In the meantime, I’m fortunate enough to have been brought into the fold of an informal group of audio professionals and studio owners that gets together once a month to have a few beers and talk shop. While we all share an obsessive, pedantic passion for audio production and music in general, these guys actually record, engineer and/or master for a living, so every time we meet up I learn something new. It’s sort of like a Star Chamber of audio pros, only the agenda revolves more around A-B testing masters and remasters or trading horror stories about troublesome clients than meting out vigilante justice. Not to give these guys any ideas...
We kicked off the last meet-up with us listening to the original CD release of AC/DC’s High Voltage vs. the remastered edition. There was more air, clarity and high end in the original, and more bass and mids in the remaster, but I seemed to be in the consensus in being able to appreciate the unique qualities of both. As a lifelong heavy rock fan that definitely leans and mixes towards a more modern, “bottom heavy” rock sound, I instinctively preferred the sheer power of the highly compressed remaster; it sounded even more “analog” and wet, more like a modern rock record from Weezer, Green Day or Foo Fighters. But as a number of people pointed out, the remaster lost finer details like the sparkle of the cymbals and hi-hat, and the grit of Bon Scott’s voice. The verdict: it’d be nice to have a remaster that was more in the middle of the two. Sometimes a remaster isn’t necessarily “better,” it’s just different. And we all agreed that some remasters can just sound plain worse than the original CD release.
Next, someone brought in bounced but separated tracks for Marvin Gay’s “Mercy Mercy Me” that have apparently been floating around the dark side of the interweb for some time now, along with some Queen songs and David Lee Roth’s vocal track from “Runnin’ with the Devil” (priceless if you ever stumble across it.) I’ve always loved this song, but to hear its individual arrangement tracks parsed out and selectively muted like this, and in a professional listening environment, was a truly enlightening and, yes, almost spiritual experience.
Listening in this way struck me on a number of levels. The first was from a sheer arrangement standpoint. The final song is such a masterful example of multitrack craftsmanship and production that even upon closer listening, I doubt I’d have been able to identify every group of tracks in the song: percussion, strings, sax, piano, background vocals… and without having written them down, I honestly can’t even remember the “hidden” stuff that stood out. I was amazed by the dichotomy between the grace and simplicity of the melody and individual tracks, and the broad, sweeping tapestry of the song itself, the sum of its parts breathtaking in its scope, virtuosity and cohesion.
But it was Marvin’s vocal track that made the biggest impression. We had several people in the room, but when Marvin sang, you could have heard a pin drop. All of us have heard this song so many times on the radio, in advertisements, the PA at Starbucks… everywhere. It’s a timeless, ubiquitous, universally beloved classic. But I can’t recall the last time I’d given it a concerted, critical listen, and I don’t think I ever have (I’ve since bought what’s widely considered Gaye’s best album, What’s Going On?). I never realized how much passion, expression and range he possessed as a singer before listening to the vocal track on its own. To hear someone in such full command of his instrument as a means of personal expression, along with the performance itself, filled me with reverence and sadness. I realized how much distance there’d been between me and the song before hearing it broken down and made whole again in a professional listening environment. Hearing it on the radio, in an ad, at the doctor’s office, through the TV as a music video or for the 900th time in your lifetime is just that—hearing it at a distance. Truly listening to it is an entirely different story. (OK, I’m copping this notion and paraphrasing from a mediocre movie, “White Man Can’t Jump,” but it works).
It’s interesting that the next thing we talked about was on a related “note.” Someone had mentioned a recent experience at a concert where they noticed that a lot of people weren’t really watching the show—they were too busy taking pictures and footage on their cell phones and cameras. This raised a question: Can you really be appreciating a show while you’re busy “watching” it through your tiny cell phone screen? This turned into a philosophical discussion as well (As philosophical as it could be while noshing on crackers and Tacate, anyway…) Why, we mused, are concertgoers compelled to do all this documenting of the experience, rather than just enjoy it? To share, of course, and/or to show off (“I’m here!/I was there!”) And mobile devices allow us to do this these days, so why not. I’m guilty of it, too: I spent the first two, three minutes watching the Police concert last summer through my cell as I snapped and sent (crappy, grainy) photos. Seeing my favorite band of all time for the first time was a milestone of sorts in my life, so I knew I’d have to stop that nonsense soon, and I did. Even then, I didn’t take for granted that I was compromising the experience by engaging it distracted and secondhand.
We do this every day with our music. We take pictures of the concert instead of watching and listening; “hear” compressed MP3s on iPods over city noise; have our favorite songs badly interpreted and co-opted by Target, Nike or some hack music video director; play it on a portable iPod player (the old term would have been “boombox”) at a barbeque to serve as the social and sexual backdrop it’s supposed to provide at the basest level. The effect of listening to music at this distance, through these various filters and multiple levels of “degradation” is akin to the decrease in reproductive quality of successive “analog” photocopies or cassette dubs. None of this is supposed to serve as an indictment, but rather an observation that speaks to my own yearning to make more effort to get closer to the music I listen to more often. Most of the time, it’s sufficient to simply listen with no distractions on a great set of speakers, or even better—for those of us with neighbors and without thousand-dollar speakers—in the dark with a pair of headphones on. To provide another recent example, my ear never picked up or appreciated John Cale before my bass player played me some vinyl through his turntable and stellar set of Event monitors.
I keep relearning that truly listening, with no generational, technological or aesthetic degradation or filter in between helps anyone appreciate the artistry and craftsmanship of any recording on a completely different level. Most importantly, it helps bridge those all-too-common gaps and degradations between the artist’s intention and their audience’s appreciation.
What’s your favorite way to get closer to your music?
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