music & technology - a retrospective
TRANSCRIPT
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Music & Technology
The music industry has always evolved with a close relationship to technology.
The following article is a list of five of the most impactful technicalinnovations to the studio, who was responsible, and how it has changed the way
we listen to music. This isn't meant to be an analysis of any specific genre, nor
is it about exposing certain people to new bands. It's a little of something for
everyone. Part history, part science, and part silly, the article you're going to
read isn't as deep as some cuts go, but is a very relevant cross section of the
history behind music, supported with albums that have broken down barriers
and change the way sound goes from the studio to your ears.
#1 Multitrack Recording
Invention: 1922 by Charles Hoxie
Function: Multitrack Recording is the practice of recording sound on different
tracks from different sources before they are combined to the entire track.
Uses: Making recordings sound like something more than a bunch of people
yelling at a microphone; allowing multiple tracks to be played simultaneously
but recorded separately to break down the recording process; keeping the
recording industry from dying out or staying on wax cylinders until the 80s.
History: The music industry was very different back in the 20s and 30s. The
shift from phonograph cylinders to vinyl records was nearly complete, but the
recording process hadn't been updated since microphones. A company known
as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (you only know them because them
make sticky pieces of yellow paper, 3M) started producing a magnetic tape that
would revolutionize the way music was recorded. Couple that magnetic tape
with Ampex, an electronics company that found a way to record on three ofthese pieces of tape and sync them together, and you have the first multitrack
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recording.
Multitrack recording is the reason albums don't sound like live music without a
crowd. The ability to have instruments split across different tracks, the ability
to split singing from playing, and the ability to recording multiple takes of thesame section all come from having multitrack recording. It legitimately
revolutionized the way music was produced, and up until the switch to digital
recording, multitrack magnetic tape was the industry standard in studios around
the world.
Recommended Listening:
The Ronettes
Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica (1964)
Baroque Pop
Phil Spector is best known for mutilating "Let It Be" before its release in 1970
(or being a psychotic murderer if you're feeling kinky). In the early 60s
however, he was the preeminent pop music producer. The Fabulous Ronettes is
one of the best examples of Spector's wizardry at engineering. The albumsizzles with class, and you can't help but imagine the image of American
families singing along to "Be My Baby" in their Plymouth Belvedere. Coming
straight out of the era of the Beach Boys, albums like these, with the lead
vocals buried in a warm syrupy harmony of backing vocals/instrumentation, sit
in a nice cozy nook of nostalgia in the back of our minds along with fast food
drive-ins and tailfins that could slice a grapefruit.
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Mike Oldfield
Tubular Bells (1973)Prog/Ambient
What Mike Oldfield did with Tubular Bells is almost as pioneering as
multitracking itself. Not only did this album single handedly launch Virgin
Records, it was one of the first ambient/minimalist compositions marketed to a
mainstream audience. Tubular Bells is a mountain of overdubs, recorded on a
16 track recorder at a time when very little overdubbing was used. Perhaps the
best way to describe it is simply a tornado of various session instruments all
entering and exiting at different times to create a varied landscape with
remarkably uniform texture. It's as if someone took all the instruments they
could find in a studio and used the Photoshop smudge tool on them so they all
blended together. The result is as terrifying as it is unique.
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#2 Doubletracking
Invention: Late 50s
Function: Analog doubletracking is done by a recording the same portion of a
track twice and mixing them to play simultaneously. Automatic doubletracking
creates the effect of that process through manipulation of the recorded track.
Uses: Creating vocal depth without needing a friend who can also sing,
establishing the strong vocal presence that has since dominated popular music,
ripping off Beatles fans who buy the plug-ins for their DAWs.
History: At a time when most session recordings were simply a few musicians
standing in a studio and playing at a microphone, there was a strong desire to
add more density to your sound. This helped many bands get out of the cellar
with heavy vocal harmonies that produced the early rock and roll sound and
helped them set themselves apart from other bands. The alternative to finding a
few new band mates was an appeal to technology in the form of
doubletracking. Rather than having a few people sing a melody, you could
simply sing it yourself twice and then sync them together to make a broad
chorus-like sound, without all the downsides of extra egos and pretention.
Perhaps the most important innovation to come out from doubletracking wasthe idea to automate it. Technological doubletracking led to the heavy rock/pop
of the 60s and 70s that was saturated with the clamor of echoing vocals and
instruments. Though some claim doubletracking is the best way to make it
sound like you record in a metal box, it has been a favorite tool in the oeuvre
of many great musician (including some four young troublemakers from
Britain). And even with the more artificial sound of mechanized
doubletracking, it has been used even up to the present day for its convenience
and usefulness. Butch Vig is famous for getting Kurt Cobain to doubletrack for
Nevermindby telling him John Lennon did it. Ten or so million copies later,
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it's a pretty safe bet that most listeners still love the sound of doubletracking.
