I will open by saying that all of the opinions, negative and positive you are about to read in this post apply to me and to any music I have ever produced. I developed these opinions from my own personal experiences and observations of other one-man-band type musicians I got a chance to listen to or talk to over the years. It is also worth mentioning that when I refer to music, I usually mean music that involves organic instruments played by humans. I'm not saying that I don't consider other genres music, it's just a matter of personal taste and what I happen to write about.
The "One Man Band" Indie Phenomenon
In the past two decades developments in personal computing technologies made music recording and production accessible to anyone who owns a computer and some basic tech skills. All you have to do is grab an audio interface, a microphone and a pair of headphones and start recording. There are tons of tools and tutorials to guide and help you almost at any level, and if you have some talent and ambition, you'll be producing decent sounding music with surprisingly good results in no time! However, there is a difference between recording and producing in a home studio and a one-man-band indie musician. A one-man-band is one person taking the role of the artist, multi-instrument performer, arranger, recording engineer, producer, mixer, mastering engineer, cover art designer, distributor and I bet I missed some. This type of do-it-all musicians is very common these days, because technology made it possible, but primarily because it is appealing to many people for many different reasons.
Freedom of Expression
Being able to do it all yourself means the freedom to choose your art direction, the parts, the instruments, stay connected to your true self and do everything from the right place. Well, I'm not sure. But I'm sure that no matter how talented an individual is, s/he can only make so many "right" decisions in so many different areas of expertise and craftsmanship. It's pretty simple; being a great lyricist doesn't make you a good arranger. Being a great guitarist doesn't make you a good mixer. Being a great producer doesn't make you a good drummer. But even if you are the greatest in all of these roles, performing them all at once at your peak is simply impossible. One of the vital things you need in order to be able to perform well in any of these roles is perspective. But when your brain is occupied with thoughts about the angle of a microphone, it necessarily pays less attention to the performance of your vocal line. And in what mental state do you think you are going to reach the moment where you need to deliver your best guitar solo ever, after struggling with ten other totally unrelated things for an hour, preparing for this moment? Is that how you imagined freedom?
The Deceit of Technology
So, as you probably understand by now, I find it hard to believe that anyone can perform well simultaneously in so many different roles. But technology can surely help. You have amp simulations, hundreds of gigs of sampled instruments, IR reactive load box, re-amp boxes, pitch-correction software, auto-quantise, and motorised faders, just spill your guts out and give the world your music! Well, these surely can help and I'm not getting into the discussion of whether or not some of them are even legitimate and when. They are all very popular tools and a solid fact in the music industry for years, whether you are an indie artist or working with the biggest studios on the planet. My problem is not necessarily with the tools, but with what they do to our minds and the recklessness in which they are applied these days.
That can be a somewhat sensitive topic, but I'll try to explain what I mean nevertheless. If you are a do-it-all kind of musician, you are rarely a drummer, or at least not a great drummer. Let's assume that I'm tight for the sake of the argument. So you need a great drum part, and you have it all in your mind, but you can't perform it, because you're not a drummer. So you program it onto a grid in your DAW, or perform it on some midi triggering pads. When you're done, you quantise it, so it aligns with the metronome, because you need to overdub bass next. When you follow that process for the first few times, it's a struggle. It is, because when you're done, it is simply not the drum part you heard in your head at the beginning. Even if all the right notes are there, something isn't right. The dynamics, the swing, the "feel", something is missing and it's hard to tell what it is (in some of my productions it's not hard at all actually). But over time, you get tired of the struggle and you accept the fact that it's never going to sound like the John Bonham in your head, or maybe you start hearing it quantised in your head in the first place. Either way, you just do it and move on to tracking bass and the rest of the instruments. And in almost every track there are more and more small compromises that you make with or without a little push from all the great technology that surrounds you, because it's there, it's convenient and it gets you through. So, before you realize it, you become a part of the computer and when you are ready to export the final mix, you can't hear it anymore.
A More Personal Angle
I am not a professional musician. I make what I hope to be called music when I have the time and only when the moon is in the right phase. I do it for my own pleasure and I do it completely alone, simply because I have a very demanding day job and no one accessible I can collaborate with when I do have some time. I started recording myself more than ten years ago and I definitely feel and hear a very significant progress in my recording and production skills. But if I leave the fact that I simply can't play some of the instruments I often record, the one thing I can't get over is fulfilling all these roles simultaneously. Having to deal with the production side of things, which fascinates me, simply kills my creative energy. There were countless tracks I started working on and dropped in the middle, or before they even started, because I got distracted by technical stuff, lost interest and just moved on. That is a huge source of frustration to me and I believe that it affects anyone who tries to do everything on his/her own, to some extent. And I'm sure that even for those who are able to perform relatively well under all these hats, the end result is greatly affected by the mental load and the technology that claims to help manage it.
Working Together
Finding other musicians to work with can be difficult, and only lucky groups manage to develop synergy and maintain it over time. But to me, that is a necessity. If I look at my favorite bands I love, they are all a bunch of good musicians who complement each other in a way that allows magic to happen. They don't have to be virtuosos on their instruments, they don't have to have the greatest lyrics or even be provocative in any way. They need an artistic vision and the ability to realize it as a group. Not everyone has to be equally talented, or contribute equally, but everybody has to serve the musical vision whatever that means. Few things come close to recognizing good chemistry between musicians, whether you are a player experiencing it first hand, or watching a band play and seeing and feeling it happening in front of you. That is music!
To me, good music is an organic thing. It is a language that conveys emotions and complex ideas that in turn ignite feelings and thoughts in the listener's mind. These are some of the things that computer algorithms and technology can't do properly yet. But the bottom line should be that anything that helps me realize my vision is great. Anything that forces my work into a frame because of technical limitations or on the flip side distracts me into endless possibilities, prevents me from realizing my vision. It can sometimes be a fellow musician, it can be a piece of software or a broken instrument, and it can always be me...
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