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Music industry is learning that technology works

10:14 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 24, 2003

By CRAYTON HARRISON / The Dallas Morning News


In a recording studio, Rob Wechsler now has the power to make every drumbeat perfect, every note in key.

The music engineer's computer software depicts drumbeats as jagged peaks and plateaus, similar to what a heartbeat monitor shows. If the peaks aren't perfectly even, in a matter of seconds Mr. Wechsler can replace them with beats that fit.

Software has sharply reduced the time it takes to make such adjustments and has cut down on the need for expensive equipment and extra recording tape. Computers have also created new genres of music and made it possible for up-and-coming artists to create professional-sounding songs.

For the music industry, the changes brought on by software have been revolutionary, similar to the way computers replaced typewriters in the business world.

Engineers have so much flexibility when they're mixing and mastering music that they often have to remind themselves to hold back, to allow pop music the little quirks and errors that make it human.

Some technologically adept musicians have begun using music software as an instrument in itself, twisting and shredding sounds into new forms.

Software "makes it easier for artists/producers to create much higher quality tracks to showcase or indeed put out independently," said Mark Vidler, a musician in the United Kingdom, in an e-mail interview. "It is blatantly obvious that you can now produce recordings at home without going near a studio and produce similar results."

Mr. Vidler has used several software applications to become one of the biggest names in a genre known as "mash-ups" or "bootlegs" – songs created by combining elements of two or more chart-topping hits.

Distributing his work online under the name Go Home Productions, Mr. Vidler garnered attention from music critics in February when he hybridized Madonna's 1998 smash "Ray of Light" with the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant."

Software songwriter


To make a Go Home Productions mash-up, Mr. Vidler has to procure an a capella version of the track with vocals he wants to use. A little work can eliminate the vocals from the second track, if an instrumental can't be found.

Then it's simply a matter of putting the two together. Mr. Vidler uses Sony Corp.'s Sound Forge software to edit the instrumental track, then combines the two tracks with Sony's Acid Pro. To make new sounds based on the old tracks, he uses the filters in Synapse Audio Software's Orion Pro. The whole set-up costs about $900 – a hefty price tag, but far less expensive than the equipment used to mix music in the old days.

Mash-ups are extremely popular in the music file-sharing world, and even mainstream artists have begun to endorse them.

Pop singer Christina Aguilera has said she loves mash-up artist Freelance Hellraiser's combination of her "Genie in a Bottle" with rock group The Strokes' "Hard to Explain."

Another music genre, fittingly called "laptop," is rising from the underground. Laptoppers use skittering, pre-programmed beats and instrument-imitating computer effects to create lush, otherworldly music.

On stage, they perform with laptops plugged into amplifiers, manipulating sound with their keyboards.

For that reason, laptop concerts can be somewhat staid, and many artists in the genre create video collages to give audiences something to watch while they play.

In other cases, the music is so exotic that it demands attention. Houston duo About This Product, an opening act at an otherwise traditional rock show last week in Austin, jarred the crowd with its assemblage of harsh sounds, washing static and white noise over grinding beats that sounded like power drills.

Laptop artists


Other laptop artists are stepping into the mainstream. Computer whiz Jimmy Tamborello teamed up with rocker Ben Gibbard last year to form a band called The Postal Service. The group scored a modest MTV hit with "Such Great Heights," featuring a beat that sounds like a marble collection clattering to the ground. The song's video was set in a semiconductor factory.

Radiohead, the British group that rose to critical acclaim in the late 1990s as a rock act, stunned fans in 2000 with the electronics-heavy Kid A, an album that relied heavily on Pro Tools software, made by Avid Technology Inc.'s Digidesign unit.

Pro Tools is the same software Mr. Wechsler and many other engineers use to mix and master music. In his home studio in McKinney, Mr. Wechsler listens to his clients' work on custom-made speakers, scrubbing and polishing sounds that most music fans would consider undetectable.

Mr. Wechsler, who has worked with artists such as Dallas hip-hop singer Erykah Badu, said Pro Tools has changed his life and his business, WexTrax Mastering Labs.

In a recording session, he can pick the best segments from several different takes and splice them together instantaneously, a process that would once have required hours of rewinding and dubbing tape.

If a vocalist in the studio doesn't hit the right note, he can highlight that part of the song the same way a writer highlights a spelling error in Microsoft Word, then ask her to do it over.

Just cutting down on the need for extra tape has significantly reduced costs, Mr. Wechsler said. And the time software saves gives him more leeway to refine and mold music, he said.

Instead of unloading and loading tape into the deck, he can move to the next project by switching from one track to another with the click of a button.

"Try doing that with tape," he said, grinning.

The only thing missing in the digital world, Mr. Wechsler said, is the "warm" sound tape provides. It's difficult to describe, but analog recordings have a light hum that can't, thus far, be reproduced by software.

In technological terms, that sonic "warmth" might be described as an imperfection. But pop songs that sound too digitally enhanced just don't feel right, and Mr. Wechsler has to restrain himself from taking full advantage of Pro Tools' power.

"You can get too perfect," he said. "You can lose the human."

What can't be fixed


Music software may be able to make good music better, but it can't fix bad musicianship, Mr. Vidler said.

"There is no escaping the fact that some sort of 'musical' ear is required," he said. "There is a glut of mash-up tracks around which have had little or no attention paid to key or keeping two tracks in time."

Rob Swarthout, a Dallas recording engineer, put it more simply. "If it's bad recording, I can't make it any better," he said.

Mr. Swarthout works at 3rd Coast Recording Studio, a branch of Dallas firm Heat Entertainment. Since the studio opened late last year, it has been inundated with business from young artists in Dallas' underground hip-hop scene. Many were getting their first taste of professional recording.

Some artists have recorded music with their own equipment – and software – and have asked Mr. Swarthout to master it.

That's when Mr. Swarthout throws up his hands, knowing that he can't improve the sound of cheap recording equipment.

But Mr. Swarthout would never go back to the days of tape. "Now that I've gone to Pro Tools, there's nothing else for me," he said.

Mr. Swarthout knows he can't combat the trend of young musicians using software to make their own recordings at home. Engineers acknowledge that the some of the next generation of music stars will probably be technophiles who learned to write and produce music on their laptops.

The trend reminded Mr. Vidler of another era when do-it-yourself music changed the industry.

"It goes back to the D.I.Y. punk ethic," he said. "Kids can now produce and promote their creations to a far larger audience in a shorter space of time than any record company could."

E-mail charrison@dallasnews.com