To Cheat, Or Not To Cheat?
Let me unabashedly state this up front: DIGITAL RECORDING IS AWESOME.
I love working on a modern recording system. What's available today to someone on a modest budget would seem unbelievable to the audio engineer of ten or twenty years ago.
However, the widespread availability of tools to tweak, tweeze, alter, nudge, tune, and otherwise fix bad performances have led to the growth of a new kind of musician — one that goes into the studio before they're ready, because they know that bad performances can be made to sound good, or at least passable.
Performer: "How was that take?"
Engineer: "It was terrible. Come on in."
"We'll fix it in the mix" has never been more true.
The most well known of these tools is Auto-tune. As you probably already know, Auto-tune can fix bad notes in a vocal take. Or, it can change the note to something else entirely. It can even alter speech that was never intended to be sung and make it sound like a song.
Auto-tune is well known, but there are many other tools to fix bad performances. Fixing takes has been going on since the early days of recording, but in the old days, even a simple edit could mean literally cutting and splicing physical tape. Not an easy task, comparatively. Needless to say, bad musicians rarely got the chance to be in the recording studio.
Today, it's easy to fix almost any kind of mistake. Drums can be lined up to a grid, making a sloppy performance nearly perfect. Inconsistent volume of drum hits can be fixed. Bad sounding drums can be replaced with samples. Guitars can be re-amped, or emulated. Sloppy takes can be cleaned up. Good takes can be copied and pasted all over the song. Vocals can be aligned and tuned.
Sometimes, these changes are artistically warranted, or can save time to help keep a project under budget. But other times these tools are simply abused in order to make a bad performance sound good. There are several problems with this.
First, and most importantly, if your band requires tons of studio fixes in order to sound good, what are you going to do when it's time to play live? Use backing tracks? Lip sync? It's either that, or you're going to disappoint the audience who came to see you, expecting you to sound something like the record they've heard.
Second, as good as these fixes are, they don't feel as natural as if you actually performed the part well. When the computer lines drums up on a grid, or makes vocals sound perfect, that's not normal. It's the slight imperfections that make a song sound like it was played by humans. The degree of perfection that is acceptable varies depending on the genre of music, but absolute perfection usually sounds "off" to us.
I'm implying a kind of musical honesty, here, and I do want to be careful with that. Truth be told, not much in the studio is honest. You can play or sing your part as many times as it takes to get it right. Your instruments are being treated with all kinds of effects to make them sound better than they do in real life. Each part of the song is being mixed to perfectly fit into the whole, and the end result is usually something that's essentially impossible to replicate outside of the studio.
However, the feel of your performance is something that should be yours, with as little alteration as possible. It's unique to you. It's what turns that collection of noises you're making into music. It's up to you to put the time and effort into turning yourself into a musician.
So, get that metronome out. Practice your rudiments or scales. Learn at least the basics of music theory. Take lessons with a great teacher. Figure out how to perform other people's music, and then incorporate those techniques into your own performances. Studying the masters is an important part of any artistic discipline, and music is no exception. Learn the rules, and learn how and when to break them. Then, take that knowledge and skill into the studio and make some real music.