"It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity." - Albert Einstein
It is a cold, dark night at 54th Street and 9th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. Inside the massive 100,000 square foot building are five large recording studios, but only one is open tonight. A team of audio engineers, producers, and other brilliant musicians is waiting in anticipation and staring through the thick glass window. Inside the studio and backlit by a single, fading light, a man is slumped over the piano. Working alongside the hum of analog tapes, Bruce Springsteen is staying up late and working on his masterpiece “Born in the U.S.A.”- an album that would go on to become a beacon of hope for the working man following his dream. However, this place where dreams were made is now no more. Once known as the Hit Factory, this historic recording space has generated 41 Grammy nominated recordings; the birthplace of countless classic albums is gone.
It is a warm, summer night at 54th Street and 9th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. Teeming with youthful energy, the busy streets provide a perfect backdrop for the creative mind. In a penthouse condo several stories above the street sits a solitary man lit only by the glow of his computer screen. He has just put the finishing touches on his debut album. Through the power of Pro Tools, he has created an album filled with the sounds of Stradivarius violins, vintage Gibson guitars, and Steinway grand pianos. He has tuned every single note of his vocal melodies to perfection. His computer has replaced collaborating musicians, producers, and engineers. The birthplace of the modern-day hit can fit on your desktop.
Recording studios like the Hit Factory are closing all over the world. The main catalyst is a decrease in demand for recording equipment and studio space brought on by an increase in technological development. A MacBook Pro with Pro Tools and an interface can now deliver a broadcast quality album ready for digital distribution. A process that used to be a team effort is now a one-man affair. Technology has affected all aspects of our society, but I maintain that the music industry is taking the hit most personally.
Change is inevitable, but rarely easy. In the never-ending search for perfection, our society has created some truly remarkable pieces of technology. The growing trend in the music industry is a movement toward a computer-driven method of music production. Today, there are many software packages, such as Logic Pro, Cubase, and Pro Tools, which serve to diminish the need for mixing desks and other studio equipment. Launched in 1991, Pro Tools is now considered an industry standard having revolutionized every aspect of the recording process. Pro Tools functions as a Digital Audio Workstation that provides a virtual mixer and a multi-track tape recorder, replacing the need for a physical mixing desk. Using keyboard commands and a mouse, one can balance levels, mix tracks and add MIDI sounds. The software is easy to install and one can grasp the mixing/editing process in a matter of months. Pro Tools is that intuitive. Prior to the development of this digital software, a team of producers and engineers would balance tracks on a mixing board and maintain the equipment as sound files were transferred onto large tape machines. Editing was done by literally splicing into the tape and re-recording the part. Now, a Pro Tools user can record and re-record parts with just a few clicks of the mouse and spacebar. Tracks are stored in external hard-drives and can be edited using the Pro Tools editing window. Here, the user equalizes tracks in order to create optimum balance and blend. Digital effects can also be added to any recorded part.
Third-party developers have created countless plug-ins that can be purchased in addition to Pro Tools. A plug-in has a specific function that enhances the recording, editing, mixing and effects capabilities of the Pro Tools software. Through the use of plug-ins, a musician can summon vintage guitar tones, amp models and other exotic instruments that would otherwise be impossible to use. These plug-ins have changed the way in which we record. Before plug-ins, musicians had to use the instruments and amps that they owned. The gear in the recording studio shaped the sound of the album. Now, thanks to the increasing accessibility of every sound ever generated, a musician is just a few clicks away from capturing the “perfect” sound.
Several plug-ins have become standards in the industry such as the “Velvet” plug-in which provides access to emulators of 1970’s analog keyboards. Another plug-in called “Strike” contains five high-definition drum kits with twelve instruments per kit. Plug-ins make it possible for a cheap guitar to sound like Jimmy Page’s signature Les Paul or can take the place of real instruments all together. However, one plug-in has gone on to be called the “Holy Grail of Recording.” It has raised our expectations as listeners and changed the recording industry forever. Auto-tune is the plug-in most widely used in the recording industry today. When engaged, Auto-tune can correct the pitch of an entire vocal/instrumental melody or can be used to correct individual notes. It can turn the most average of singers into a pitch-perfect performer. At Auto-tune’s core is a mathematical formula called autocorrelation. Prior to Auto-tune’s inception, this formula was used to determine suitable drilling sites for oil companies. Andy Hildebrand, a seismologist, was successfully using this formula throughout the 1990’s to save oil companies millions of dollars. After being asked to create a program to fix out of tune vocals, Hildebrand began to tweak with autocorrelation and had a working solution for pitch correction by the end of 1996. In the same way that autocorrelation helps engineers to detect drilling sites, Auto-tune employs the formula to find the correct pitches for any given melody. The only information that Auto-tune needs is the key signature of the song and then it fixes the out of tune notes in real time.
