It's easy to forget just how much computers and digital devices have changed the way music is packaged and consumed. Just as I often ponder how my parents, in the age before ATMs, kept enough spending money on hand, I have a hard time imagining the days of music before the CD, MP3 or the portable player.
No doubt today's musicians feel the same way. Once upon a time, recording an album required spending weeks in a dedicated studio playing songs over and over until the band got everything just right. Then expensive, 2-inch analog tape and mixing consoles gave way to hard drives and PC software for editing audio, allowing artists to cut tracks in basements and bedrooms and to dissect flawed songs and surgically remove imperfections in a way never possible before.
But holdouts remain, and none more vocal than Steve Albini, the engineer (he eschews the term producer) who has recorded thousands of albums including ones for Nirvana, PJ Harvey, the Pixies and the Breeders. His studio prowess is legendary among musicians; he's known for arranging mikes in a way that gives drums that elusive, compressed sound and brightens the tone of the guitars.
Walk into Electrical Audio, his studio in Chicago, and you'll find a trove of vintage consoles, mikes and tape machines that many bigger studios long ago replaced with newfangled digital gear. Ask him why there's a dearth of digital equipment and you're likely to get a sneer.
• Neil Young: Prairie Wind
Young was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain aneurysm shortly before recording Prairie Wind. He has since been successfully treated for the condition, but the album, rich with steel guitars and honky-tonk rhythms, finds the elder statesman of rock and folk confronting his death with dignity, tenderness and a sense of humor.
• Portastatic: Bright Ideas
With Superchunk on indefinite hiatus, Mac McCaughan (the band's frontman) has morphed Portastatic from a one-man side project into a full ensemble. The result is indie pop that's filled with vitality. Bright Ideas has plenty of bite, but songs like the samba-influenced "Truckstop Cassettes" show it also knows when to pull back.
• The Brian Jonestown Massacre: We Are the Radio
After watching them implode in the documentary Dig, you might have thought it was over for the BJM. We Are the Radio is here to prove you wrong. The psychedelia this time is more subdued (think Velvet Underground and Nico). The song title "Never Become Emotionally Attached to a Man, Woman, Beast or Child" is alone worth the price of admission.
Dan Goodin offers his music picks every other Monday.
"These machines cannot be trusted to make aesthetic determinations about music," he says. "Because it's so convenient to do circus tricks in the digital domain, it's sort of done pro forma."
Take, for instance, what's called tempo alignment. Using digital editing software such as Pro Tools, engineers routinely slice a song's drum beats and align them with metronome pulses. The effect may ensure that the percussion is perfectly in sync, but, he says, it creates a rigidity to the time keeping and removes one of the key differentiators among bands, which is the way their drummers play.
Another of Albini's beefs: auto tuning, or the practice of correcting the pitch of a track's vocals so they are perfectly in tune. Ella Fitzgerald, he says, was said to have perfect pitch, meaning she could hear a note in her head and, without the aid of an instrument, sing it exactly on key. But even her singing had minor inflections that would have been corrected by digital tools routinely used today. He says the result is vocals that take on a robotic quality and lack the feeling of a live performance.
Plenty of other artists have strong feelings about digital recording, too. Among them is Death Cab for Cutie, the indie heartthrobs known for their sweet melodies and vivid lyrics. The Bellingham, Washington, band recorded its first four albums onto analog tape because of producer, guitarist and keyboardist Chris Walla's conviction that Pro Tools and other digital methods more often hinder good records than promote them.
"The world of tape really rewards talent and it really rewards a work ethic," Walla says. "The digital world, at least in rock 'n' roll, tends to reward insecurity and a lack of drive."
He uses the term "option anxiety" to describe the unease he feels when presented with the overwhelming number of features in Pro Tools. The program also has a way of hijacking the recording session, he says, eliminating the chance musicians get to catch their breath while waiting for tape to rewind or introducing a shimmering glow from a computer monitor that, like a TV in a restaurant, is impossible not to look at.
Death Cab's fifth album, Plans, released four weeks ago, is its first to use digital recording. But rather than use a computer, the group used a simple stand-alone device that has play, rewind and fast-forward buttons just like a tape machine and doesn't require a monitor.
Walla is happy with the results, praising the wide-open sound of the guitars and the fast drum attacks. But even with the slimmed-down menu of features, he says distractions abounded from going digital. He devoted more time to mixing the album than any other the band has made, and yet fewer hours working with his fellow bandmates.
The arguments of purists like Albini remind me of the debate that once revolved around the use of word processors like WordPerfect and Microsoft Word and the effect they had on writing. Once upon a time, teachers forbade their use; now most require students to know how to use them.
I still find word processors so distracting that each time I install a new one on my machine (I currently use Sun Microsystems' StarOffice) I have to spend 10 minutes disabling features like autocorrect before I can hope to get any work done. As flawed as today's word processors are, I can't imagine going without one, which isn't to say I never write longhand.
I've got to applaud Albini for acknowledging the pink elephant in the mixing room -- that Pro Tools and the like are frequently abused by insecure artists and overbearing producers, and result in records that have no soul.
But it seems to me the problem isn't so much with the programs themselves, as with the blind reliance so many people put in them. Over time, producers' giddy fascination with digital recording tools will ease. Once that happens, the urge to demonize the instrument will fade, and criticism will turn where it belongs -- on how well or poorly it is used.
In music, precision counts, and machines deliver it perfectly every time. With time, musicians will learn how to use that power to enhance the artistry of their work, rather than stifle it.
Dan Goodin received a masters in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996. He covered legal affairs, internet governance and financial markets for publications including CNET News.com, The Industry Standard, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. He lives in San Francisco.
