Canadian Musician September / October 2019 | Page 59

RECORDING
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 - including 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).
By Kevin W Herring
The Damaging Effects of DAW
Technology on Musicianship
A
re today’s digital audio
workstations (DAWs) re-
sponsible for improved
recordings at the ex-
pense of deteriorating
musicianship?
Beat Detective, time stretching/
scrunching, pitch correction, comp-
ing a solo, etc. All are used daily and
pervasively in the hands of top-tier re-
cording 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 abili-
ty of the musicians? When is the final
product more dependent upon the
engineer’s mastery of this technology
rather than the actual musicianship of
the performers? Where is the incentive
to bother singing in pitch when there
is Autotune? 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 per-
formance where none existed in the
original recording sessions.
The editing power of current DAWs
is mind-boggling! What were in the
past considered impossible edits
have become commonplace, run-of-
the-mill tasks.
Performing vs. Comping
More and more, musicians schooled
in the playing of their instruments are
becoming increasingly incapable of
performing lengthy passages – much
less entire movements – 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 re-
ality beyond their true abilities? The
expectation now is to provide multi-
ple 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 ar-
en’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; however,
today’s technology has made it pos-
sible for a second tier of musicians,
whose competence is suspect and
who require technological interven-
tion, to eke out an acceptable record-
ed performance.
I started my career during the era
of razor editing of tape, but now have
only a vague memory of that wonder-
ful 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 performanc-
es to the benefit of the process and
final product.
I have been fortunate enough to
have recorded some inspired perfor-
mances during my career and I am
thankful to the musicians for that priv-
ilege; however, at other times in my
career, it has been my responsibility to
piece together an acceptable perfor-
mance – 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
technology but, in my opinion, at an
aesthetic cost. I hope that we can re-
turn 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.
CANADIAN MUSICIAN 59