the playback

By Robbie on January 1, 2012

When you're in a studio and trying to guide a recording of a performance toward an optimal state, there's this crucial stage of the playback. I'm speaking, as I have to, of my own little corner of the world. Here, writer and performer and producer are the same person, group performances in real time constitute the recording or at least its essence, sound engineering is someone else's task, and money is restricted. You, the artist, have already made the blueprint, the constructed song, as shining and bulletproof as you can -- in this capacity you're like an architect. You've cast the piece with musicians, like a contractor, and hammered out parts and form like a carpenter.

Now you hear the whole back for the first time, with the clock running, and are instantly at a crossroads. The piece stands largely revealed, as never before. Not infrequently deflation and disappointment rush in: this, whatever polish and chippings-away you might add, is going to be the broad shape and sound of the thing, and it's less than soul-stirring. Should you strangle the baby in its cradle? I hardly ever have the heart for this; for some reason I try to work with and shape a defective performance/recording as best I can, soldiering on with someone whose miscasting is suddenly manifest, or a sum of knob-tweakings too complex for me to analyze and unthread. Then I'll discard it, days or weeks later, after it's "done."

Whether you're happily or unhappily surprised with the sound of your work at this stage, the use of the playback time for the application of rational intelligence to piecemeal quality improvements is, curiously enough, the same. You might change one guitar or microphone for another, sit over here instead of there, add a bar to the end of a chorus, sing this line more from the pit of your stomach, and so on. You, or anyway I, tend not to act radically. I don't head home and rewrite, I don't replace the drummer, I don't axe the song and move on to another. Conversely, I also don't jump in the air with a click of the heels and say: Voila! Exactly it! Done. The logic of playback always seems to point to tinkering, and the tinkering suspiciously tailors itself to the affordable time.

I heard about a different and fascinating use of playback time a couple years ago from a friend who had worked on a record produced by T Bone Burnett. I was curious to hear any and all details about his work methods. "You know the usual routine of recording, where you finish playing a take and then go into the control room to listen back to what you've done?" I said yes, though I was surprised to hear it presented in such a way, like the part of the morning where you get out of bed and put on your pants. "Well, I found it very interesting that T Bone would often do that routine, but he wouldn't play back what we had just played. Instead, he'd play back other music. Hank Williams records, for instance. And we wouldn't even discuss it, we'd just listen to the music and enjoy it, and then return to the floor and play the song again." 

This story stayed with me and got me thinking more critically about the function and possible shortcomings of studio playback. I also heard, from another friend, about the creative process of a well-known and wealthy band whose record he worked on. This group booked a studio for a few weeks and, instead of coming in with pre-written pieces, messed around with progressions and grooves, recording all their improvisations and meanderings. Then the lyricist went home for a spell and used the most promising sections of tape to contsruct more proper songs. Not a playback story, but like the T Bone Burnett story, it points to a weakness in a recording routine in which playback, with its logic of conscientiously shaving away at a sculpture whose essential countours are pre-set, is a crucial element. Extended in-studio improvisation is an indulgence denied to the 99%, but the method is a smart reflection on the accidental and time-inefficient way in which a lot of (most?) great art comes to a completed form. The goal is to make something beautiful and highly accomplished, and something that sounds like you and no one but you. Given that, and given the way Hank Williams records sound, how likely is it that the goal is reachable by an altogether rational and efficient procedure?

I was all too happy to rethink the conventional logic of playback, because I've grown to be uneasy with that part of record-making. When you work so long to get your music to the point of memorializing it, and the playback lays before your ears something that is a good deal different from what you had imagined (as it always does), the next step has always felt a bit uncertain to me. Should I redouble my efforts to direct the piece back to the ideal? Or use what's there as a fresh starting-point, either embracing the unexpected into the scheme or picking out a few plausibly malleable components to coax the whole partway back toward the first conception? I've never found a satisfactory answer. Moreover I blanch at "directing" others whose skills and playing personalities I admire, much less using psychological and motivational goads on them, as an effective coach does. Then there's the time factor. Typically you might record two takes, then repair to the engineer's room and listen to both, then discussion ensues, with sometimes a too-many-cooks effect. Play, listen, blabber. This regimen can easily result in most of your valuable studio time frittering away on non-music-making activities.

So on my most recent studio effort, the month before last, I resolved to minimize playback -- almost eliminate it, if I could -- and see what happened. In place of all the listening and tinkering, we would create more takes to choose from, an approach made feasible to the 99% in the age of digital tools. To get the songs in shape, we played them for several days previous, at home and in a couple clubs, and I had had the advantage of listening back to all of that. I used those private listening sessions to make notes both broad and niggling on tempos and seeming weaknesses in structure and performance, things like that. Then, the first morning in the studio, we all listened back to our playing to get the sound of our instruments the way we wanted. After that, playback was very limited. We mostly played. I used the time savings to record 8 or 9 takes instead of the 4 or 5 I'd usually do, and to record some unrehearsed, off-the-cuff tunes for fun.

I'm left with a not inconsiderable stack of discs full of musical efforts I've not yet heard. It seems to me quite possible that weaknesses in song performance work themselves out without verbal direction and even conscious choice, if you have good players playing the songs repeatedly and listening well to each other. Like an organic, unplanned, Adam Smith effect: the invisible ear. And it seems possible that a series of takes, without leaderly direction in between, will incorporate a series of smaller mistakes, some endearing and some not; whereas the same series with guidance and direction will also incorporate sundry missteps, but under an official banner of movement to a higher state which could well be totally illusory. On the other hand, it's possible that leaving takes unheard and performers largely undirected is just a rationalized way to avoid work. We'll see, and I'll let you know what I find.