms of expression. Oh wait, that was you.

Phil

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Two different forms of expression, but when you have a practitioner of BOTH in one person and they try to apply the esthetics of one to the other, you have a quandary such as what we have here. To be or not to be? That truly is the question here.

Trying to make a perfect recording of a performance is like trying to make a perfect picture. Art is not about perfection, it is about averages.

On the average, get the performance right and you're good.

Get it near perfect every time and you're great.

Get it perfect every time and you're boring.

Sell it with all it's imperfections and you're a genius.

[crduval]

I have come full circle on this topic over the course of my musical career. I used to be a rather rigid purist - I refused to have my band record something that we couldn't reproduce live, we'd do takes until we got it right, etc. You weren't a "real musician" otherwise.

Then suddenly we found ourselves in the digital world. I remember doing a gig with a band that I had heard of, but never actually heard. Being somewhat competitive, I hung around to hear the opening band's sound check. At the time we were doing some very heavy music with these dense vocal harmonies that we practiced endlessly to get them right. The opening band's soundman said "let's check backup vocals", and to my surprise the keyboard player walked up not to a mic, but to his sampler, and there were these huge nice b/u vocals, just like that! I was actually offended and angry! We worked our tails off and these guys just sampled their demo vocals and played to a click?? What the heck?! Of course they sounded great!

Eventually I started thinking that the goal of the studio is to represent the vision of the artists, which really goes beyond the musician(s) to include the engineer and producer. You are there to take that music and make it all that it can be within your budget constraints. That recording will represent you all for as long as it lasts, which now with the cloud will be forever.

Shooshie asks if its right to improve a recorded performance, I think it's kind of a responsibility to do so, assuming that changes are consistent with the vision of the project. As far as whether in his role as engineer he now becomes a performer, well, that line is completely blurred in the pop world, and I would submit that even in the classical world, the engineer's choice of mics, recording techniques and mixing decisions constitute a performance that produces a unique result - had another engineer done the same session, it would not have sounded the same after all.

As to the question of acknowledgement as a performer for a coveted award, I have no answer. The award criteria for performance does not really reflect how the work is done in this day and age. I suppose it would depend on the extent of the fixes and improvements, and whether they were done behind the scenes or with the producer's knowledge and agreement (then you'd hope the producer would acknowledge the contribution).

You could argue that an award for outstanding engineering is at least in part won as a result of recording good performances. I mean, would a stunningly great sounding record of crappy music ever win a Grammy?! Oh. Err... Wait... Hmmm...

Shooshie, at least you will know the true value of your contribution and you will be associated with the award (assuming it is given).


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Well the Grammys ARE about recording, aren't they? So yeah, make the recording as good as possible.

[Shooshie]

I don't think it makes you a co-performer any more than a doctor delivering a baby makes him a co-parent.

It's not a medical procedure or a moral dilemma. You're providing a service for a client. If they want to cheat, that's their problem, not yours (unless you are the producer).

Well, while I do agree with your point of view here, I don't think the doctor analogy works. When you're listening to these recordings, sometimes the player you are hearing is me. Indeed, I performed those bits, even if they are short bits. Chords, short melodic phrases, notes… I'm playing them. Because they constitute less than .1% of the total, I don't think it's worth mentioning that I played them. But if you had a cymbal player in there who played one big crash, even though it's only .01% of the notes (one note in 10,000), you'd give that player album credits. Are my parts as important as the cymbal player's? Take them out and you'd sure experience some big holes in the music, which may originally have been filled with clashing wrong notes.

Anyway, analogies aside, I don't think it matters. It would matter if some engineer actually wanted to be included in the album credits as a performer on all the instruments. But the real focus of this thread was to be whether the mere existence of my playing on these tracks constitutes any kind of threat to the official sanction by judges, critics, or listeners. Will any of these, were they to find out, disqualify the recording or call it a fake?

Not that they're going to find out. I will not put my name on the performing credits, of course. But still, unlike your doc delivering a baby, I actually made some of that baby. …er… recording.

