HW: TMTYL

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 09:20:24AM -0500, Carl Edlund Anderson typed out:

	<snip>

> So I don't think the perceived problem in Hawkwind's case is  
> necessarily that of digital vs. analogue, even though surely Brock &  
> Co. probably have more years of experience in the analogue realm than  
> the digital.  I think it's more that recording with a system like  
> Logic makes it incredibly easy to apply fantastic amounts of tweaking  
> and processing to everything, to add new layers than then tweak and  
> process them into the middle of next week as well.  This is an  
> awesome temptation for the musician!  And I think this is what  
> results in the kind of "muffled" sound Mike refers to -- it's  
> something I've noticed more an more of over the last decade or so of  
> Hawkwind records, particularly in the most recent studio outputs.  I  
> think they (or Dave anyway) are just overcooking everything,  
> producing everything to death with piles of tweaking and effects.   
> When you've been working on a track for a few months and have become  
> way to familiar with every part in it, you adjust a few extra things  
> here and there and slip some new bit in -- and suddenly it sounds  
> great to you again .... But to the casual listener who never heard it  
> before, and may never hear it until they buy the disc, rip the song  
> to some relatively low bit rate MP3 and crank it through their iPod  
> earbuds ... it just sounds glossily muffled.

	For what it's worth, I think this is on the button. Now that one 
can produce records to professional standard on home equipment the 
pressure is kind of off. I think DarXtar's _Tombola_, which was held up 
for so many years, caught this even worse than TMTYL. A fine album, but 
on headphones the original music sounds almost as if it was being 
broadcast from a speaker in a recess in the studio wall where Søren was 
putting on another year's set of overlays... I think TMTYL caught this 
too to a lesser degree.

	Compare that to the Motörhead-like work ethic of Bedouin, which 
Alan once expressed to me as being ready and able to record all the 
songs first take, because you know them and you can and you may not have 
long in the studio, and it's easy to see how he and the Captain could 
have a difference of opinion about how long it should take to make an 
album... Yours,
		Jon

-- 
"When fortune wanes, of what assistance are quantities of elephants?"
	    (Juvaini, Afghan Muslim chronicler, c. 1206)
 Jon Jarrett, Fitzwilliam Museum, jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk