INPUT
The Damaging Effects of
DAW Technology on Musicianship
By Kevin W Herring
A
re today’s digital audio worksta-
tions (DAWs) responsible for im-
proved recordings at the expense
of deteriorating musicianship?
Beat Detective, time stretching/
scrunching, pitch correction, comping a
solo, etc. All are used daily and pervasively
in the hands of top-tier recording engineers
to compensate for deficiencies in musical
performances. The listener becomes the
beneficiary of all this technical wizardry, but
at what cost to the actual musical ability of
the musicians? When is the final product
more dependent upon the engineer’s mas-
tery of this technology rather than the ac-
tual musicianship of the performers? Where
is the incentive to bother singing in pitch
when there is Auto-Tune? Why bother to
play on beat when there is Beat Detective?
Classical music, too, is falling victim
to this trend of leaving it in the hands of
the balance and editing engineer to piece
together a (hopefully) perfectly balanced
and seamless ensemble performance
where none existed in the original record-
ing sessions.
The editing power of current DAWs is
mind-boggling! What were in the past con-
sidered impossible edits have now become
commonplace, run-of-the-mill tasks.
Performing vs. Comping
More and more, musicians schooled in the
playing of their instruments are becom-
ing increasingly incapable of performing
lengthy passages – much less entire move-
ments – flawlessly. Are they becoming
lazy? Or are they attempting to deliberately
mislead the listener into thinking that they
actually can play music that is in reality
beyond their true abilities? The expectation
now is to provide multiple takes of shards of
music, leaving it up to the editing engineer
to stitch it all together. And heaven forbid
that the engineer should botch the nearly
impossible insertion of that one note that
was miraculously played correctly in take
148!
This is not to say that there aren’t
mind-blowingly talented and hard-working
musicians capable of exquisitely sublime
performances both live and in the studio.
They are at the top of their field and are
to be acknowledged for such skill; how-
ever, today’s technology has made it pos-
sible for a second tier of musicians, whose
competence is suspect and who require
technological intervention, to eke out an
acceptable recorded performance.
I started my career during the era of
razor editing of tape, but now have only a
vague memory of that wonderful smell of
tape in the control room. Do I ever again
want to experience the sweaty palms and
racing heartbeat as I prepared to make that
destructive edit? Absolutely not! But I do
long for the days when musicians realized
the limits of razor editing and when they
saw it as their responsibility to provide long,
continuous, flawless performances to the
benefit of the process and final product.
I have been fortunate enough to have
recorded some inspired performances
during my career and I am thankful to the
musicians for that privilege; however, at
other times in my career, it has been my
responsibility to piece together an accept-
able performance – in some cases a bar or
even one note at a time. I am grateful for
the former and somewhat remorseful for
the latter.
In the recording world, we all have
entered into a Faustian compact with tech-
nology but, in my opinion, at an aesthetic
cost. I hope that we can return to that place,
in the production of recorded music, where
the focus is on the performance and not on
the quick key adeptness of the engineer.
Kevin W Herring spent 14 years as
the head of a post-secondary Audio
Engineering and Production program
in Fredericton, NB. He has recorded
internationally in Porto, Portugal and
San Francisco, USA and, most notably,
numerous classical and jazz projects
at AIR Studios London, England - in-
cluding a series of orchestral projects
for legendary Executive Producer Sir
George Martin. He remembers when
entire DAW software fit on two or three
1.44MB diskettes and also remembers
what SCSI stands for. He is a member
of both the Audio Engineering Society
(Life Member) and the Canadian
Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences
(JUNO Delegate).
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