Quote:

I cant picture a beatles or stones song played to a click track, it wouldnt be the same. human beings
slow down and speed up as a natural tendency, when it doesnt it's not human any more.




You might not be able to picture it, but they did use click tracks, and you can prove it just by listening to Blackbird. In the final mixdown, the Beatles chose to leave the clicking metronome in the song and you hear it up to the point of the first break where it is faded out over two beats. There have been misreports on the web about it being Paul tapping his foot and the guitar microphone picking that up, but there are two things that disprove this. First, if you listen carefully there is a definate "clip-clop" sound to the beat....a two tone metronome sound that gives you the up/down beat. A tapping foot would have the same tone on each tap, not two distinctly different tones. The other thing that proves that it was a recorded click track and not a tapping foot bleeding into the guitar mic is the fact that it was faded out during the mixdown. A sound picked up by the guitar mic could not have been faded out seperate from the guiar.

Did the presence of a click track during the recording of Blackbird dehumanize the performance? I think not. Load the song into an audio editor and count the beats. The metronome in Blackbird stays right on never slowing, never missing a beat, and never speeding up. Yet Paul's performance varies throughout. Paul varies his timing between 3/4, 4/4, and 2/4. The guitar slows down, breaks, restarts, yet the metronome keeps banging away, right on the beat. This isn't the only time the Beatles used a metronome in the studio, either as a group or individuals, it is just the only time that they left it in so that you could hear it.

Blackbird analyzed on Wikipedia

In case it isn't obvious, I've had this conversation before.

Quote:

And no one is there to advise them or tell them they suck.




Well, actually the marketplace is there to tell them that they suck. Slipping past all of the gatekeeping devices that used to be in place only gives folks an opportunity to get their music recorded and heard. People vote with this dollars, and if you suck, your income from your recordings will also suck.

What has the former insiders in an uproar is they don't have control over the gates any more and the market that they once had a realtive monopoly over is now diluted with mostly inferior product that is competing with them. Do we need some record executives to tell performers that they suck? Probablly not and history shows they they don't know so much. Decca told the Beatles that they Sucked. Joe Meek told the Beatles manager Brian Epstein that they were "just a bunch of noise, copying other people's music". Heck, Meek not only told Rod Stewart that he sucked, he put his fingers in his ears and screamed until Stewart left the studio.

The only reason that the recording studios want to decide who sucks and who doesn't, is that they want more money passed around in a smaller pool.

Keith
2026 Audiophile Windows 11 RYZEN THREADRIPPER 3960X 4.5GHZ 128 GB RAM 2 Nvidia RTX 3090s, Vegas,Acid,SoundForge,Izotope Production,Melodyne Studio,SONAR,3 Raven Mtis