Shoosh

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Ah, credit! Minor detail! When you are performing, are you are performing someone else's material? If so, then your work is most likely a "work-made-for-hire" and as such belongs to the person paying you to record. If they don't know, then you're infringing their work! If they do know, they are allowing you to do so, but they own it. You are not (I assume) being hired to actually perform or score but for the most part, record and edit, and the editing process for you involves performance of the material as intended by the artist.

It's a slippery slope, for sure. Every so often I do compilation soundtracks for theater or dance and they need a special cue. A fanfare, scary or sci-fi stinger, or they need to "smooth over" an ending or transition. I just write the cue and forget it.

William Ackerman tells a story of a guitar piece he wrote and that he thought he stole from John Fahey. He went to John and played it for him. Fahey's response was allegedly: Will, you can have it.

Esthetics aside, I say "let 'em have it" and move on, just be sure to set your price high enough to get what you need to feel better about yourself afterwards. ;$

[Shooshie]

I have come full circle on this topic over the course of my musical career. I used to be a rather rigid purist - I refused to have my band record something that we couldn't reproduce live, we'd do takes until we got it right, etc. You weren't a "real musician" otherwise.
[…]

Shooshie asks if its right to improve a recorded performance, I think it's kind of a responsibility to do so, assuming that changes are consistent with the vision of the project. As far as whether in his role as engineer he now becomes a performer, well, that line is completely blurred in the pop world, and I would submit that even in the classical world, the engineer's choice of mics, recording techniques and mixing decisions constitute a performance that produces a unique result - had another engineer done the same session, it would not have sounded the same after all.

You're right there with me on this. I think there are two kinds of recordings:
1) Live recording which is a "you were there" record of what happened at that concert. This is more like forensic evidence. "A performance was committed here on that night. This is the story of that performance." A good example that comes to mind is Simon & Garfunkel reunited in Central Park. It's been years since Art Garfunkel sang any of those songs with Paul Simon. Sometimes you hear those beautiful harmonies for which he was known. But often you hear that he forgot the words, and for many entire songs he was in unison with Simon. Those harmonies he used to create? Lost from his memory. He can only sing along like any of us sitting with Paul Simon around a campfire. And you hear Simon laughing, and the two of them cutting up as this poorly rehearsed reunion takes place, and Garfunkel is forgiven over and over for not remembering his old part. (anyone who tries to sing Garfunkel's old parts knows that they were not at all easy)

2) A studio recording (where "studio" implies not the location but the multi-track process) is a sonic sculpture of a listening experience for which you hope that people will pay money and enjoy listening to it. It doesn't matter if you summon wizards from the Xth dimension to come in and magically transform the whole mix, your obligation is to package and sell this product that is as close as possible to the composer's and performer's expectations, but also to the listener's expectations. Galway's Moto Perpetuo by Paganini was a shameless example of splicing the music to make it better. It's not perpetual motion if you stop for a breath now and then. Galway had to stop to breathe. His engineers spliced out the breaths, and the listener got an exciting performance out of the deal. Only the flute students went around perplexed and concerned about whether Jimmy G. (now SIR Jimmy G) had raised the bar, and whether they'd now be required to circular breathe 5 minute pieces. I learned to circular breathe so that it was second nature. Why take the chance of NOT learning that, when obviously it was quite useful? But Sir Jimmy G put out a fantastic recording that made the world gasp, and like the blonde whose hair doesn't seem to age, he would not answer the question "does he? or doesn't he? …only his engineer knows for sure," but passed it to his engineers to answer.

It seems that there is a strong consensus of agreement in our forum that as engineers our responsibility to the music comes first, and that there are no rules governing what we can or cannot do to embrace that responsibility. Just do everything you can think of and pull off without showing any of the seams where you sewed it together. When your seams show, you're violating that responsibility, but as long as there is no "you" in that recording — in other words, as long as it's 100% believable that the players on the album cover could have done all that — then you are not crossing any ethical lines in a studio recording.

