I love taking my daughter – Isla – to school and picking her up. I get to do it every day (bar one) in the week. It’s one of the greatest advantages to running your own business, that you can make time to do the things that matter to you, especially with those people who matter to you.
One of the things that we enjoy doing after school is sitting down together, chatting about our day, and often watching some short videos on Youtube. These may be learning videos, bike builds, and – as you may expect – videos of music performances.
One week, I introduced her to Sam and Dave. Sam Moore and Dave Prater were a musical duo that started performing together in the 60s and continued for many decades. You’ll know some of their hits like ‘Soul Man’, ‘Hold on, I’m coming’, ‘I Thank You’, and many more.
Isla was utterly enraptured by the performances. Despite having seen lots of live music in recent years, whether at festivals, events, churches, choirs, etc, but she’d never heard anything that grabbed her like this did:
Here’s the thing about quality: it is often self evident. Of course, taste can play a role in whether someone enjoys a piece of music, but when someone has sufficient exposure to a particular discipline, a higher level quality stands on its own merit as a cut above.
NOTE: I’m not holding this up as the greatest music that has ever been made, or even that it’s a perfect performance. You don’t even have to like this kind of music, but go with me on this as an illustration of what it was like to record and perform in a world without auto-tune.
Here’s the problem we face in the modern world of music
We are what we eat.
What we consume dictates very heavily what we are, who we become, what our preferences are, etc. And in a world populated by Justin Bieber, Maroon 5, Billie Eilish, it’s often difficult to remember what real voices sound like.
Don’t misunderstand me, I like many of these artists, and I’m not trying to tear down the commercial acclaim or even musical validity of these artists. But what you are hearing is a heavily heavily processed version of what these voices would sound like if you were in a room with them, their voices heard totally acoustically.
What I also want to draw attention to is the very different demands that artists are under these days. The money involved in the game is so much higher, but the level of ability you need to record an album or tour as an act is far lower.
Live
Think about it: when you watch that 1974 video (yes, 1974), it’s all done live with zero technical aids. There is no autotune. There is no click track or in-ear monitors. There’s no overdubs. There’s no post-production to polish up the sound. It was a live televised performance. There’s no do-overs, no retakes. There’s no backing tracks. Every band member is responsible for playing WITH each other, in a live environment, and to do it in-tune and in-time.
In contrast, when you watch a live performance of a mainstream artist from even the last 10 years, you’re hearing something that has been massaged and produced to within an inch of it’s life, even live. Pre-recorded tracks reign for consistency of live performance. When live performances are indeed live, autotune is used judiciously to iron out inconsistencies that a singer might let slip by. very unless you are watching an artist recorded on someone’s phone with no amplification, you
Studio
Back in 1974, when artists were in the studio it was possible to do overdubs, and SOME pitch manipulation was available (e.g. speeding up or slowing down tape to get the correct pitch if a singer was out, then slicing the tape and putting a final track for a vocal together). But this was an unbelievably arduous task.
Everything was recorded to tape – hard drives didn’t exist. Tape wasn’t insanely cheap, nor was studio time. Every hour spent in the studio, every reel of tape used was at huge expense back then. Most projects couldn’t afford endless takes and endless reels of tape. It was far easier to actually just to get better at your part and record it properly in the first place.
This is the kind of work ethic that led to acts like Sam and Dave, or the best acts of bygone eras. And this standard of quality and excellence was what Isla was picking up on when she heard that music – it was self-evident even to a child that it was a cut above what she hears on the radio.
In contrast, nowadays you can do a billion takes til you get what you want. Auto-tune can be done in seconds. Modern pop almost NEEDS auto-tune to sound idiomatically “right“.
Worse still, many of us are being trained out of knowing what real voices actually sound like. I’ve told this story before, but I’ve actually taught younger singers who try to imitate autotune in their own voice. They have grown up with so much auto-tune, that the the mechanical shifting between notes that is characteristic of auto-tune is something they feel a good voice should have. It’s like the vocal equivalent of body dysmorphia caused by Instagram and photoshopped images of models.
This is the diet that modern music is often feeding us, especially so with younger singers.
Conclusion
I’m not asking you to judge modern music as bad, or to place music from yesteryear on a pedestal. Instead, I simply want you to realise how much technology has affected the music we consume today, which in turn affects our ears. For those of us who have grown up predominantly on modern music, or perhaps have never compared/contrasted such eras of music, our ears may even reject the sound of a ‘real’ unprocessed voice, because we don’t recognise how it sounds.
Dive back into some older music, and try and hear it through the lens of everything we’ve discussed above. You may be surprised by how impressive so much of it was, especially given the difficulty in recording great performances ‘back in the day’.