To 'Tools or Not to 'Tools

With music getting increasingly more “perfect” sounding with every passing year, the question has been raised as to how far you can go before all the life has been drained out of the music. At the forefront of this argument is a vehement disdain that some have cultured for Pro Tools, one of many digital audio workstations that acts as the computer-based front end to a recording studio.

While there are many other DAWs in use - Logic, Cubase, Digital Performer, Sonar, Nuendo, and Record amongst them - Pro Tools was especially geared up for particularly finicky editing of recorded audio, allowing producers or engineers to edit a take to within an inch of its life. There are all sorts of repercussions of this, the most immediately obvious one being that all of a sudden the entire band can be in perfect time with each other, even if the recording wasn’t exactly a sterling performance. Drummers can be made impossibly precise, their timing impeccable and their hits even and steady. Guitars can be pulled into time and neatened around the edges and vocals can be tuned and preened.

This has become so infamous in the industry that you’ll often hear bands or producers refer to “Toolsing” their album or resisting the urge. A lot of hate has been lobbed at artists that choose to to go the squeaky clean route but those same artists have often been rewarded with the vast record sales they no doubt were aiming for when they chose to process like that in the first place. The whole procedure has become so thoroughly ingrained in popular music that it’s almost impossible to consider where R&B, Pop or Hip-Hop would be without such options available to them. And it’s certainly helped a lot of characters of the Paris Hilton variety to be able to put out an album, which may or may not be incredibly likely without dubious amounts of audio surgery.

The thing is that arguing about the use of editing facilities within our software is ultimately the same as arguing about any of the other processes I’ve discussed in prior columns. The problem with casting a cover-all judgment is that it neglects one side of the argument, and if we’re going all retro and demanding that people lay off the editing and present real, unprocessed takes then we’re closing the door on all those artists who actually use these techniques in interesting and innovative ways. Sure, Rock’n’Roll may sound more exciting if you can hear straining vocals, a missed beat here and there and the guitar cutting out where someone tripped over a lead but those sort of imperfections aren’t necessarily desirable on a Sade record, for instance.

People like Justice and Autechre have founded their entire styles on being able to manipulate audio to the nth degree, and in doing so have created sounds that the rest of the world can’t get enough of. The stuttering groove of Justice’ ‘Waters of Nazareth’ simply wouldn’t be possible without liberal dicing of those chunky synths, disco basslines and smacking beats. And Autechre’s trademarked b-boy drum edits set the bar for generations of electronic musicians even as far back as 1993. The likelihood of these guys giving up their Pro Tools (or whatever their DAW of choice is) is not something I would be betting very much on!

So the argument comes down to the same conclusion as so many such disagreements relating to taste. It really is a matter of whether artists and producers can decide where to draw the line, how much manipulation is appropriate and how well the subsequent change in sound suits what the music is trying to convey. The unfortunate factor these days is that radio acts are unlikely to back down on the editing! To some people (namely buyers of the top 40) “neater” does equate to “better”… There’s no accounting for taste!