I wonder what Queen's fans thought the first time they heard Freddie Mercury perform Bohemian Rhapsody live? If they expected him to sprout 20 heads and sing all those parts he put into the studio recording of it, they probably walked away disappointed. But if they celebrated that they were listening to the genius who made that recording, and that he was singing his live version now, then they were happy groupies.

A more apt comparison, actually, is George Martin's playing on Beatle's songs. It would be hard to document every time a sound came from Sir George Martin, and not from Sirs Beatles. He really was the 5th Beatle, but the screaming teeny boppers didn't care about him. "You did WHAT? Well can you just shut up and tell me which room Paul and Ringo are in?"

Someday, maybe an aging violinist will walk into a studio, pull out her fiddle and play a scale in D minor, then pack it up and leave. The engineer will sample that scale and all her bow arm tendencies, hit "process" in Melodyne version 128.03, and then option-paste the result onto a recording of Heifetz playing the D-minor Chaconne. The product will go directly into iTunes Music Store as "Hillary Hahn plays the Chaconne in D-möll. The engineer will come to this forum, now run by James Steele's great grandchildren, and ask "did I cross a line?"



Shooshie

[MIDI Life Crisis]

So all I need to learn is how to play each of the 88 notes and you can take it from there!

There's more truth to that than meets the eye. A late, great friend of mine used to arrange TV music for Marvin Hamlish. He'd hand her 16 or 32 bars on a lead sheet and she'd have to turn it into a 30 minute TV special. She got paid well, but that's not too far off from your violinist with the D minor scale. However, I'd ask her to play some chromatics and maybe a few harmonics as well. Then it's off to the bungabunga room for some serious 'editing' (which is code).

[David Polich]

If you've done a good job on replacing or fixing parts, no one should
be able to tell the difference. As I said, they'll never know what "wasn't" there.

I have a rule of thumb - take your level of enthusiasm for what you did
and cut it by 50%, that will be the level of enthusiasm that the audience
expresses. So if you think something is a work of art, your audience will think it's "good". If you think it's "pretty good", your audience will
say it's "so-so". Remember, audiences are never as invested in your product
as you are. Mostly, for them, it's just a few minutes of their time they
spent, then they move on.

I just mixed an album of downer rock for a band whose guitarist is a personal friend of mine. The drum tracks consisted of triggered kick, snare,
and tom samples (all of them terrible samples) and the overheads were
recorded out-of-phase and for some reason the ride cymbal was almost nonexistent, but the right crash was insanely loud. No hi-hat track at all.
I ended up replacing all the hats and cymbals with BFD, that I recorded as
MIDI and then audio, and tossed out the overheads after that. I used Drumagog5 to retrigger better samples on the kick, snare, and tom tracks.
It was a lot of work, but in the end the drummer thought it was all him,
and loved the "awesome job on the drums".

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I have a rule of thumb - take your level of enthusiasm for what you did
and cut it by 50%, that will be the level of enthusiasm that the audience
expresses. So if you think something is a work of art, your audience will think it's "good". If you think it's "pretty good", your audience will
say it's "so-so". Remember, audiences are never as invested in your product
as you are. Mostly, for them, it's just a few minutes of their time they
spent, then they move on.

Can I borrow that? Truth! So rare these days.

[Shooshie]

If you've done a good job on replacing or fixing parts, no one should
be able to tell the difference. As I said, they'll never know what "wasn't" there.

I have a rule of thumb - take your level of enthusiasm for what you did
and cut it by 50%, that will be the level of enthusiasm that the audience
expresses. So if you think something is a work of art, your audience will think it's "good". If you think it's "pretty good", your audience will
say it's "so-so". Remember, audiences are never as invested in your product
as you are. Mostly, for them, it's just a few minutes of their time they
spent, then they move on.

