HeyPapaLegend Studios

Everyone’s eating organic foods these days, asking for ‘free-range’ this and ‘organic’ that.  I think its great, but what about organic music?  Is nobody thinking to ask for their music to be more organic?  Well I am…

When I look at what music is popular these days I wonder about the state of mind of the general population.  Everybody seems to be digging on synthetic grooves and virtual instruments.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I love electronic music.  I think as a genre or group of genres it has a whole lot of merits and appeals to a certain area of the brain that, well, for want of a better turn of phrase…likes to shake tail…

What I’m talking about is music created on live instruments played by real people and then destroyed at some point along the line.  It doesn’t matter whether its a sound engineer that is ‘edit crazy’ or a mastering engineer who squashes all the dynamics out of a track in order to make it pop.  The result is the same.  The people are taken out of the music and the machines are put in.

Music by its very nature is a fluid thing.  It can be broken down, analyzed and divided into segments which can be seen to have mathematical elements such as beat subdivisions and chords built on the harmonic series; but you listen to a song that you love and that’s when maths falls dramatically short of the mark.

I digress though…

What I’m really trying to say is that I would like to see a return to the days when music was recorded for the energy and passion it contained.  Technology has allowed musicians to become lazy, why?  Well, we’ll just fix it in the mix, that’s why.  But can you add emotion in the mix?  Certainly to an extent, but most of it needs to come from the performance.  This is where I have ENORMOUS amounts of respect for guys like Jack White that have scoffed at the modern way of doing things and have kept it real and ‘organic’, recording music with little or no overdubs and using a sound that is so raw that it cuts through all the bullshit that we hear today.

The virtual instruments that one can buy these days are so good that it is getting cheaper and cheaper to compose big music works.  Where before you had to hire an orchestra, now all you need is the software and a keyboard.  A little know-how would also be good, but so many of the ‘composers’ out there making money, whether its from commercials or producing artists, don’t actually know what they’re doing.

The resulting sound?  Plastic.

Yes, the sounds are sampled phenomenally well.  You can create an orchestra that really sounds close to the real thing, but the fact of the matter is that you cannot beat the emotion felt when you have a real violinist or a real drummer playing the music the way they feel it.

The same goes for re-sampling live instruments.  So many people replace snares and kick drums after the recording when they’re mixing and for some styles of music you can get away with this, but you have to ask yourself…what would drummer say?  Maybe he hit a few of those snares in a subtly different way, maybe he did this because that’s the way he was feeling it?  Or maybe he miss-hit the snare because he was so into the music that his technique slipped just that little bit.  Do we now want to get rid of that?  Or is that maybe just part of the magic?

Either way, its human.

Its organic.

Its making music.