The Studio as an Instrument

Multitrack recording lets you put each part on its own track, record them at different times, change any of them without disturbing the others, and mix the result into something that sounds like a performance.

It never happened. Not once. The musicians may never have been in the building together.

Les Paul was doing this by the early 1950s, layering guitars against himself. By the mid-sixties it was the ordinary working method of ambitious popular music, and the consequences went well past convenience.

The first is that arrangement became revisable. A part can be tried, kept, replaced, doubled or removed at any point, so the record is composed rather than captured. Brian Wilson built Pet Sounds this way, and the Beatles' work from Revolver onwards is organised around what the tape machines allowed rather than around what four people could play.

The second is the producer, a role with no live equivalent. Someone is responsible for what the record ends up being: the arrangement, the sound, which take is used, which musicians actually play, sometimes the writing itself. Phil Spector's records are more his than anyone else's. Much of the character of a modern pop record belongs to the producer, and the credit conventions do not reflect that, which is why so many disputes are about it.

The third is space, and this one is almost invisible until you notice it.

Reverb is a claim about where the listener is. A dry, close vocal sits inside your head. A plate reverb puts the singer in a room that does not exist. A long tail places them at the far end of a hall. Every mix positions the listener relative to every source, and those positions are chosen: by people who rarely describe it in those terms and always do it.

Listen to a record and ask where you are standing. The answer is a decision somebody made, and once you start hearing it you cannot stop.

Which brings the standard complaint: a modern pop vocal is assembled from dozens of takes, pitch-corrected and time-aligned, and it is therefore not a real performance.

The description is accurate. The complaint is a category error.

Nobody objects that a film scene was shot out of order over six weeks in three locations, that the reverse angles were filmed a month apart, or that the actor delivered the line forty times. Film is understood as a constructed medium, and we judge the construction.

Recorded music is equally constructed and is still discussed in the vocabulary of live performance, which is where the confusion originates. Pet Sounds, Sgt Pepper, dub, most hip-hop production and nearly all electronic music are objects made in a studio, not documents of anything. Judging them as failed recordings of performances is like judging a film by whether it works as a play.

There is a real and different criticism available, which is worth separating out: that a construction can be so corrected that the human variation carrying the expression is sanded off, leaving something accurate and inert. That criticism applies to particular records rather than to the method, and the best studio-made music is evidence that the method is not the problem.

The honest position is that live performance and recorded music became separate art forms around 1955, and have been growing apart ever since. Both are worth having. They are just not the same thing, and neither is a defective version of the other.