https://www.npr.org/sections/monitormix ... ns_th.html

Excerpt:


The extremes of this have definitely been felt to the extremes in metal, where there are intentionally sloppy niches, and to the other extreme, intensely mechanized and recordings. Many bands with a full lineup often record separately. Drums are often triggered, and over the last 20 years, many bands have also used session drummers (or even band members) much like breathing drum machines to pound out blast beats, and the repetitive nature of blast beats often leaves little room for the human element. What might be one rhythm guitar in a live setting will rarely be less than four tracks on a recording. Modern production has changed how bands function, and it has changed music quite a bit.

Many of metal's classics are imperfect recordings, especially more extreme metal bands, where the peculiarities of both performance and recording shaped distinct bands. On the other extreme, many newer bands have utilized these new aesthetics to make music more extreme in different ways.

while I agree with the point(s) made 102%, you can't easily sell an argument like that to metalheads, based on the beatles, james brown and (cringe) the mamas and papas as examples metal is a whole different story. you can get away with "a wreck of a keyboard (or even guitar) solo", but not the anything-goes attitude of "rain"...

Rock is compromised of far more carefully selected notes than mistakes. Those listed by the author were very select examples.

The biggest problem today is lack of money in making music. There are many others though, but this article addresses maybe #100.

NPR: now there's a place I go when I want to better understand rock-n-roll music. Their musical observations are as astute as their political ones.

I completely agree with the article and think the points can translate to metal, maybe even more so considering metal is faster and more extreme. imo, some of these modern recording techniques are just unnecessary and remove the authenticity of a recording, making the music sound fake. These recordings are supposed to represent a band playing their songs, and not robots playing them, right? Some people are tighter players than others, but as a listener I would rather listen to an authentic recording. What really matters is the melody and I would honestly listen to and enjoy the sloppiest most awful authentically recorded music if it had a good melody.

I agree with the sentiment in the article. I like a lot of modern bands, but some others, particularly new traditional metal, tend to sound too calculated, polished and pieced together - it sounds like the band members just listened to their favorite 80s bands on repeat and nothing else older to actually understand writing songs. It just doesn't seem to come together with the same feel or energy I guess - it sounds more like they were consciously posturing and trying to sound like something, rather than playing from the heart so to speak. I'm not a musician and wouldn't know what notes are "wrong" or anything though. It's just how the writing sounds and how it comes across to me. I feel like you should appreciate music from all decades and try to really understand compelling songs - otherwise you get a narrower scope and it won't be as entertaining.

It's not so much the mistakes, but, as Richie Blackmore said in some interviews, "searching for notes".

Richie's epic live solos from the 70s may contain a bar or two of exploration, sometimes yielding nothing, sometimes yielding nothing short of genius, mixed with one or two bars of "by the book" (closer to the album) lines.. he would allow the space for this to happen. Solos weren't perfect. It wasn't 100% improvisation either; as I said, he would sometimes fall back on familar parts. Hendrix also did this.. you could hear some lines where he would be searching for the perfect note. No two solos are the same when you hear Purple live in Graz or in Paris a few days apart in 1975, or the Live in Japan nights (of which Made in Japan was compiled).

This process was going on in the studio, during rehearsals as well.. and of course, the album version was somewhat polished, but the process lead to something unique which was not doctored according to some original design.

I agree with what Empyreal said above, and here is what I think: In the past, the groundbreaking bands of whatever genre you think of- 80's thrash, 90's black metal, early death metal (circa 86-89) would draw upon influences of what came before, often completely outside their genre. Early thrash metal was influenced by Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and partly by punk/hardcore. Early death metal was influenced by Venom, Celtic Frost, and early thrash; early black metal by Venom and Bathory, and so on.

I realize I may be oversimplifying but this is the point: Many modern thrash, death, and black metal bands are only influenced by earlier generations of thrash, death, and black metal (etc.) bands. And thus, they have a much harder time avoiding the pitfall of simply sounding like a 3rd rate re-hash of those bands. Its not fresh or original, and its harder to get excited by hearing the same riffs, same kind of songs done over and over.

I think that one thing that DOES help a newer band from a long-established genre really make a good impression is having a raw, unfiltered organic sound. Not necessarily under-produced or poorly produced, but rather, it captures the feel of you standing in a small club by the front of the stage hearing a band flailing away. Modern productions do tend to sanitize things too much.

That unfiltered organic sound is a product of bands who play together, which gets at the main point here. It isn't even mistakes, but perceived imperfections and the human element of playing. A skilled band writing songs together can bounce an idea back and forth countless times in a matter of minutes. The nuance of phasing and timing can change in an instant when a few musicians hear it and play it a little bit differently.

