In the comments to the previous post where I was complaining about the emphasis on timbre (musical sound or texture) in a recent New York Times story, p.d. reminds me that changes in timbre are the creative engine behind, like, all my favorite music (techno, hiphop, and so forth). He tells a great story about "Berry Gordy making the engineers build a radio transmitter and everyone heading out into the car to check how the motown test masters sounded...and remix, re-eq, recut, and test, etc...for the whole day because he knew if it didn't sound 'right' on the radio it wouldn't sell." p.d. points out how many current hiphop hits have built on such sonic refinements, from Motown right up through '90s drum and bass experiments, turning them into main attraction.
All true, but I don't think the sound scientist I was hectoring, Daniel Levitin, was talking about artists who consciously base their music on equalization or synth textures, a la the Detroit techno guys. He means monster hits, which I maintain rely as much on the marketing of personality and yes, old fashioned musical hooks. A good case in point was Cher's "Believe," to which the Times devoted an anatomy-of-a-chart-topper story several years ago. It was quite funny: Cher came off as the grumpy CEO of her corporate musical enterprise, complaining at development meetings to the teams that had various parts of the song parceled out to them. Seems they had the verses in the pipeline for six years but the chorus was eluding them (or maybe the reverse). She admonished one team to "go out and get more pain in their lives" to develop an effective hook. Someone had some weak lines and tried them with the vocoder and the rest is musical history. So, yes, timbre put the song over the top but the hit also resulted from nuts and bolts Tin Pan Alley songwriting. The acoustic scientist Levitin has discovered an interesting fact about current music but is announcing it as a principle. And no offense to anyone in a lab about the dig in the last post--my point is mainly that art is its own kind of rocket science but journalists love to dumb it down by reducing it to something quantifiable.
i'd say you're both right??
you can find lots of megahits [or what counts as a megahit these days] made by producers who rely mostly on eq and synth textures: neptunes/timbaland/lil jon/shondrae/collipark etc.
or look at a band like [sorry] nickelback. they do have all the "i love you" hooks but they also have exactly the type of consistent timbre that levitin is talking about.
i think its a 50/50 thing...if you have great songs but bad timbre you'll never make it onto radio so you wont have a hit, maybe you can tour with your songs, play smaller venues etc - at least this one is fixable. if you have perpect pop timbre [which is always created by someone else besides the artist and funded by serious dosh] but thats all you have you can get on the radio, maybe your first single will sell a bit, but then we probably won't hear much from you again. and if you have both then you're hopefully off to the races.
i've had some experience with pop timbre lately working with two guys who produce for nelly. i make a beat and they might like the vibe...but then regardless of how much i try to make the best mix possible, it has to go into an expensive studio to be "mixed down". only at this point can they really decide if it has the right timbre to think about releasing [none have yet :( ], at which point it might go through further mixes and then finally "mastering" which is the most amazing thing.
there's some mastering dude sitting in a room somewhere with a bank of $100,000 tube compressors [and ears who have't been blown apart by years of raving] that can take, what to me sounds like a perfectly mixed track, and make it's timbre sound Better. and not only just Better, but Better in an unconsiously identifiable way that makes it fit for release and radio play...like i didn't know it even could sound Better until i heard the final mastered version. try as i might [albeit with a million cracked vst plugins not tube compressors] i can't get anything i make to have this type of timbre - i don't even really know what i'm looking for. i only know from listening to other before and after mastered tracks that this guy does.
anyway in terms of timbre in specific sounds, levitin wasn't talking about robert hood even as contemporary pop producers are more and more influenced by that era of dance music, but in terms of timbre as the overall "sound" of a track, i'd say he's right in saying you've really got to have "it" consistently to have a decent career. i'd also suggest the first two michael jackson solo albums as excellent examples of a successful marriage of pop content with a constant search for new but accessible pop timbres.
How much of this is "the loudness wars" we've talked about on the blog with regard to CD production?
