NaBloPoMo: Let There Be Drums

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If creation is all in preparation then...I'm good at preparing.

The drums are synthesised, their EQ settings and variations set and defined, their reverb settings similarly set and defined, as are their decay parameters plus their individual and group compressor settings.

In other words, the drums are all taken care of. It might take 10 seconds to come up with a beat, but it takes a day to get the knobs twiddled the way you like them, so the beat doesn't sound like porridge. Unless you want a degree of porridginess, for a 'live sound' or you want a few instruments to make a thick sound a la Portishead.

Odd how painting buffs understand the difficulty in getting the right colour, but music buffs think the colours of sound come automatically and magically. I think most snobbery is inverted.

It takes months to make a pop song in the studio - and most of that doesn't involve the band. Sometimes it involves a session band re-recording the bits the band couldn't get right - which has been known to be most of the song - and sometimes it involves hundreds of minute adjustments to timing and frequency of samples.

The Beatles used to record their early albums live. They'd write the song, practice it a few times, go into the studio and press 'record'. Which leads to the question of whether or not their greatness (assuming you believe in the greatness of The Beatles) is in spite of, or because of, their early albums sounding like demo tapes.

I'm all for a little tasteful imperfection in music. That's why I set some of the parameters to vary semi-randomly but subtly within limits. A perfectly autotuned singer doesn't produce an inherently good or inherantly bad sound - just a perfectly autotuned one, and all the criticism of T-Pain for using autotune is a criticism of T-Pain's way of using autotune, as opposed to his use of it at all.

Except for those who criticise any use of autotune, who're just silly. And inverted snobs.

I don't personally get why The Beatles were (and are) loved so much. Probably because I was born in 1972 and not 1952. I'm sure most of those born in 1992 don't get what made the Eurythmics or the Pet Shop Boys exciting - or even interesting - in the 80s.

There were plenty of musos who objected to the 'cold, soulless' sounds of CDs when they first appeared. They genuinely thought hiss, crackle and distortion was part of the way James Brown should sound - as though his band came with hiss and crackle built in.

There were also those (including modern bands like The White Stripes) who thought analog tape gives a 'warm' sound. As indeed it does - by the interpolation of harmonic partials by saturation, soft knee compression, low frequency red noise in the background, and more extra frequencies created by wow and flutter in the drive mechanism.

The Brown fans were like those who see an old painting after cleaning and declare the dirty version they saw for decades was better - because that's the version they'd got used to. And the analog fans pretend not to know you can get the same effects, but usefully controllable, digitally.

Digital recreations of analog imperfections really are better than the real thing. Provided you're not in a nostalgic mood, of course. I used to work with warm analog tape. Most of the time, I wanted less of the warmth and more of the clarity.

So anyway, I have drums. Tomorrow...I shall have instruments.

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