Modern or vintage?

Music trends, latest album reviews...whatever!

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rghvdberg
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by rghvdberg »

Depends on what I'm making. Sometimes I'm making a pure machine like track so everything has to be on the grid.
Sometimes I try to make a more 'live' track and I keep it more 'sloppy'.

I only work with soft-synths (I guess most of you know that by now) so it's all with midi.
I program the drums straight on the grid most of the time .. well always to be honest.
Baselines I usually play on the keyboard and I do quantize that but only to a percentage (80 ~ 90 %)
I like to keep the melody as 'live' as possible but I do have to quantize and clean up a bit but when using pitchbend and modulation you have to be carefull otherwise the alignment of notes and the controller messages don't line up.
Don't have the time to re-record until it's perfect because I have to compose, arrange, record and synthesize all the sounds, in one month.
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by Lyberta »

It depends on the genre. When I do orchestral tracks I record all notes live on my MIDI keyboard because otherwise it feels too artificial.
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by ufug »

I strongly prefer the imperfect. When I hear people describe a band as "tight", it's probably not something I am going to love. :wink:

When I'm recording, I never, ever punch in. A take is a take. I might cut a bad note out later in the mix, but each track is a performance. If it is bad, I delete it and start over. If it is close enough, I keep it. Whether it is good or not is for others to decide, but I want it to sound like me, not a fake version of me.

Lots of great music has "mistakes" be it a flubbed lyric, a buzzing pickup, a squeaky kick pedal, a dead spot on a bass neck, a sloppy harmony.

Take Steely Dan. Lots of people admire how perfect everything is, the writing, the production, the playing. I think it is the blandest music ever. Catchy, great structure, yes. But... yawn. I'd rather hear Hank Williams or Zeppelin or something else with character!
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sysrqer
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by sysrqer »

What you're describing isn't really modern or vintage. There are plenty of records made on modern equipment but retaining noise or imperfections. If any music is made with notes exactly on the grid then that is a creative decision by the maker, not a necessity of it being modern. Loads of completely computerized music is very loose and is nowhere near on the exact grid position.

Sterility is more about the performers than the process in my opinion. If Led Zeppelin time travelled to today to make their first album on the most up to date equipment with the best engineers, mixers, producers, and mastering engineers then it would still be an amazing album and would sound incredible.

Modern music has several problems. in the vintage time records were only made by people who had talent and potential to sell records, which made their recordings good quality. Now anyone can record so people with not much talent record their own music and produce it so and end up with quantized midi and 'clean' overprocessed audio. Also there is the issue that some people are just boring to listen to, you can be great at playing an instrument but that doesn't mean you have any talent at writing. This goes back to the first point, in the 70s we would not have heard these people on records.

If you have soul in what you do, you are good at it, and you have someone who knows what they are doing with recording and producing, then it doesn't matter much about vintage or modern equipment. Listen to DJ Shadow finger drumming on his digital midi drum pads, he can make it sound like any funk drummer from the 70s.
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by folderol »

"sysrqer" hits the nail right on the head. In 19{mmfty}{mmmf} I knew a concert pianist who was absolutely note perfect to the dots, and was boring as hell. So there's nothing new about that.

Personally, I will very occasionally run a click track and play to that if I'm building up something really complex with lots of tracks, otherwise I play out the main idea a few times to get my 'internal' metronome running, then just play through with Rosegarden on record.

A post-processing trick I sometimes use if I want to create a really tight counter-melody against a lead with very fluid timing is to copy the lead track, set a different instrument, then just move the notes up and down in pitch while retaining the time position. After that I'll nudge some of these forward or back a fraction to change the dynamics, and also sometimes change the velocity for emphasis.

P.S. note the words 'sometimes', 'occasionally' :)
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by sadko4u »

beck wrote:There's a lot of modern music. A lot of modern produced and recorded music also.
Music made with modern, almost perfect gear. With each note exact on it's spot on the straight timeline. With all the modern techniques to edit and master everything. Up to a 'perfect' level without any imperfections.
No problem, cause i like to listen to this music with great pleasure. I can freak out on a straight hard baseline of a rave or rap song.

........

I'm curious what you all prefer? And how you do that?
The question is formed in completely wrong way.
The main question is: for whom do you write your music?

