Become an O'Reilly Member
Visit the Digital Media Forums
Digital Media Audio RSS Feed
July 27 2005
Sep. 15, 2013
Search Digital Media
Recently I had my first chance to produce a country album, for independent artist Bo Billy. This came about when Bo asked to record some of my songs for an upcoming CD. As it turned out, he liked the sound of my demos enough to ask me to produce for him as well. And I liked his work enough to want to do it. But the challenge for both of us was to use a very tight budget to create something that sounded competitive with $100,000-plus major-label productions.
Meeting that challenge is easier in Nashville than in most places. I've written or produced all kinds of music in Toronto, the San Francisco Bay Area, and occasionally Los Angeles. But it was only a few years ago that I took a trip to Nashville and made the discovery that has been made by so many outsiders before me: Music City has more great musicians and recording engineers per square mile than any city in North America. Furthermore, Nashvilleans violate the old rule that you can only have two out of three: They somehow manage to be fast, cheap, and great. In Nashville it's common to get a finished take of a five- or six-instrument bed track in half an hour or 45 minutes! How? The whole band plays together, and everyone gets it right in one or two takes.
Working in Nashville meant that if Bo and I were prepared, we'd be able to record and mix an entire album in a little over a week. And we did.
The songs included some by professional country songwriters, a couple of Bo's originals, and a cover of the 1989 hit "When I See You Smile," written by Diane Warren and originally recorded by Bad English. This last was one that Bo particularly wanted to do. He's a fan of big '80s pop ballads, and as it happens, so is his audience: The center of the country music demographic is 35-year-olds (the majority female) who probably listened to rock and pop in their youth.
Despite the rustic image, there's some clever technology behind Bo Billy's CD production.
Digital Nashville
Non-fans might be surprised at the technical sophistication of a musical style that after all calls itself "country." In fact, while country is stylistically conservative, Nashville has always been quick to use cutting edge technology in the service of fidelity or productivity, if not necessarily radical sonic experimentation.
Digital technology was adopted early and enthusiastically, if not always successfully. To my ears, the clumsy use of drum machines on a lot of '80s country records makes otherwise good songs and performances almost unlistenable. Happier experiments have involved the early use of digital multitrack tape recorders, Sonic Solutions mastering stations, and more recently digital audio workstations, or DAWs: iZ Technology RADAR (popular for its sound and for its tape-machine-like interface), Digidesign Pro Tools, and, emerging as a local favorite, Steinberg Nuendo. Many Nashville engineers swear by the sound of their Nuendo systems, saying that Nuendo is especially musical-sounding, though other manufacturers claim at least equal quality.
All current high-end DAWs approach the fidelity of excellent analog tape recorders, with lower noise and distortion. But the major benefits of working with a DAW are flexibility and speed. Since digital recording and editing can be non-destructive, fixes and changes are always possible, even if they are probably indulged in less often than in other styles. And the use of plug-ins means specialized compression, EQ, or effects can be inserted at will on any track.
One plug-in, though, may be emerging as '00s version of the drum machine in Nashville: Antares Auto-Tune, which can nudge an out-of-tune vocal back onto the correct pitch. The over-use of AutoTune has been blamed for polishing the soul out of many recent recordings, and for allowing some mediocre singers to sound better than they are. And for a town that places so much value on musicianship, that's not in tune at all.
|
Related Reading Digital Audio Essentials |
