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How Much Is Enough?
The Fine Line Between
Groove Perfection And Destruction
In today's digital audio workstation world, the ability
to alter a live performance is limited only by your imagination
and how much time you want to spend. It's a well-documented
fact that many top artists' performances are crafted using
bits and pieces of various takes inside a digital audio
workstation resulting in a believable, but sometimes too-perfect
performance. |
Producer, engineer and ProTools guru, Russell Bond, has
been on the bleeding edge of digital audio technology for
nearly 20 years. His credits include a wide range of work
with artists including Alex De Grassi, Stevan Pasero, Chris
Spheeris, Michael Spiro, Bill Cutler, The Big Wu, and Michael
Hedges. He has been an audio consultant to Apple Computer
and spent the last year as a Training Specialist for Digidesign.
He's just opened The Mindlab Learning Center, a comprehensive
ProTools training facility in Menlo Park, CA.
What's
your point of view with respect to perfecting a track using
a digital audio workstation (DAW)?
There's no question that there are some awesome tools available today to fix
and create performances. The most powerful one being the basic editing capability
of the DAW itself! If I wanted a "perfect track," I could use tools such as Beat
Detective to automate the process of quantizing audio with amazing speed and
accuracy, but it can often result in a fairly stiff, predictable performance
unless used with a certain amount of intelligence. I prefer working with live
acoustic performances as opposed to loops and samples. The subtle variations
in dynamics and phrasing give a recording its unique quality. I try to preserve
what makes a performance uniquely human, using digital tools to enhance where
needed. I've found that by first analyzing the way a particular musician interprets
a rhythm, I can maintain their feel, but put the track in perfect time.
Could you give us an example?
On the album, Crossing the Line, with writer/producer Bill Cutler, we had to
restore a number of songs that were recorded back in 1973. The tracks were not
sonically up to date, and the performances were rhythmically incon-sistent. We
were very nervous about completely quantizing the performances for fear of sounding
too mechanical. I spent some time looking closely at just how the musicians interpreted
the grooves and I ended up regioning out the audio to maintain the feel, while
cleaning up the tempo. The results were fantastic, nearly identical to the original
30-year old performances in terms of groove, only much tighter. It now sounds
like a bunch of NY's finest session players.
The process takes more time than most people are willing to spend, however. A
five-minute drum track took about 13 hours of non-stop editing... and each song
averaged 30-40 tracks, all of which needed to be "fixed" in order to maintain
synchronization. As you know, it's
easy to lose track of time in the studio!
Do you use any DAW timesaving tools?
Well, ironically, I did that project a few months before Beat Detective was part
of ProTools so I had to do it manually (laughter), but as a ProTools user, it's
hard to avoid using Beat Detective and Sound Replacer to modify performances.
They have a lot of features that make the process of manipulating audio very
fast and flexible.
Is there a limit to how tight you should make a track using tools like Beat
Detective?
Yeah, Beat Detective is especially cool, but I can see that it could be overused
or abused simply because of how easy it is to use. Some great drummers instinctually
play around the beat just a tiny bit to create their unique feel. For instance,
on beat two they may hit the snare 10 ms before the beat, and on beat four they
may lay the snare hit back a few milliseconds. This gives the song its own fluid
groove. Quantize that out and you lose the feel of the song.
So like any tool, you've got to use it responsibly.
Right, I like to look at keeping what makes the original performance unique,
and just enhance it a bit, as necessary. Those minute changes that are played
from verse to verse, even bar to bar, give breath and shape to a performance.
If you let the computer make all the decisions on clean up, you'll probably lose
the spirit of the performance.
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