[yep]

Originally Posted by Evan

...I am planning to embark on a project where each track will be an experiment...

Great question.

This is bit outside of my wheelhouse, and a bit outside the intent of the thread, which is how to produce and manage a recording when YOU are the talent and engineer, not necessarily a general discussion on producing records.

That said, I will offer that it is useful to distinguish between producing an ALBUM and producing SONGS. In any case it always helpful to have an idea of what you are trying to achieve before and throughout the process of achieving it.

The very notion of an album as anything other than filler between the singles might seem a bit quaint these days, but setting aside the question of whether anyone still listens to "albums" (I certainly do) as beginning-to-end musical presentations...

Many great and entirely coherent albums vary quite a bit in terms style and instrumentation. Examples include some of the most highly-regarded records ever made, such as Sgt Pepper's, Pet Sounds, and a lot of stuff by late 60's and 70's era rock gods. Even a lot of 80s pop albums got pretty far-reaching at time. Commercial acts these days are not often given the same creative latitude, but there are plenty of smaller examples (Stephin Merritt's stuff with the Magnetic Fields comes to mind, or maybe Tegan and Sarah's first album), and a lot of hip-hop and R&B artists still experiment pretty widely with instrumentation and style (A lot of Michael Jackson's records, and most stuff produced by the RZA vary quite a bit from one song to the next).

Maybe some of the best examples of really effective albums that vary a lot would be great movie soundtracks. Almost any film by Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese is apt to have a great soundtrack album, with a bunch of artists, but still revealing a unified progression and aesthetic.

In some respects it is almost easier to talk about what makes a bad album than a good one, and it's not always bad songs. One of the worst things that can happen in an album is to have an inappropriate or jarring mix of catchy, uptempo, hard-hitting pop/rock alongside delicate, spacey, challenging, textural music. The problem is not that one or the other is bad, the problem is that one tends to make the other sound boring, while the other tends to make the first sound stupid or fake.

It's like wearing a full tuxedo but replacing the pants with cargo shorts, or wearing Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt with dress shoes. Or like serving crackers with peanut butter and foie gras, accompanied by Champagne and Dr. Pepper. It's not necessarily about bad vs good as much as about creating an immersive experience, a journey instead of a slideshow.

This is actually a fairly common problem with unsigned bands. They try too hard to show off their different sides, mixing jazz and acoustic folk with electronica and punk or whatever. A lot of "how to get signed" or "how to make the perfect demo" advice will tell you to pick a genre and stick to it. But I think "genre" might not be the right word, it's more like "gestalt" or "vibe". Artists such as Beck have never had a problem selling records without "picking a genre", but his albums still have a sense of unity and continuity. The genre is Beck, in a sense.

Ironically, even while the industry "insiders" will tell you "pick a genre and stick to it", modern albums frequently feature a single that is completely different in texture and tone from the rest of the album. This is an infuriating experience for the buyer, who might hear a kick-ass pop-punk song on the radio, and then pick up the album only to find the rest of it filled with introspective shoe-gazer stuff. This both turns off the potential "crossover audience" who feels like they wasted their money and also alienates the committed shoe-gazer audience who will dismiss these pop-punkers out of hand. It's not necessarily a "genre" thing, nor a matter of different instrumentation or production techniques or whatever, it's a matter of a band with a certain vision who maybe had a cover or a one-off in a more poppy or accessible style, and the label latches onto that as the "single" instead of allowing it to be a neat little extra.

Pretty much every 80's hair band album included at least one "power ballad", something slower, often primarily acoustic, with more sensitive and romantic lyrics, but the song still "made sense" in the context of the album. One need only hear such a "power ballad" to immediately envision a skinny white man with permed long hair and leather pants singing it.

