Bob Dubery wrote
Or there's the live Sandy Denny album that I bought. Nearly all the lead guitar parts were redone for the current pressing. The "official" story is that the tapes were damaged and the original parts lost, but I now read that various boxed sets have tracks from the same show with no fixing and re-recording and everything sounds hunky dory.
That's possible. The old nitrocellulose tapes are notorious for having the oxide flake off after 2+ years - especially the multitrack tape. Often the two track master will be intact which can be cleaned up to some degree, but if they want to go in and remaster it properly, the multitrack recording is essential and if that's damaged, there may be no option other than re-recording the damaged tracks.
Quick aside - I must say, I've been very impressed with some of the modern remasters of old and bootleg material lately. One that blew me away is the Dylan
Live '66 bootleg (the one with the "Judas!" catcalling) - I've heard the original bootlegs (my wife is a Dylanophile) and they are pretty bad quality, but the remaster is pristine.
I'm not saying that this is deceptive. In fact there's a case to be made against "warts and all" live recordings.
I can understand both approaches. Any artist understandably wants the best recorded representation of their work. Also, for live performances, if there is technology that helps with the performance to make it a more enjoyable for the audience, why not? Make the live performance as good as possible and capture that accurately.
However, I don't like the idea of taking a recording of a live performance and overdubbing in the studio, that does feel a bit like "cheating" to me.
Of course there is a third (Zappa) approach - record every single live performance and then use parts recorded on different nights (or in different years in some cases) to replace the questionable parts. That way every part is live, but still represents the best possible performance.
But I do think somewhere there's a line that can get crossed. I've read recently about things like "auto-tune" (better known as the "Cher effect") being used in concert to correct pitch problems on the fly. What you hear coming out of the speakers may not be what the singer actually put into the microphone.
There's a way to cure a vocalist of relying on Autotune - set it to the wrong key or raise the overall pitch by a semitone. When they complain, tell them their Autotune has developed a fault and that it does that sometimes. They will never want to use it live again. Or maybe I'm just evil and like doing things like that to vocalists...