Recommended Listening:
Buddy Holly
Buddy Holly (1958)
Rock and Roll
For the short time Buddy Holly made music, he made it count. The second to
last album recorded before his death is one of the first examples of
doubletracking. Listening to the guitar sizzle on the opening of Words of Lovebefore fading into the warm of hum on doubletracked vocals was the sound
that would set the tone for the next generation of rock musicians. He recorded
prolifically for the short time he was alive, dying in a plane crash in 1959.
Perhaps more enduring that his music was the influence he had on so many acts
of the 60s with his sound, which spilled into acts like The Beatles, Bob Dylan,
and the Rolling Stones.
The Beatles
Revolver(1966)
Rock
It's great to expose others to a band nobody's ever heard of, especially when
they're really bad and it compliments my self-righteous arrogance.
And now for something completely different.
The first album to make use of automatic doubletracking did so in a very
psychedelic fashion. Abbey Road's engineers used their creation to fill up dense
landscapes of sound by double tracking almost everything in the studio.
However, reviewing a classic album would just be one more drop in a bucket
of drool on the Beatles' front porch.
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#3 Sampling
Invention: 1970s New York City
Function: Sampling is the result of taking sound from another source (such as
another song) and mixing it into a different song. Often made up by illegal and
copyright protected music - Such as music torrents.
Uses: Including cool beats in your song if you're not good enough to make
them yourself; putting breaks of incoherent speech into music for absolutely no
reason; paying tribute to past influences while remixing their work and hoping
to God they won't sue you.
History: Sampling was unofficially the child of Clive Campbell, a Jamaican
born New Yorker. His rebellion against the nauseating disco tidal wave of the
70s was DJ-ing parties in New York. The movements of playing extended
breaks was the embryo of hip-hop music that was soon snowballing into much
larger forces than he could control. The sample, taking a clip from one source
and playing it in another, became the close companion of hip-hop since day
one. They grew up together and led an emerging rap genre into the late 20th
and later 21st century.
Unlike other innovations listed here, sampling wasn't something cradled in alab by eggheads in trench coats and later sold to the people. The sample was all
about the culture of the remix, and was a pure product of the people. Had it not
been for the massive excitement and energy derived from sampling it would
have died out on the streets. However, it was the next step in evolving music.
The sample is closely tied to remixing music, taking someone else's work and
making it original and artistic yourself. What the sampling did was open up
music to a lot of people who's creativity may not have been recorded or
remembered by future generations. History was given a spin in the mid 70s and
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it first hit the studio in the early 80s.
Recommended Listening:
Brian Eno and David Byrne
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981)
Experimental/Art Rock
Brian Eno has always been known for putting together some really weird stuff,
and this album is not an exception by any means. It is, however, one of the firstalbums to use heavy sampling, if not in typical manner. Instead of dropping
some classic funk or soul beats, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts relies on clips
from radio commentators, politicians, or people reciting the Qur'an to get his
clips. The album does excite the mystical and spiritual qualities that transcend a
simple musical experience, but can also fall back on its powerful instrumental
rhythms when called for to deliver a moving milestone of history for sampled
music.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel(1999)
Hip-Hop
Don't let the date fool you on this one. This compilation of tracks by
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Grandmaster Flash are of just as much historical importance as the previous
album. Some of the older tracks were recorded in the late seventies, before
Grandmaster Flash won real fame with "The Message", another of the included
songs. Flash may not have been the first to sample, just as Babe Ruth wasn't the
first to play baseball, but he made it gain all the exposure it needed to permeate
the mainstream eternally following his success in the early eighties. He is
lauded as a hero by those close to the origins of hip-hop, and is just as
important to the success of the genre as sampling itself. Like all great
visionaries, he sees his world and responds to it, changing it for the better.
#4 Digital Recording
Invention: 1975 by Soundstream Inc.
Function: Digital recording is the process of taking sound and transferring it
to a digital medium. The analog recording is saved digitally as a series of
numbers.
Uses: Massively reduces the cost of copying/distributing music; re-mastering
albums so that you can pay more money for music that doesn't sound much
different; digital piracy (yar!).
History: The switch from digital entirely changed the game. Again. The sameway multitrack recording took the music industry in its infancy and taught it
how to walk, digital recording took the industry and taught it karate. Sound
make the switch in the late 70s to a state where it was now entirely helpless
against an army or computers that could stack and process sound in new ways.