True for almost all people. But for classical music students, if it's a definitive recording, they will pore over it for days, weeks, or even years as they learn to do what the master in the recording did. It's for them that I "fix the mix." They're the ones who would soon be saying "oh that recording? It sucks. You should hear all the mistakes they were making!" Hey, I was once one of those kids. After I'd learned to play without those mistakes, I realized that it never was about those things. But you'll never convince those students that.

Shooshie

[Prime Mover]

Not sure that's always true. We're often our own worst critic. Some recording that we may not be proud of (due to fiddly engineering bits), the audience could just as easy overlook and think is brilliant. I think the problem is, it's really hard to second-guess an audience. I mean, the better you think it is, probably the more likely the audience will also think it's better, but one can never be sure.

Speaking of audience, on the flipside, as much as us engineers feel "all bets are off" in the studio, most civilians I've talked to seem to be horrified by what goes on in the studio. Our audience knows so little, many of them think the band came in, did one take, got it perfect, and packed up. There are people who think that take splicing is something only done by "bad musicians". If they really knew what goes on, even on their favorite records, their hearts would break. I mean, we talk of take splicing as an intrinsic part of the process, not even worth a second thought. Yet our audience often sets the "cheating" bar to that height. What would they think about pitch correction, beat splicing, MIDI-re-recording, drum replacement... I mean, from an outside viewpoint, what we are doing to these tracks is an abomination. But the reality is, musicians and engineers are aiming for the music, not the image. I really believe that is the correct path. People who are let down by simple recording processes are missing the point of the recording... it's not about creating hero worship, it's about creating beautiful sound. If they're offended by what we do in the studio, it's their own damn fault for trying to turn music into something that it isn't.

Composers, musicians, engineers, producers... we're all just slaves to the sound.

[HCMarkus]

Following up on Phil's "Human VI" comment, the thing that your friend did really right was allow you to perform phrases that were related to the song he was producing.

As a keyboardist, I like to play my parts well, all the way through a song in one take if possible. Maybe fix a few clinkers here and there, but retain the continuity and feel of my performance.

But when I hire in guitarists, I need to get the most bang for my buck. After doing as many passes as are required to capture what I think the song needs, I have 'em go crazy, and ask them express their take on the tune without constraint or second guessing from me. Maybe more importantly, I will often let them go crazy BEFORE we do the passes I think we need.

I make sure to get Work For Hire Agremeents, too.

The I edit it all into submission. But what do I have to work with? A lot more than individual sampled notes. I have chunks of inspiration, played with the feel of my production, not someone elses' leftovers I have to conform to or try to make do.

[Prime Mover]

HC, I find that having them "go wild" after we get the straight-ahead stuff rarely works. Usually they're so focused and burned out trying to achieve perfection that there's not much right-brain activity going on. Once in a while, you have one of those really inspired sessions where the musicians just nail it early, and you can just cut loose. I tend to like doing the "go wild" takes at the beginning, because it get's them all jazzed up for the rest of the session.

BTW: As a keyboard player, I'm kind of the opposite of you. I try to play something straight through, but I always find myself going back and micro-recording sessions. The longer I record, the pickier I get, and the smaller and more detailed my cuts are. Some say that this creates a drain in energy, and yes, it's EXHAUSTING, but I've always come out the other end very proud of the results.

These are some things I could probably do to work on. I'm always worried that I'm over-stressing the musicians. I always come into a session with a very focused vision, and I can imagine it might be stifling. Coming from a progrock background, I also like a lot of complexity and drama in the performance, so I'm usually faced with trying to get musicians to push their technical limits, and never play the same thing the same way twice. Drummers probably hate me, because so many of them are focused on "groove and simmer", and I'm always trying to get them to keep things shifting.

I find that for the most grooving tracks I know, the rhythm section is never just coasting. Even if they're not actually changing the rhythm, there are shifts in energy, in intensity that really make the track come alive. I think many drummers view themselves as a strictly utilitarian requirements for the music. But to me, drums are one of the most musical, most expressive parts of the mix.