General Music Chat

There is a comparison, Mike. Page and Beck were both educated and rehearsed for the level they attained. They set their sites on something higher than the local scene from the beginning.

Yet there's no shame in putting a band together just for the fun of playing out with yer brothers locally. At least 90% of bands are that. Local venues don't owe them anything except what is agreed on in advance. To get past any goal in life you have to be faithful in the small things until you're given the opportunity for greater things, so just do your job as best you can and try to do it even better next time

Local bar owners don't respect someone who has no more ambition than every other band coming through the door, but even if you wow them with talent, they are going to prefer hiring the band who works to bring in audience and increase the bottom line at their venue. All business is about partnering with someone that makes your job easier and more profitable. Find a way to help them and they will hire you. Since there does seem to be less places to play, relationships become the penultimate goal to success at any level.

My theory about bands is that they are at their very best when they are young and hungry. So many outfits today have devolved into tribute bands, even though they are 'covering' their own material. Their followup stuff never matched their early hits.

Talbot

That's a great point, Michael. I've always thought that bands were best when they were fresh. If they are already good players who listen to each other, then rehearsal is over-rated. It's better to feel a sense of excitement with a few clunkers than to be perfectly stale in a live performance, imo.

Your other point is something I have been dealing with since I left the label. Now that I have the freedom to do whatever I want, I believe that my best music is always my last project. But when I go play people want to hear the songs they remember and liked from 2002-2008. I've done 5 albums since then that got progressively better (imo) and yet I started feeling like an oldies act because fans seemed to prefer the old wine.

I gotta tell ya, it was depressing to have the new music (which I'm very proud of) to be overlooked in favor of the previous decade, so I decided that was it....and went looking for a new challenge in film-making. But what I have found now is that it just took time for fans to adjust and grow with me. The new music is more popular now and I've reinvented myself just in time for the move to Asheville.

So the problem of bands who don't get any better (in my opinion) is that they stop growing, stop pushing their own boundaries, and start playing it safe. It is human nature to do just enough to get by, avoiding the work of growth. That quickly becomes predictable, the kiss of death in art.

People will always request the "old wine" because it's familiar but you have to ignore what they want and give them what they need. New wine. Peter Frampton is still playing because he does this.


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[quote="yod"
It's better to feel a sense of excitement with a few clunkers than to be perfectly stale in a live performance, imo. .[/quote]

I second that. I'm tired of "Perfect flawless" commercial "studio magic" music. A lot of bands sound great on CD, but can suck when playing live. Where would pop be without Atari? Many "artists" lip sync when on TV.

Generally music isn't studio flawless when performed live by musicians. Because sh*t happens.

I'll take fresh any day. The early Stones and Beatles stuff had a lot of appeal without all that studio baloney. Now it all seems to sound the same.

One reason I hate recording at home is that the various softwares only give me the options to create that same boring sound. How about an option for dummies, for hillbillies, for folks who want that live band sound?

Talbot

I'll take fresh any day. The early Stones and Beatles stuff had a lot of appeal without all that studio baloney. Now it all seems to sound the same.

One reason I hate recording at home is that the various softwares only give me the options to create that same boring sound. How about an option for dummies, for hillbillies, for folks who want that live band sound?

Talbot

What you're talking about is recording the whole band at one time (with just overdubs on vox and lead guitar, mostly).
That can be done in a practice studio/home environment, with the right players and right equipment. You don't even need to isolate the mics/instruments that much if you want that kind of sound. It does help to isolate the drums, if you can, because they are loud enough to bleed to other mics, but a plexi drum shield or some movable gobo traps will usually work. The thing to NOT use in this scenario is PA speakers. Headphones or in-ear monitors are the key, so vocals can be done, and monitor mixes can be adjusted to everyone's liking - hence the 'right equipment needed'.

When you consider the number of camera and lighting set-ups, and starts and stops, lip syncing is almost mandatory.

Was working on a show yesterday in Dallas where they had wanted me to lip-synch when I got there, but I refused. It's just lame and no one does that since the 80s. Most bands/artists use tracks these days for at least a part of their live audio, so the trend is singing live/playing to audio tracks and that's what I had agreed to. The issue for this show was a monitor in the room, so we used headphones for audio monitoring and made it look a "Studio recording" as a compromise that made everyone happy.

It's not that hard to have good live audio, if you have a good audio person. When I produced a show in the 80s we lip-synched a couple of shows before abandoning that approach. Instead I'd hire an audio guy to do a separate mix and send us the feed. A little more complex but well worth it.


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