3M flew in to save the day yet again by making the process cheaper and
applicable to pop music by 1980 after it had spent its first five years as a
novelty sort of recording used only on large classical ensembles in a quality to
satiate the most critical audiophile.
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Digital recording shouldn't be thought of as an extension to analog recording
the same way a rifle shouldn't be thought of as an extension to a bow and
arrow. Digital opened the door for so many new technique it could be broken
up into four or five sections if you were picky enough. Digital waveforms give
the engineer more techniques that they can use to edit the sound after it has
been recorded. Digital recording also has the advantage of being much less
prone to distortion or "fuzziness" in sound that introduces more white noise. It
also began the counterpart of digital compression which led to formats like
mp3 and flac that we now use to consume almost all of our music, and
innovation that has born the digital music market (both legal and pirate). So
thank digital recording engineers as you download some more albums.
Recommended Listening:
Ry Cooder
Bop Till You Drop (1979)
Blues Rock
Ry Cooder had been recording for years by the time he made the first
commercial digitally recorded album. If anything is to be gained from hearing
him cover old R&B songs, it's how the industry approached the new industrywith baby steps. The first digital album is hollow, almost a mile long drop
backwards from all the room-filling harmonies and doubletracking that defined
the previous generation of music. That being said, what comes out of this
album is crisp and clean music that represented popular music's first teetering
steps through a door into the digital age and let's face it, Rome wasn't built in a
day.
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Herbie Hancock
Future Shock(1983)Funk/Hip-Hop
Herbie Hancock has always been on the cutting edge of music, and digital
music was no exception. With all the electronic MTV driven music of the early
80s building up steam, Hancock's Future Shockis one of the quintessential
pieces of defining that electronic sound. The heavy use of automation and
synthesizers make the album sparkle with a very bright tone throughout, and
the haunting funk of "Rockit" takes a good long look at the border of jazz and
hip-hop before deciding it doesn't like it and smashing down the barrier to a
new realm of sonic achievement. Not only does Herbie understand the new
medium, he embraces it and applying a character to it, strongly saying the
music of the electronic era won't be a whole bunch of a robotic beeps and
boops. The collective statement is one of the most enduring and
groundbreaking albums of its age.
#5 Auto-Tune
Invention: 1997 by Andy Hildebrand
Function: Auto-Tune is a processing algorithm that corrects pitch. It
essentially allows an off-key or out-of-tune performance to be corrected to
sound in tune.
Uses: Making people who can't sing on pitch sound much better; making a
profit for T-Pain; keeping Glee profitable.
History: The history of auto-tune is a bit of conundrum. One of the most
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important production techniques of the last decade, regardless of whether or
not you approve of it, was designed by an Exxon engineer who realized
musicians didn't know how to use calculus. Being a smart college educated
guy, he created a program that processes sound waves in a vocoder and
automatically corrected them to the required pitch. Not only was it developed
out of the music industry, but unlike most other technologies, it didn't so much
innovate our way of making music rather than make us lazier. So many people
have jumped on the bandwagon for pitch correction that it has now become a
cliche that pushes the bile to the tip of most music fans' tongues.
With all that being said, auto-tune is still something that has pushed music
forward. The initial reception and application of auto-tune was much less
overzealous than the type of lampooning that made Antoine Dodson famous,and created a string of popular hits in the late 90s and beyond that proved that
if not used out of laziness, auto-tune can add to your sound.
Recommended Listening:
Cher
Believe (1998)
Pop
Listen carefully to Cher belting out the high notes on "Believe". Now listen to
the massive waver on the low range in the verses. Did you hear that
unmistakable sound of pitch correction Mr music producer? If you listen to this
album for nothing else, know that "Believe" was the first song to use auto-tune.
So before you go around punching out rappers for ruining music by running
themselves through the box, know it's all Cher's fault for doing it first, only she
made pop music subject to the "Cher Effect" for the next few years following
the single's success.
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Daft Punk
Discovery (2001)
House
There actually was a period of time where auto-tune wasn't the flavor of the
month, a few years back. But who am I kidding? By this point in your life,
you've already heard "One More Time". In fact, you've probably heard it more
than one more time and probably have thumped three or four friends with no
musical diversity for playing it too much. But with an album already drippingwith heavy sampling and electronically processed sounds, auto-tune doesn't feel
like the awkward kid who showed up uninvited. Instead, it's surrounded by
disco and synth sounds where it not only blends but enhances the lyrics, all
without putting auto-tune in the spooky realm between singer and sampler that
alienates so many listeners.