I know from when I spun records a few years ago that my records from the '80s didn't cut it as far as holding a room and I ended up playing only current discs. Yet some of those records were hits in their day.
I've argued that it had more to do with improved sound tech and not just simple loudness, but now I'm wondering.
I don't dispute that the type of professionalism you're talking about is necessary in a broad, mass audience sense nowadays. I think Levitin is lamenting a "loss of musical values" (I'm not sure--he seems to be flipflopping on whether timbre is bad or good) and that's not my issue. What bugs me that it's another form of gatekeeper.
I just think it's bizarre that the public demands a certain level of insane perfectionism for a "radio hit" but will watch (and listen to) the most degraded piece of shit on YouTube. It makes me think it's mostly psychology and we need to rethink our expectations.
i wonder if there's something to the fact that yes people will watch and listen to extremely unprofessional youtube videos, but they dont pay for them? whereas with pop music at the end of the day one of those hyper-produced nuggets has to sell in order to keep the whole thing going.
could be other reasons besides loudness why you're records from the 80s didn't move the crowd. dj'ing in london - the home of musical nightlife mediocrity - i've often felt a bit silly trying to do something interesting that freezes the dancefloor to stone [the name "DJ Medusa" is already taken] and then the crowd responds to the next dj playing contemporary [loud?] electro-house straight off of compilation discs. but it's ok i blush easily anyways.
ive always been fascinated how timbre isnt really a part of old school Music Theory and only started to get messed with fairly recently. maybe its a result of new technologies opening up uncharted territory, but maybe its also a sign o' the times, dunno..
i think timbre always was/is a big part of music theory but it's usually called "orchestration" when applied and descriptively called "colour". or for example the harpsichord faded specifically because it didn't have the range of timbres of the piano and composers in the late 18th century found those extra timbres [and dynamics and notes] compelling to write for.
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In the comments to the previous post where I was complaining about the emphasis on timbre (musical sound or texture) in a recent New York Times story, p.d. reminds me that changes in timbre are the creative engine behind, like, all my favorite music (techno, hiphop, and so forth). He tells a great story about "Berry Gordy making the engineers build a radio transmitter and everyone heading out into the car to check how the motown test masters sounded...and remix, re-eq, recut, and test, etc...for the whole day because he knew if it didn't sound 'right' on the radio it wouldn't sell." p.d. points out how many current hiphop hits have built on such sonic refinements, from Motown right up through '90s drum and bass experiments, turning them into main attraction.
All true, but I don't think the sound scientist I was hectoring, Daniel Levitin, was talking about artists who consciously base their music on equalization or synth textures, a la the Detroit techno guys. He means monster hits, which I maintain rely as much on the marketing of personality and yes, old fashioned musical hooks. A good case in point was Cher's "Believe," to which the Times devoted an anatomy-of-a-chart-topper story several years ago. It was quite funny: Cher came off as the grumpy CEO of her corporate musical enterprise, complaining at development meetings to the teams that had various parts of the song parceled out to them. Seems they had the verses in the pipeline for six years but the chorus was eluding them (or maybe the reverse). She admonished one team to "go out and get more pain in their lives" to develop an effective hook. Someone had some weak lines and tried them with the vocoder and the rest is musical history. So, yes, timbre put the song over the top but the hit also resulted from nuts and bolts Tin Pan Alley songwriting. The acoustic scientist Levitin has discovered an interesting fact about current music but is announcing it as a principle. And no offense to anyone in a lab about the dig in the last post--my point is mainly that art is its own kind of rocket science but journalists love to dumb it down by reducing it to something quantifiable.
