Watched the second episode. Not as much fun as the first. The focus on the technology resulted into too much lesser music being used.
E.g., Tomorrow Never Knows is technically innovative. But it really isn’t that great of a song. So the effects wowed a bunch of producers and such. Who cares?The song is nearly unlistenable unless you’re stoned.
The disasters that resulted from having too many tracks and trying to use them plus spending months in the studio could have a better representative than Tusk. I’d go with After Bathing at Baxter’s myself.
Without explicitly saying so, this episode makes a really good case for how looping is bad for music. A tiny variation on each phrase enriches the song.
I’m surprised they mention the tech goofs of the early days of stereo. “Hey, let’s put the drums on the right track and the guitars on the left track. That’s what stereo means, right?”
My wife was telling me to come watch it last night but I was so wrapped up in trying to finish The Italian Boy that I only caught the last 10 minutes or so, but that little bit I saw made me want to watch the whole series. I’m a performing songwriter and sometimes home recorder so it’s very interesting stuff for me.
Just finished Episode 3: The Human Instrument. I would have preferred quite a bit less time devoted to Autotune, but the interviews with different singers were great and added quite a bit to the show. I got to hear a lot of artists I wouldn’t normally have listened to, owing to my musical tastes, and that was awesome. I liked the section with Imogen Heap (I knew her name but had never heard any of her music). Christina Aguilara impressed me the most, tho. She came across as quite intelligent and self-reflective and the song they focused on was awesome. Linda Perry, who produced that track, was terrific as well.
Uh, I hope this isn’t gonna spoil the show for anyone if I offer commentary on each episode. If it is, lemme know and I’ll start using spoiler boxes.
ETA: I did keep thinking how absurd a lot of what they were talking about was with respect to my favorite genres. There’s no fucking Autotune in metal. \m/
…says the guy whose genre introduced Cookie Monster vocals.
If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.
Again, without seeing it yet (all episodes set to DVR!), autotune has certainly been pervasive as studio artifact in modern music that it is worth a big focus on this series. No surprise that Adele appears to be featured as a counter example. And yeah, Christine Aguilera has always been able to sing and knows the business. And Linda Perry knows her stuff - a top player today. I watched an episode of her reality series about discovering and working with new talent. I thought the one I saw was great, and Perry showed how she leads in a studio, but couldn’t get my kids to watch it with me.
Well, that’s kind of my point. The show did spend a bit of time exploring the fact that many of the most revered and popular vocalists are people who can’t sing as well as lots of people, but they have a voice with unique qualities that makes them stand out. They showed Tom Waits to illustrate this, and Ben Harper talked about his own voice, etc. but they could have also shown us more of Janis Joplin, Louis Jordan, etc.
I know that the focus of this is on pop music, but by ignoring other genres of music, they marginalize those other genres. And the technical aspect of being able to do CMV isn’t small nor is the ability to record that well. There are today hundreds of metal acts who’s vocals range from operatic to cookie monster to pig squeal to frog-in-a-blender-on-helium, and some acknowledgement of that as an artistic development and the technical challenges (both physical for the singer and technological for the producer) would have been welcome, IMO.
The program is called “soundbreakers”, a pun on the word “groundbreakers”, after all.
All true, and would be great for folks like you and me, but I suspect they are aiming for mainstream pop, which in the 60’s through the early 90’s had much more Rock / Guitar-based genres in it.
Agreed (I watched the “Human Instrument” episode last night). The show’s creators are likely having to strike a balance between “artists who have a very interesting style or point-of-view” and “artists and genres with which most viewers are going to be familiar.” At a certain level, this is an “inside baseball” series, and if they go too far inside, they’ll lose the more casual audience.
I agree with both of you; I did mention that “I know that the focus of this is on pop music”. Doesn’t mean I can’t point out inequities, tho.
Because once they started focussing on the singers, they kind of stopped focusing on “stories from the cutting edge of recorded music”. The 8 minutes spent on Christina Aguilera were not about anything “cutting edge” in any way, shape or form, for instance. It fits with “stories” and “recorded music”, but that’s it. Now talking about what they had to do to record George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher properly, that might fit the whole tagline.
I set the DVR to record the series but had already missed the first two episodes before seeing this thread. I downloaded the PBS app on my phone and tried to watch the first ep last night. Right after the Elvis segment and just as the Beatles segment was starting, I got an error message about not being able to play this media on this device, and it kicked me out. I’m going to try again over the weekend and see if I can get caught up.
Episode 4: Going Electric was fantastic. Again, they skipped over a lot of influential people, but what they presented was clear, concise and informative. The section on the electric guitar was great. Loved the bits about Charlie Christian (a criminally under-known guitarist). I thought the section on Jimi Hendrix was excellent. Once they moved to the synth, I thought they did a great job although they could have given a bit more info on Bob Moog. The EDM section was very good, but I would have liked some inclusion and recognition of Bruce Haack, a true innovator. All in all, tho a very good episode; I enjoyed it somewhat more than Episode 3.
ETA: I ordered the Blu-Ray from Amazon. I have a feeling I’ll want to watch this again and again, and I don’t want to have to rely on PBS keeping it on servers so I can stream it. Thanks again to HyacinthBucket for posting about this. I don’t watch TV so I would not have known about this program without your OP.
I caved and watched the first episode. So fun. Like who they are featuring, why they were picked, and how this documentary portrays them. I love the fact that Stories are being told, and the insights about recording are embedded within the stories. Coaxing Elvis out of his shell, and reminding Johnny Cash who he is.
Watched the next two - a fine way to spend a Sunday morning. Really good and again, I am please with the story-based approach and the examples. Featuring Bessie Smith at the start of Ep3 and showcasing the innovation if using a microphone for Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra was very cool.
ftg - don’t know what to say about Tomorrow Never Knows, but man I love how it was featured along with Rain.
One clunker: Ben Harper is a fine musician but doesn’t know Talk Boxes and should not have been allowed to speak about them. Talk Boxes do NOT “send an electronic frequency down your throat” - I don’t even know what that means. Talk boxes send the actual sound of the instrument into your mouth, instead of to a speaker. You shape the sound with your mouth and it goes into the mic you are singing into for loudness. So if you make an Oooooo shape with your mouth, that guitar/piano/synth sound is shaped so the frequencies emphasized by the Ooooo shape are the ones hitting the mic in front of your mouth.
And no, Autotune is NOT an attempt to replicate a Talk Box. It is what it sounds like: something meant to correct minor pitch issues that imparts its own artifacts onto a vocal track if you mess with the autotune’s controls in an extreme way vs. the subtle way intended. Yes, an Autotune can have a Wah-ish effect on the vocal, like a Talk Box, but they could not be more different otherwise. I mean, WTF?
But that is a nit in an overall wonderful series so far.
Aye; I was scratching my head at that too, but having him on that episode was worth it when he admits that he’s heard other people cover his songs and do them better than he did. I don’t like much of his music, but I respect the guy a lot and the humility in being able to assess a cover that way is a part of that respect.
No idea why they didn’t go to Peter Frampton to talk about the Talk Box; he’s prolly the best known (and most tasteful) user of one in all of pop music history.
