Re: (TV) never will be another or Slow, Slower, and Slowest

[Joe Hartley <jh@brainiac.com>]

On Sat, 10 Jul 2010 17:20:43 -0700 (PDT)
Jesse Hochstadt <jesseh58@yahoo.com> wrote:
> IIRC, Tom has always been a stickler for getting the right "sound." I'm very far 
> from an expert, but I'd guess this is much harder to do with home recording. 
> Don't studios permit you, for example, to make far more subtle adjustments to 
> the room's acoustics than is readily done at home?

The short answer?  Not really.  While studios are built with acoustics in mind,
and houses rarely are, it's possible to make a completely useable, good sounding
home studio without an enormous outlay of money.  Sound isolation, especially
with electric guitars, is easily achieved with "bogos", basically wooden frames
holding foam sheets that can be moved to keep mikes from picking up extraneous
sounds.

The longer answer is that studios will have more sonic processing gear like
compressors and microphones so that there are greater options to subtly color
the sound, and more people available that know the technical side of audio
engineering to help create the desired sound.

That said, I have never heard that Tom had any real interest in the actual
recording process, which is fine.  He's a musician, so his primary interest
is getting the right sound coming out of the amplifier.  That said, I can't 
forget the story of Tom and the sessions for Bowie's Scary Monsters album,
in which Tom got the axe because "he hired every amp in New York City and 
spent the whole day just playing with them" (according to Tony Visconti.

In this regard, I think Tom and Richard once again show themselves to be
the opposite faces of the same musical coin.  Richard's built out his own
studio and is one of my favorite producers these days because I feel he 
always gets the sound captured and uses the studio to keep that sound rather
than losing the sound a bit in studio manipulation.  (Case in point, take a
disc like The Cover Doesn't Matter or Bibi Farber's Firepop and compare it to
Beck's Sea Change.  They both sound great, but the studio manipulation on Sea
Change is evident.  It's used to great effect, but is a definite layer of
abstraction between the instruments and the listener.  Cover to me has a more
immediate sound that keeps the studio as transparent as possible.  That is a
*lot* harder than it sounds, because there's actually a lot of processing that
happens on that record, it's just that Richard manages to make it feel natural.)

I have had a small studio for years, and have recorded different people and 
bands in there.  One of the biggest factors for success is the decisiveness
of the artist in achieving and capturing the sound that they want.  If a guitar
player comes in with a sound already dialled in, then I can capture that and
reproduce it in the mix more easily than if they know they want some kind of
echoey, kinda distorted sound, and try to create it on the fly in the studio.
It can be done, but it's a lot more time-consuming.  I think that that's how 
Tom tends to work, and since that relies on external resources, it's what
limits Tom's output.

I would *LOVE* to hear a Tom album produced by Richard, but I know that that's
not going to happen.  I can dream, though.

-- 
======================================================================
       Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh@brainiac.com
 Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa
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