Be very careful of deliberate genre-hopping. Especially with highly technical styles such as fusion jazz, speed metal, latin percussion, celtic folk, free jazz, Appalachian fingerstyle, modern classical, etc. These are genres that tend to consist of a handful of extremely dedicated and accomplished musicians, and a whole lot of bad other stuff. Every so often a pop/rock band will come along who manages to successfully incorporate one of these kinds of styles, and it sounds awesome, and it then spurs a lot of other stuff that sounds really fake and dumb. This also applies to intense styles of techno/electronic music. There is a fine line between cheesy and awesome.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: don't try to be innovative. Try to be good. If you are an innovator, then you will innovate whether you intend to or not. If you're not, you can still be a great musician who contributes a lot of value to a lot of people's lives without making an ass of yourself by trying to reinvent the cheeseburger.

This doesn't mean not to experiment. It means pursue you vision, and follow where your inner voice leads you, as opposed to trying to figure out what to do next based on charts and graphs and textbook theories. I once saw a concert poster that advertised "the next step in the evolution of reggae". The fact that I cannot remember the band's name and that I never heard of them again is telling, but I do remember thinking: why the hell should I care about the "evolution" of ANY musical genre? What does that even mean? Is this going to make all my Jimmy Cliff and Peter Tosh and Linval Thompson records obsolete? (NO)

I once heard one of the Marsalis brothers say something like: "There is no 'evolution' in music. We're never going to 'get beyond' Bach or Coltrane or whatever. We all just contribute to an expansion of the stuff that enriches our experience of life."

Bringing it back to "bad albums", the trick to making a great album (as opposed to making a mix CD of a bunch of good songs) is making something that takes the listener on a journey, as opposed to something that flips through a bunch of travel brochures. There is no limit to how varied that journey can be, but there might be a limit to the degree that you expect the listener to exhibit patience for musical ADHD.

An album should be set up like a live set, like a recorded concert. If it is a very ambitious and varied album, it might be something like a variety show, or a "Night at the Apollo" or a Christmas extravaganza, or superbowl halftime show, or a movie soundtrack or whatever. It doesn't necessarily need to sound the same from beginning to end, or even like the same band. But it should ideally sound like something that could be listened to by the same audience from beginning to end without making them feel like they're listening to a resume being read aloud.

On that note, one thing I like to recommend is to try to imagine, realistically, how you would play this album on tour. That doesn't necessarily mean that every single song has to consist of exactly five musicians playing the exact same instruments or whatever, but suppose that you got a small contract and a tour budget that allowed you to hire a second guitarist and a cello player or whatever. You could probably find a second guitarist who could fill in on backing vocals and plunk out some basic synth lines, and maybe you'll hold out for a cellist who can also play a little horns or who's willing to fill in on bongos or tambourine. Maybe you can find a trio of backup girls to sing at major concerts, and so on.

But seriously, suppose this album is successful, and suppose that the audience wants to hear these songs, and suppose that you do NOT become the kind of mega-star who travels with a gospel choir and a Tuvan throat-singer and a horn section and an orchestra who all fill in for one song each...? Suppose that you have to actually load in your own gear and that you have to limit the band to the number of people who can sleep on a bus and who are willing to split $500 per night?

Maybe you're willing to karaoke the whole concert... that's fine, if it's something your audience is going to accept (would you accept it, as a fan of this music?-- that's not a rhetorical question).

Maybe you could pare down the "important" parts to the core musicians... if that's the case, I suggest making sure that the "core" arrangement is still a satisfying representation of the song. Nobody wants to pay money to hear "Ring of Fire" without the horns.

The reason to think in "live" terms is not purely practical. Focus and discipline have a way of honing artistry, and limitations have a way of making everything count. We have all heard big, sprawling, spare-no-expense productions that suck and that could not be saved by guest composers and the London Symphony Orchestra and the Harlem Gospel Choir.

None of these are rules, just suggestions. The Beatles and Glenn Gould both famously quit playing live because they decided the studio was a better way to communicate their vision. And the more truly "experimental" you get, the less advice there is to give. But even stuff like John Zorn or Bill Dixon or Kronos Quartet albums tend to have a certain consistent vibe or vision.

Don't know if that helps, but that's what I got.