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Originally Posted by PAPT
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Also. open tuning isn't just about 'cheating'. You can get chord forms that would be impossible in standard tuning. Listen to Joni Mitchell. She is a master at this.
Yep, I tend to think that you don't play?
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I don't think you even read the post you quoted. As I said in that very post:
Quote:
Lots of great players have used capos to achieve timbral or tonal effects or simply to play hybrid open/closed passages that they could not have played otherwise.
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I feel like this has turned into something I didn't mean: a "capos are bad" vs "capos are good" debate (or alternate tunings, for that matter).
To bring it back to my original point, and to the original topic, a guitar, or a voice, or even a piano, for that matter is not a midi sequencer. It's not something where you just input the right notes and then tweak knobs to make it sound good.
Good piano players absolutely adjust their technique and style of play to the instrument, to the room they're in, to the overall sonic context of the accompaniment and everything else. And that's
piano. Even organ, synth players, drummers, whatever. When you get to stuff like horns, strings, and especially electric guitar and vocals, it's not just something where you can sequence the right notes and then just push a bunch of knobs and buttons to make it sound good.
In the days before cheap and easy processing, when instruments and gear were expensive, before easy multi-track demo recording and online transcriptions, loopers, sequencers, what-have-you... in those days, actual bands had to create actual
good sound, in a room, with four guys playing four instruments (or eight guys playing eight instruments, whatever). If they could not do that, they were not a good band.
The Beach Boys actually sang those parts. The old Motown recordings were a band in a basement, churning out three, four hit singles a day: they'd work out the changes, write up a chord chart, play two or three takes, then do the same again with a different singer or vocal group. Same with Sun studios: play a couple Johnny Cash songs in the morning, with him singing in the room, then a couple of Elvis songs in the afternoon, with him singing in the room. Those were the records: mixed live, recorded with a handful of mics, and a band that
already sounded good.
And yeah, they had really good gear: heavy-duty, hand-wired, bomb-shelter/tank-like equipment with huge power supplies, hand-matched components, solid metal shielding, military/industrial-grade switches and knobs, and so on. But they weren't making it to sound "vintage": they were buying the best components they could buy and building them to pre-computer-era construction standards, back in the days when "obsolescence" of electronic and electrical components was almost unheard-of: this was back when people imagined sci-fi worlds with atomic spaceships guided by room-sized, vaccum-tube computers.
They built quality stuff because the expectation was that it would last for generations. And, remarkably, it has. You can still use the same gear that the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Elvis recorded on, and plenty of modern bands have. You can even buy plugins and re-issues and knockoffs and so on, and people spend a fortune on those, and a lot of them are very good, often even better than the originals. And you can also buy a $400 computer and $200 worth of software and a $500 interface that a lot of those recording engineers would have given their left nut for.
The old gear *was* built better (although the modern boutique manufacturers tend to build it about as well). But if you're looking for the difference between modern recordings and 60's recordings, to me, it's a bit silly to start with transformers and power supplies, when there are so many bigger and more obvious differences in the material actually being recorded. It seems a bit like trying to analyze paint chemistry to figure out what makes a Jackson Pollock different from a Da Vinci.
And I say all of the above without meaning to imply any value judgments about modern popular music versus "vintage" pop music. It's a different beast, just as the Rolling Stones were different from Tin Pan Alley. But in the same way, you can't make Mick Jagger or Eric Clapton sound like Nat King Cole or Charlie Christian just by buying the right mic and twisting the right knobs.