The nice thing about electric guitar is that once you reach a certain level of skill, it's almost impossible to sound bad. Even if you hit the "wrong" note, you just slide one fret up or down, and if you do it fast, it doesn't sound like a mistake.

Yeah exactly. A band that listened to a lot of music and drew on all of it will be more impressive than one that just listened to the same few bands exactly like their own sound. But it's more difficult now because there are more bands in general and it's easier to fall into a trap of being sectioned off by genre and not branching out more.

Nostalgia and the endless need for novelty come into it too. Mamas & Papas, James Brown, Beatles, all good still in small amounts (actually not sure if I remember M&P PR confuse them with Middle ofthe Road now) also tired and old, mistakes or not, I'll take a new (un)polished tech death blastfest over them most days.

Might as well say that music dies when recorded and it only ever should be heard live and improvised.

Being able to fix mistakes is a gift to music production, but snapping everything to a grid and paint-brushing guitar notes is absolute cancer, as is indiscriminate auto-tuning and squashing dynamic ranges for radio standards on anything. It's not all good or all bad,

As a musician, one of the biggest challenges of proper recording is determining the difference between a bad take and a "good enough" take. Almost all of us are serious perfectionists and I can guarantee that the musicians in every example listed in that article all kick themselves every time they think of those specific mistakes. That's not even going into the mistakes that we beat ourselves up over that nobody but us will even notice, not even our bandmates. Most of us are trying to make the best possible representation of our work, knowing well that we'll likely never be satisfied.

Also gonna second Warty on the endless need for novelty. Nothing is ever allowed to just be good anymore; everything has to have some kind of statement or be 100% unique for it to be acknowledged beyond particular niches.

I mentioned this in another thread, but the recent Rivers of Nihil album is a great example of this. It's so perfectly recorded, with every single sound aligned, processed, and shoved into its little hole that the music loses all sense of humanity. Every drum hit is the same volume, every note is tweaked to perfection. And even if that wasn't the case, everything is so covered in effects that you wouldn't notice mistakes anyway. That's obviously exactly what they're going for, but to me it's essentially the same as electronic music. They could recreate the entire thing without any humans and it wouldn't sound that different.

I want the music I listen to to have elements of humanity behind it. Music should make you say "wow this riff makes me feel something" and not "wow that it technically proficient and perfectly timed."

This is something that's especially important in the sound of 70s rock, to my ears - more than just the mistakes of the musicians, the limits of the equipment of the time were essential in defining the sound of bands like Budgie, Montrose, and early Riot. Modern equipment fundamentally cannot reproduce those sounds; it was the sound of the band pushing right to the limit of what their hardware could actually do.

Yep. Most modern "Andy Sneap" metal and pro-tooled cut and paste recordings just all blur together. The music rarely breathes. Its usually very flat sounding. Why has music sounded worse as time has gone by with more studio tricks? Instead of amazing recordings we got the Loudness War. Even great bands fell victim to this, Maiden, Rush, etc. Why does Clockwork Angles, as good as a record as it is, sound so lacking compared to A Farewell to Kings? I know some people like it and that's fine, but most of it just sounds like shit to me.

I somewhat agree with the article, but it really depends on what kind of sound the band wants. I think it makes sense that technical death metal band would want to record to perfection, however a doom metal band may not. I think there is a lot of value in both.

Editing a tech death album to perfection kills what is potentially the most important thing about the band, which is the musicians individual performances. It's a style pioneered by many of the most skilled musicians of the style, and their playing is great to hear in its natural form. The edited and sampled tech death of the ProTools era is homogenous and often unlistenable because it doesn't capture this essential element of the style.

What you said also applies to movies imo. Why does the theatrical release of Star Wars capture the imagination so well with its actual physical sets as opposed to the new ones which were just eye candy to me? I just got through watching T2 Judgement Day on AMC and to this day the effects in that one are infinitely more convincing to me than any of the other installments released since. Conan the Barbarian (the 1982 one) was on also and maybe a few of the effects were dated, but overall it remains a beautiful film with fantastic, elaborate vistas. When the crowd was going to see Thulsa Doom, it was an actual crowd of people. These days they would have CGI'd the extras and it would have looked like a video game.

The last couple of seasons of Game of Thrones has been marred by this as well. All of those "classic" major battle episodes are my least favorite ones. I understand they had to incorporate the dragons and all, but it is still just too much. It's cartoonish now. The first season was very low on the special effects and it is still undoubtedly the best one.