Auto-tune has been used not only for pitch correction, but also as a vocal effect. First heard in Cher’s 1998 hit, “Believe,” Auto-tune was used to give her voice an otherworldly sound or the effect of singing underwater. The effect was achieved by adjusting Auto-tune’s retune speed. By setting the retune speed to zero, the input pitch is changed to the output pitch instantly and the resulting sound is both jarring and automated. Increasing the retune speed allows for more natural pitch correction and this technique is Auto-tune’s most commonly used feature today.
“I think Pro Tools is highly inappropriate to record music... It's too easy to correct mistakes; it's too easy to fix things. We hear this sort of clean, plastic perfection that's been applied to all the tracks. That is not the kind of music we grew up loving and listening to and wanting to be a part of.”- Jack White (White Stripes, The Raconteurs)
It has become too easy to fix the little imperfections that used to add character to a song. If Auto-tune had been available during the recording of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s…” Ringo Starr’s “sang out of tune” line would be sung in tune. Even in this age of Auto-tune, there are some vocalists who refuse to use it. “Come Away with Me,” Norah Jones’ 2002 debut hit contains vocal imperfections as the singer delicately slides into notes with great emotional effect. With Auto-tune these would all be removed, eliminating the human element. In its place, we hear a false sense of perfection that is often exposed when we hear a live performance that sounds shockingly different to the album cut. Auto-tune has created a generation of lazy singers. Knowing that an engineer is going to fix any mistakes, a singer no longer needs to strive for something better. After a few takes, the engineer selects parts out of each and melds them together to create something fake. This part is then processed with Auto-tune and reverb to further enhance perfection. Artists like Aretha Franklin and Bruce Springsteen made recordings that contain a passion, energy, a vibrancy that I find missing in a great deal of modern-day recordings. The songs created before all of this technology were so emotional because the voice was human. Unprocessed, raw, and pure.
And there was a great deal of humanity present on all aspects of yesterday’s recording process. Men and women hard at work behind the glass performed the tasks of today’s computers. Bands used to gather together in one room in order to write and record. Now the recording process is happening alone in a bedroom or in different time zones, as musicians are able to send audio files over the Internet. We are replacing the human effort with the more efficient, closer-to-perfection computer process. In turn, we have lost something. This could explain why there is currently a movement to return to analog recording. For years, third-party developers have been hard at work trying to make digital software that emulates analog recording. Why is that? Because the sounds of the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s are worth imitating. Each decade brought forth its own unique sound that shaped the music of that time. The music changed because the people changed as well. Now, in this current age of computer-perfected music, I hear no distinctive sound. We have replaced the organic recording process and, in turn, we have lost our voice. Popular radio is filled with a conglomeration of sounds from all decades as artists search for their voice. In a way, the computer has brought all of these sounds together in one unified time period. But we are very much lost, as computers are not affected by current events. The hiss and hum of analog tape and vinyl recordings is replaced with a crystal clear digital sound. The music of the digital age is missing something that analog recording captured. Our technology has certainly surpassed our humanity.
Pro Tools and other software have effectively replaced the need for the recording studio. For the first time in history, recording technology is accessible for anyone with a computer. This software opens up the world of recording for countless artists who would otherwise be unable to afford studio time. It is a time to celebrate the young artist rising up without the hassle of dealing with a major record label. These are all good things and it is an exciting time. However, no matter how fantastic the technology gets, nothing will ever match the experience of trained professionals coming together to create. An amateur using Pro Tools will create an “amateur sounding” album because he lacks the training and experience of a professional. There will always be a difference between the amateur user, dabbling in recording, and the trained audio engineer. These technological advancements will continue to diminish the need for musicians, producers and engineers, but the computer will never fully replace the work of a human being. A computer can never match the creative capacity and cathartic effort of humanity. There is an energy that exists when people come together to create music and the end result is better than the sum of its parts. I feel that computers make everything too mechanical and all we hear is individual parts. Yes, Pro Tools can quantize sounds, and crossfades make everything crisp and clear, but there is still something missing. Computers cannot synthesize the chemistry that is clearly present on so many classic recordings. Would “Born in the U.S.A.” sound the same if Bruce Springsteen was accompanied by a computer instead of the powerful E. Street Band? Would the wail of Mick Ronson’s wah-soaked guitar found on “The Man Who Sold the World” sound the same if he had run his guitar through a digital processor? These and numerous other classic recordings will go down in history as purely human effort.
Many will insist that Pro Tools and Auto-tune are just ushering in the next era of recording. Like the invention of distortion and the electric guitar before that, technological advances are necessary steps in the evolution of music. But my concern with this latest advancement is that humanity is being replaced. The electric guitar enabled acoustic guitar players to create the earliest sounds of rock and roll. Distortion allowed them to play with an expanded vocabulary of effects. All of these innovations enhanced the music-making process, but did not replace it. Pro Tools and Auto-tune have replaced teamwork and hard effort. In order to find this generation’s sound, we must look past all of these technological advancements and re-discover the music that inspired us. The music that lies between the grooves of the vinyl 45’s, covered in dust, lying dormant in boxes, attics, and garages, waiting to be awakened from their long slumber.