If you write music for long-beard beer-bellied men over 50 then probably It's okay. Another way, if you're aiming to become famous and well known then you should better concentrate on mid-age and teen-age public. Most of teens didn't ever hear old recordings, they hear up-to-date music that sounds clean, loud and in most cases 'ideal'. But if you ask an average teen to take a rest, sit down and listen for recodring from 70-s or 80-s, I think, he (or she) will find it boring because it 'sounds like a shit'. So now the up-to-date musician shall sound not modern nor vintage, the up-to-date musician should sound good. That's why sound producing industry actively develops new gear and sound processing units. Because if the recording 'sounds like a shit', it won't compete to other recordings that 'sound good'. Also, the cost of music production has lowered, so now it's very easy to produce high-quality recordings at home. So the sound producing has accelerated, and after Internet came into each house, the distribution of music became very easy. All CD-stamping companies went bankrupt.

The new idustry dictates new rules and new tempo of sound producing. So now if a band didn't produce a song for about half year, it goes out of human minds and only big fans remember something 'about that band'. So now there is no time to sit for one-two years at the studio and record one 4-track album. Today's requirement sounds like this: 'this song should be mixed yesterday'.
The back side of this is that advanced sound producing lowered requirements to artists that dictate new rules of competition for audience. Yes, it's true but if you're talented at composition and performance, then these semi-artists are not competitors to you.
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by chaocrator »

i prefer taking advantages of (ultra)modern rig for jamming the old way.

20 years ago it was hardly possible to imagine a one-man project performing live like a whole band. (i mean, with no pre-recorded loops & loopers — that's the point).
modern technology lets do that, so i'm enjoying :mrgreen:
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by chaocrator »

well, i meant performing live on stage, not studio works.
music i used to listen to 20 years ago (mainly electronic genres) was typically made by one-man or 2-piece projects (and still is).
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by Luc »

chaocrator wrote:well, i meant performing live on stage, not studio works.
music i used to listen to 20 years ago (mainly electronic genres) was typically made by one-man or 2-piece projects (and still is).
Why not 30 years? :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_the_Bass
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by rghvdberg »

beck wrote: Don't underestimate teens. They do grab back on old music.
+1
I do band coaching with kids 8 ~ 20, they love the Peppers, Metallica, Guns & Roses, all the classic bands, etc. They like to play music from modern bands too.
Maybe it's because they make music themselves but they don't show much love for EDM, trap etc.
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by chaocrator »

beck wrote:
chaocrator wrote:well, i meant performing live on stage, not studio works.
Sorry. :oops:
But for that there's a solution too. :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
Image
you got it. now, imagine a laptop and MIDI controllers instead of acoustic instruments :mrgreen:
never liked 80s electronic music. coil is the only exception.
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chaocrator
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by chaocrator »

since i am a drummer, rather something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LkpnZvpqAs

(currently i use Non-Sequencer in trigger mode + a few instances of Machina + qmidiarp, but all that stuff will be replaced by supercollider someday)
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chaocrator
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by chaocrator »

beck wrote:But did you know that lot's off bands often play with a(n electronic) backing track? Even well known famous groups. On stage too. :wink:
so, i want to make backing tracks morphing.
partly depending of what i'm playing, partly using random values generated somehow on the fly (i use a tarot deck for random values 0 to 77, and a coin for boolean).
that's why i'm so interested in tools like finite-state-automata-style sequencers.
these days 1 or 2 laptops have enough computing power to do accompaniment entirely with softsyns, without using any prerecorded audio. and that's awesome.
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by lykwydchykyn »

Started out in the 90's making synth-pop with programmed everything + a little guitar + vocals. Later I got better gear and added in some live bass, and sometimes hand drums or tambourine.
In the late 90's I started making purely electronic music, just instrumentals with synths. I made some stuff with vocals and guitars too, but it still had a lot of programmed tracks.

I got so burnt out on all that.

Today, I use almost entirely live-performance instruments. I still edit the tracks, but not so that everything is perfect, just to remove any "cringe moments" in a performance. And if I can't edit it out easily, I just rerecord.

It's a little more limiting, since my drum skills are basic, and my drum collection consists of a cajone, a hihat, and a smattering of hand-percussion. But I am just so dragged down by the tedium of drum programming these days. I just wanna beat on something and get it done.

It's taken me a few years to work up the skills on enough instruments to express my ideas adequately, but it's worth it to me.
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chaocrator
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Re: Modern or vintage?

Post by chaocrator »

beck wrote:Can't wait to hear some of it. 8)
Love (almost) everything non-standard. Love explorations and new combinations.
well, i certainly will announce on linux-related resources (e.g. here) when i have some recordings ready, but it's not going to happen very soon, since my live setup is still not considered stable enough to be production ready (and i'm not interested to waste my time on conventional studio recordings at all).
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