Whilst I have been sitting at my parents house looking at various jobs, applying for various roles, etc. I have come to start my random dives into the web development world again, this was in no small part to a new project site that myself and a friend have decided to start up. This site was originally going to be running a copy of WordPress 3.0 setup as a CMS with a custom theme and some plugins to provide the functionality we required, however after some initial testing (read messing about with..) I made the decision to use a proper fully fledged CMS as WordPress whilst being amazing at what it does i.e. blogging, is not really suited to being a CMS. This is when I started to look into CMS applications for the site going on what I’d used before, which was Mambo / Joomla.

Mambo / Joomla whilst again very very good systems, were a little too complex for what the site needs and in my opinion a little bloated and full of things we just would never use. Yes I know there’s that age old saying “Never say never” but in this case I really don’t mind saying never as I think I found the answer to the CMS problems in…Drupal.

I’ve used Drupal on a site before and not really gotten along with it, thinking it was complicated and nothing made any sense, there were too many clicks to get where you wanted to be, theming was hard, blah blah, etc etc. needless to say I have since spent a little more time with Drupal in the past week and have changed all my opinions of the system around, and now think it’s actually one of the most feature rich, easy to use, and easy to theme content management systems available for the price….FREE!!!

I am currently re-familiarising myself with HTML, CSS, and PHP whilst building a custom template for Drupal which is something I’ve not done in about a year, but for some reason I don’t seem to have forgotten much and everything seems to be just falling right back into place where I left off. Now obviously theming an already existing CMS is not exactly as taxing as developing your own CMS which is what I was doing with this site originally before having too much work to be doing with uni, but I’m enjoying the design aspect as well as the development aspect of building this theme, and also playing with Drupal. We shall see where this leads, and if I get into a pickle with it, or if it turns out better than I thought.

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When a singer comes into your studio with maybe not a fantastic voice, but they can sing pretty much in tune and time with everything else, do you get them to record and record and record until you have enough parts to make up a whole vocal from the parts? In the past this was never really possible, yes you could splice tape together which took hours and hours and was an art in itself, but artists from that era trained their voices, or their ability with what ever instrument they played to make sure it wasn’t needed. Why do we not think about this anymore? Where has the performance gone?

When we use a DAW such as ProTools we have the ability to use plug-ins for all sorts of things, EQ, compression, gating, effects, you name it there’s probably a plug-in for it. One such plug-in that has become more and more widely used in recent years is the pitch correction plug-in whether it be Antares Auto-Tune, Celemony Melodyne, or just Logic’s built in pitch correction. These plug-ins are used most often to correct a vocal line to bring it to “perfect pitch”, which is normally done by the engineer during the mixing stage. Why do we as sound engineers feel the need to fix everything? I had a copy of Antares Auto-Tune a while ago and I don’t think I actually used it on a final mix once, why you may ask, well personally as a musician I think it takes the human out of the human. Correcting something to be “perfect” to me takes the character out of the music, and surely that’s what it’s all about, the character, the essence, the performance.

Imagine you had a permanent Auto-Tune or Melodyne built into you with no way to turn it off, would you really be happy walking around day after day talking in perfect pitch, singing in perfect pitch, and even sounding exactly the same as every one else out there? I think not some how, so why oh why is it done so often these days, when back in the 60′s-80′s, even the 90′s to some extent was it ok to be slightly out? I think it’s because it kept the human factor in the music, and that is what has changed about music today, it’s nothing to do with the audience wants to hear that in perfect pitch, or that it’s more pleasing to the ear, in fact it has nothing to do with what the audience want at all I don’t think. I think it’s more to do with what we as listeners have been brain washed into thinking is the right way for something to be heard and personally I think that’s wrong.

As a ProTools engineer, and as a musician with everything I record whether for myself, or for other artists, I never take that human factor out of the music unless they say to me that they want the vocals correcting, or the drum track in perfect time the entire way through, or maybe that guitar didn’t quite come in on the beat so can it be nudged slightly, but with every edit I make I always try to keep as much of the way it was played as I can. That way it keeps that character, that essence, the performance of it being played by a human player and not just a sequencer. Humans make mistakes, machines don’t when it comes to timing, you ask a drummer to keep a 4/4 beat going playing 16ths on the hi-hat, and at one point, they WILL go out of time due to fatigue, they loose track, or because they are just human. Computers can’t do that, they can’t purposely go out, they are designed not to, and yes you can put swing on something, but that’s still programmed, it doesn’t quite sound natural.

Where am I going with this? Well You could see this as a stab at Auto-Tune, or Melodyne, but it’s really not, they are great bits of software, or “tools” don’t get me wrong, but in my opinion they are not used as “tools”, but more of a way it is done and has to be done. Why are rock, jazz, or blues all but dying out? I think it’s because artists are not as good as they used to be in the past, artists rely on these so called “tools” to fix their problems, “Oh it’s ok, that can be fixed later with Auto-Tune” I hear all to often by singers, and I think to myself, well no wait a minute your meant to be able to sing that part, it’s your vocal after all, why can’t you sing it right in the first place? Most of the time, the answer is simple, we have the “tools” to fix it so why bother getting it perfect in the first place.

Music as a true art is dying, and it’s a sad state of affairs we are moving into when artists rely on these “tools” to give them that “perfect performance”. So is the true art of music dying? Well I think so yes. Welcome to the digital era I guess…..

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