- tom moody 1-02-2007 6:05 pm
i'd say you're both right??
you can find lots of megahits [or what counts as a megahit these days] made by producers who rely mostly on eq and synth textures: neptunes/timbaland/lil jon/shondrae/collipark etc.
or look at a band like [sorry] nickelback. they do have all the "i love you" hooks but they also have exactly the type of consistent timbre that levitin is talking about.
i think its a 50/50 thing...if you have great songs but bad timbre you'll never make it onto radio so you wont have a hit, maybe you can tour with your songs, play smaller venues etc - at least this one is fixable. if you have perpect pop timbre [which is always created by someone else besides the artist and funded by serious dosh] but thats all you have you can get on the radio, maybe your first single will sell a bit, but then we probably won't hear much from you again. and if you have both then you're hopefully off to the races.
i've had some experience with pop timbre lately working with two guys who produce for nelly. i make a beat and they might like the vibe...but then regardless of how much i try to make the best mix possible, it has to go into an expensive studio to be "mixed down". only at this point can they really decide if it has the right timbre to think about releasing [none have yet :( ], at which point it might go through further mixes and then finally "mastering" which is the most amazing thing.
there's some mastering dude sitting in a room somewhere with a bank of $100,000 tube compressors [and ears who have't been blown apart by years of raving] that can take, what to me sounds like a perfectly mixed track, and make it's timbre sound Better. and not only just Better, but Better in an unconsiously identifiable way that makes it fit for release and radio play...like i didn't know it even could sound Better until i heard the final mastered version. try as i might [albeit with a million cracked vst plugins not tube compressors] i can't get anything i make to have this type of timbre - i don't even really know what i'm looking for. i only know from listening to other before and after mastered tracks that this guy does.
anyway in terms of timbre in specific sounds, levitin wasn't talking about robert hood even as contemporary pop producers are more and more influenced by that era of dance music, but in terms of timbre as the overall "sound" of a track, i'd say he's right in saying you've really got to have "it" consistently to have a decent career. i'd also suggest the first two michael jackson solo albums as excellent examples of a successful marriage of pop content with a constant search for new but accessible pop timbres.
- p.d. (guest) 1-02-2007 8:18 pm
How much of this is "the loudness wars" we've talked about on the blog with regard to CD production?
I know from when I spun records a few years ago that my records from the '80s didn't cut it as far as holding a room and I ended up playing only current discs. Yet some of those records were hits in their day.
I've argued that it had more to do with improved sound tech and not just simple loudness, but now I'm wondering.
I don't dispute that the type of professionalism you're talking about is necessary in a broad, mass audience sense nowadays. I think Levitin is lamenting a "loss of musical values" (I'm not sure--he seems to be flipflopping on whether timbre is bad or good) and that's not my issue. What bugs me that it's another form of gatekeeper.
I just think it's bizarre that the public demands a certain level of insane perfectionism for a "radio hit" but will watch (and listen to) the most degraded piece of shit on YouTube. It makes me think it's mostly psychology and we need to rethink our expectations.
- tom moody 1-02-2007 9:05 pm
i wonder if there's something to the fact that yes people will watch and listen to extremely unprofessional youtube videos, but they dont pay for them? whereas with pop music at the end of the day one of those hyper-produced nuggets has to sell in order to keep the whole thing going.
could be other reasons besides loudness why you're records from the 80s didn't move the crowd. dj'ing in london - the home of musical nightlife mediocrity - i've often felt a bit silly trying to do something interesting that freezes the dancefloor to stone [the name "DJ Medusa" is already taken] and then the crowd responds to the next dj playing contemporary [loud?] electro-house straight off of compilation discs. but it's ok i blush easily anyways.
- p.d. (guest) 1-02-2007 9:48 pm
ive always been fascinated how timbre isnt really a part of old school Music Theory and only started to get messed with fairly recently. maybe its a result of new technologies opening up uncharted territory, but maybe its also a sign o' the times, dunno..
- guthrie (guest) 1-02-2007 11:53 pm
i think timbre always was/is a big part of music theory but it's usually called "orchestration" when applied and descriptively called "colour". or for example the harpsichord faded specifically because it didn't have the range of timbres of the piano and composers in the late 18th century found those extra timbres [and dynamics and notes] compelling to write for.
- p.d. (guest) 1-03-2007 4:30 am