Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Ear Candy

As a former musician and composer (well, I still compose this and that but don’t play in any pro capacity any more) and furthermore being a recording engineer of sorts, it really struck me tonight just how important the engineering is.

The stereo “spread” . . . well, can I even mention it, being so out of touch these days? Because there’s 5.2 Surround Sound and even 7.0 Surround Sound. That involves seven speakers. I hail from a generation that worshipped quadrophonia and slightly before, eight-track players...

To me it’s always been stereo and headphones. Listening to the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” on my very nice Sony headphones yesterday was an exercise in horror. Even the stereo mix sounds like a pack of wolves — even though the music was fantastic. Goes always to the Beethoven+synthesizer+digital tape deck argument. How much better would they have done it if they’d had the technology . . . I contrasted it with Sgt. Pepper's and was blown away at the technological prowess, literally within a year of the Beach Boys' album, between the two. Sounds like the Beach Boys' crew were a bunch of rubes who'd had too many mint juleps.

But there are some people that seem to delight in producing the best possible stereo mix — literally a Smörgåsbord for your ears. For the iPod generation, this really should matter. This means that the vocals aren’t drowned by the horns or the drums are too loud, or everything is echoey . . . yes, minor concerns, but put yourself on headphones at volume 10 and your brain will quickly jump to hear the music mixed the finest way possible.

And if you know me you’ll know that the benchmark for all this is Steely Dan. And Donald Fagen’s “Morph the Cat” is just an incredible illustration of the finest audio production that can be provided for us poor audiophiles without a $45,000 Bang & Olufsen setup. It sounds like he’s personally in my head, and oh, he decided to bring along a few musicians, and could I maybe serve some St. Emilion for the dudes?

Oh, almost forgot. Yeah, I’m back in Montreal

4 comments:

  1. One of my fave production jobs is Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend." It's very ... I don't even know what the word is. Un-messed-with. Very live-sounding, like the musicians are in the room with you.

    Jane Siberry's "The Walking" is also quite something.

    Welcome back.

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  2. Jim,

    I've always been a big fan of headphones (ever since my fingernails were removed by the guy downstairs) so I have a particular interest in the Aural Spectrum that encompasses those twin encaissements. As a musician and amateur sound engineer, I always tried to make it seem for the listener that they were sitting in an amazing room listening to sounds that were treated with love.

    To the best of my limited ability . . .

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  3. Now that I come to mention it, however,upon repeated listening, Don's tunes sound about as appetizing as a heart surgeon's sterile field

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  4. Pet Sounds is actually a Mono recording. The stereo mix was done way after.

    The recent CD reissue has both versions back to back. I'll lend it to you at our GT if you want.

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