lindsmuse
I was listening to a bit of Adele yesterday and I don't know. It sounds Photoshopped ? I can understand the need for fantastic studio work to play thro fantastic sound systems, but to have a voice that has perfected rawness to a degree that the emotion is gone? I know this exists in a lot of popular music today - but when you're singing blues surely there's got to be some messiness, grit. It's just not organic enough (for me). But she has an incredible voice. Maybe this is just the new Blues. And I don't get it.
Bob-Dubery
Well there's a lot of things that producers and engineers do today just because they can do those things. Joe Boyd says that he never sampled, never used a drum machine etc etc, but those were not options available to him on most of the albums he produced, so he didn't resist that much temptation (though if you think about it, some of the things that George Martin and the Beatles got up amount to sampling, at least in terms of intent). So one reason engineers & producers do things these days is because they CAN. If recording technology had been magically advanced forty years then Aretha Franklin might have made very different sounding records.
That said, I do think that sometimes modern records sound better in many respects but also a bit sterile. This doesn't mean that the actual artist doesn't have skills that stack up to whatever we think the golden age might be.
It's an interesting observation actually. And possibly accurate. These days a lot of "photoshopping" is possible, though not necessarily done in every case. There used to be a guy named Julian who worked at McGibbon's. He was a pretty good bass player. He told me a tale of a session that he did that he thought had gone quite well. But after he'd been in the studio the producer/engineer used software to edit his bass parts and align every note he'd played perfectly with the drums (also edited) and some synth parts (either edited or generated by software). Everything was forced into what was judged (not by the players) to be perfect alignment. Which left it sounding a little more perfect, a little more mechanical, a little less human. Julian asked not to be credited because the bass parts that ended up on the record were not what he had actually played. Generally I think a lot of contemporary records sound sort of shiny but shallow.
