OFF: ABB, _Fillmore East, 1970_

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On tis 7 jul 1998 23.02 -0400 "Paul Mather" <paul at GROMIT.DLIB.VT.EDU> wrote:

> Carl writes:
>>      That never bothered me--I mean, I appreciate the purity of an
>> original recording, but I also appreciate that you *can* take two
>> partially good recordings and make one excellent recording out of
>> them.  If it sounds good, do it.  It's not like they're trying to
>> deceive you or anything: they've simply said, "We've spliced it."
>> So what the hey :)
>
> Hey, I love _The Fillmore Concerts_, but do too much of that studio
> trickery and you start messing with people's minds! :-)  Where does the
> line between studio and live performance end?  How much messing can you
> do and still call it live?

     Well, _that_ is an old question which has been an issue well
before people came up with clever digital editing techniques.
There are plenty of "live" albums out there that are not entirely
so!

> And, you fix up too much in the studio and
> you create a false impression of what the band are like live.  Start
> polishing it too much, and it begins to become too fake.  Call me daft,
> but I actually *like* the little flubs, mistakes, and recoveries, like
> leaving in the "sorry... power failure" bit in _Hawklords Live_... ;-)

     Sure, so do I.  But I don't think it really creates a false
impression of what a band is like live if you say "we edited
together different performances".  Then everyone knows that the
track they're hearing never truly existed outside of recorded
media.  I put it down to whether they claim it's fully live and
it isn't, or not.
     Where do we classify Brock's banks of tapes and MIDI stuff?

     I suppose, in a sense, that even a live recording with
no overdubbing or later additions is often remixed for a better
sound on the record.  Is it still live if some weird screw-up
dropped bass out of the PA mix briefly, but it still went to
the tape and therefore ends up on the live album? :)

     Perhaps instead of parental warning stickers we should
campaign for studio-trickery stickers, just so that everything
is up front :)

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
Dept. of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, & Celtic
St. John's College, University of Cambridge
mailto:cea20 at cus.cam.ac.uk
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~carl/