Here are two somewhat complicated matters that I’m very interested in knowing your opinions about.
1) With all the improvements in technology, where almost anyone with little or no talent can sound like a million bucks after a lot of editing, I still think that recordings should sound like recordings and live should sound live. Is it responsible to keep blurring the frontier between recordings and live?
And,
2) How much editing is enough? It’s almost a rhetoric question, but, should we see music at the same level as photography, where many people use Photo Shop to death? Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate all that’s happening with technology and love copy and paste, but Shouldn’t we practice more and make sure we are able to play a lot easier the hard shit that we sometimes have to record?
As a musician I find most studio recording just too perfect. That degree of perfection just doesn’t exist in the real world. I think it ruins it for people who buy the recordings and then are disappointed when they hear their favourite artist make a small mistake, or a clam here and there, or be a bit out of tune. Then they go away with the opinion that the artist isn’t very good.
I see this a lot with my students. When they hear a clam the first think they say is :»That wasn’t very good…he/she chipped a couple of notes». To which I reply «What about the other 3,962 notes that were beautiful? Stop listening for mistakes and start listening to the music! »
When you go back and listen to the recordings of years ago when there was no cut and paste (this is true of classical, pop, jazz, whatever) you can hear some chips, some out-of-tuneness, (sometimes even wrong notes !!) but the performance is so strong and musical that the take was kept and released.
And in the end it should all be about the music…not perfection.
But that doesn’t mean we should stop practicing :-)