Before when I wrote songs, every song had its own feel. Snow and Lights made me think of looking out the bay window in the winter down toward the street light in my front yard doing a snow storm. Sleep in Peace made me think of a young couple in a small house packing their things up and moving to a neighborhood like mine. Meaning to Write made me think of driving in my car on an open back road on a clear night. One Day One Night made me think of getting on a plane and flying home and my neighbor's basement and how I would get to and from the airport and how I excited I was to write that song.
Now every song feels like this:
Click for full-size
Boring. Dumb. Emotionless. Empty. Mathematical. MIDI. Plastic. Edited. Talentless. Computerized. Ugh.
Before, whenever I would write a song, I would just close my eyes and practice it over and over and over again at the piano, and recording was done in one shot, over and over and over again, until I played and sang the whole thing through with (almost) zero mistakes. I wasn't micromanaging. I wasn't editing. Plastic perfection wasn't the aim. Just the correct essence of the song. Pro Tools kills that. Now the aim is synthetic perfection. It doesn't matter if your song has a soul or not; Rebecca Black's Friday is regarded as better than Apathy by The Stuff because it's been airbrushed.
If Pro Tools was the only way to record songs, I don't think I ever would have started. And if I ever use it again, it will be long, long after I've cemented what a song is to me, so that its image in my head is of what the song really is, instead of some gray and black computer screen.
Peace out.
2 comments:
...I thought you liked Pro Tools??
Yeah, you're a little bit right about the plasticism of it all...However, the Pro Tools tracks do sound much better during digital playback.
I have a feeling that if you had regular access to a more acoustic venue, your one-shot, non-doctored tracks would be the best-sounding of all.
I was pretty cool with Audacity? But I don't think I ever said I liked Pro Tools ((o_O)) I would be very surprised with myself. And yeah I know they SOUND better, but that doesn't mean the songs ARE better. And it makes me hate songwriting.
And yeah. The Ben Folds Live sound is what I've pretty much always aimed for.
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