Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Aug. 27 2007, 15:21 |
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| Quote (onion @ Aug. 26 2007, 21:10) | try google for Paris Hilton latest and greatest album/song whatever she made.....there is a 100 % moron for you....she is even so lame that she probably got some sort of a technician to switch the knobs in the computer program for her so that "music" came out of the speakers..  |
Well there you have it - you've hit the nail on the head yourself there. Those artists don't make 'their' music. Sometimes they write it (I'm not sure about Paris Hilton), usually they perform some of it (often just the vocals and not necessarily all of them), but the programming, arranging and engineering is handled by other people. Those people tend to be ridiculously good at what they do; it may be formulaic and lacking in true subtlety, but it's a sound that sells, and they're experts at getting it. That's the difference with Mike - he's not just the name on the album, he's usually the guy who does a lot of the work too...not that it necessarily makes the album better.
It's clear to me that there's quite a lot of Mike in those tracks; he's done more than just start up a loop and let it play for the whole length of the album. They all have structure. Sometimes the structure is quite basic, other times it's a bit more complex, but it's always more than the exact same thing going round and round. Some tracks admittedly don't develop much, but I personally get the impression that all of them had more thought put into them than Mike turning on the computer, playing a loop, going "ooh, that's nice" and letting it run for five minutes. That's the difference between Light + Shade and the music of the true morons of this world.
Sure, there are people out there, some of them quite young, who could create music that's just as good or better. They're not just any old people - they're very talented people. As Alan said I'd say...if anyone can do it, how come so few actually manage it? I've done it and, from my perspective at least, I'd say there's more to it than may meet the ear at first.
With all that said, I never took to Light + Shade much. I rather felt that it was an album which had the seeds of something very interesting in it, just they were still growing and were rather swamped by weeds. I'm not sure I'd agree with the review that there are no memorable tunes there, as I can still recall a number of them, but equally, there are a good few I struggle to remember at all...I suppose the fact is, a large chunk of it didn't really excite me. The kind of craftsmanship that went into The Songs Of Distant Earth wasn't there. The mixes also all had the rather 'hard' sound that mixing in Logic seems to impart (I've not done extensive tests to get to the bottom of quite why that is, I know only that when I've worked with the same material in both Logic and Pro Tools, the mix has come out of Pro Tools sounding better than it did coming out of Logic...but there could be all sorts of reasons for that, to be fair on Logic. That said, compare Light + Shade with Tres Lunas. Tres Lunas - mixed on the Neve Capricorn - sounds much smoother to me). Personally, I feel he would have had a much stronger album if he'd discarded half the material and worked more intensely on the remaining parts. In case anyone is about to pop up with the old argument of Mike just doing the album for the money (with him therefore having knocked out two discs' worth as quickly as possible), I can guarantee you that the record company is making him pay for the fact that it's a double album - it'll be counted as a more costly special format, and a deduction will be made from his royalties to cover that, at the most unreasonable rate they can dream up. Cutting it down to a single album would have got him greater royalties...so clearly the reasons for it being a double album are artistic; he must have felt that producing two CDs' worth of music rather than one was the best use of his time. I can't say I agree, but then what's done is done...and Mike wouldn't have listened to my opinion anyway
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