The RIAA Armageddon has begun

Samples are more appropriate for many productions

Whoops, accidental click. Samples are more appropriate for many productions, but hiring an orchestra or even just a quartet is cheaper and easier than you'd think. Building an orchestra w/ friends doing overdubs, too. afaic the major price-sink in album-making that is more deeply shaping the, uh, meta-sound is the expense of recording to tape, recording live drums in nice rooms.

"Someone looking for the sound of an orchestra playing live rather than synth patches?"

Not even just talking about synth patches though. There are so many ways to create sounds now (sampling other obvious).

"something that's easy to do is by definition not going to impress anybody, and won't really be considered a magnum opus"

Yes if you don't suffer your art it's not really art, right.

no that's not really what I mean - I'm referring more to the resources marshalled for a work, ie, writing out the actual score and having it performed by an orchestra is more impressive in terms of the scale of effort involved and the resource required than playing some string patches by yourself through a laptop. suffering doesn't really have anything to do with it.

Scale of effort does not seem to me to have much to do with the quality of a work.

I sold 2 12"s ans 2 cds I paid a sum of £6.50 for £11 (store credit) today. Buying physical music makes you money! (which you inevitably just piss away on more records anyways...)

Owen makes an excellent point, we do stuff at our church concerts with pickup chamber groups made up of up to 6 string players and it's always surprising to me that ppl are as cheap as they are; we even did one concert with 4 BSO brass players playing archaic instruments and I don't think they got paid more than $500 apiece

not discussing quality

xp

So you were talking about low-quality magnum opi?

I'm just addressing how the shifting economics of music means different kinds of work are going to get produced. Large scale works involving the dedicated efforts of large numbers of professional musicians marshalling expensive, cutting-edge technology and operating at the height of their powers are going to become rarer - small-scale works by small groups of people working with whatever cheap shit is around in their spare time are going to become the norm. This is not a qualitative assessment.

I think most people understand the term "magnum opus" to refer to a work that is complex, dense, and took a lot of time, effort and resources to complete. without money to prop up this kind of effort, these kinds of works will become less common.

A couple real-life examples-- though your definition of "magnum opus" may be tested-- a record such as "Ys" would've had its orchestra graft accomplished with 5-15 days of scoring by VDP and maximum six hours of studio time. A record such as Parenthetical Girls' "Entanglements" took the arranger and the producer about six months of on-and-off tracking friends playing different instruments, piecemeal, into an MBox.

And price wise, it'd cost about the same to record four days at a good studio with a Studer 24-track and purchase tape for it than it would to hire a 21-piece string section for a four-hour session-- which is enough to track 20-30 minutes of well-scored music.

Furthermore it's problematic to describe anything with an orchestra as being more or less magnum an opus than shit without an orchestra but that's my own problem

Yes, I get what you're saying. table is the table had a great post about this very thing about a year ago

Owen these anecdotes are super fkin interesting to me.

I assume all this stuff changes like crazy when it's a film score and has to involve union players?

The classic Band That Couldn't Exist Today example I like to use is Steely Dan -- didn't tour much in their day, relied on expensive production and expensive, well-trained musicians. Of course the disappearance of the class of studio musicians that played on their records is as much due to the advent of sequenced electronic production as it is to anything else. But a band like that today could never get a sufficient advance to make their records in the first place and could probably never earn enough on album sales and radio play alone to make a living. But w/e. Bach couldn't have existed in the 1970s either.

xp I wouldn't know. None of my clients hire union players. AFM requires all members of the orchestra to be paid residuals, which is too much administration for any label (or film studio, for that matter) to want to take on. Even Disney/Pixar will plonk down $1m to buy out a session.

There are people at AFM who want to reform this system to reflect current realities, but it hasn't happened yet. Until then, you have to hire off contract. I always check film credits to see who got the work and it's usually one of six or seven contractors.

Where is that table post it was so good, I didn't 100% agree with it but it was a Good Read

I've kind of already said this to the point of turning blue in various threads like these, but there are certain kinds of music that you're just not going to get, for the most part, from people who record in their bedrooms after coming home from their dayjobs. You need sufficient time and energy to develop, and that's something a large record label advance did afford. I actually think the "scam" of it all was overblown in fact -- you would basically get a big chunk of upfront cash and not have to guarantee anything in return. Yes, there were sleazy abuses of the "recouping" system but the mere idea of recouping is really not unreasonable at all. Maybe the scam was taking naive young people with no financial understanding whatsoever, handing them a pile of cash looking the other way as they blew it.

Touring is overstated as an alternative -- the pie is smaller with more people competing, and it's pretty unrealistic to expect to even break even in your first couple years on the road (again, that's why an advance is useful).

Furthermore it's problematic to describe anything with an orchestra as being more or less magnum an opus than shit without an orchestra but that's my own problem

I want to you to know that witty remark this did not pass unlol'd

xxpost I have become, over the past several years, a big film score geek so I like hearing abt this shit.

"eh, I only dig their first EP where they had the Royal Philharmonic..."

@ Hurting, I'd agree that "no advance equals different recording dynamic" but I'd disagree that it means a tangible change in the quality or content of the music recorded. I do think Steely Dan could exist today, recording-wise, no question.

What can't be duplicated imo is the phenomenon of the artist supergroup. A band such as Radiohead, who hit their stride at the height of CD sales and received both financial independence and a devoted following to sustain it. A band that can continue to tour big and record big for ten-plus albums, that's the phenomenon that we'll more likely see disappearing, for better or for worse.

Other similar examples would be [redacted redacted redacted I'm not getting into more detail]

I mean Kanye comes close in that regard but he's had SALES

[redacted redacted redacted I'm not getting into more detail]

;_;

Kanye doesn't sell nearly as much as people assume iirc

(still a lot tho obviously)

Kanye has sold over a million units of every album he's put out so I think he's mostly doing okay

"but I'd disagree that it means a tangible change in the quality or content of the music recorded."

i think there has already been a big tangible change.

(in the US, I mean)

OH NO there have been changes, for sure, but not because of record company advances, imo.

Scott: do people really ask that much for Ray Lamontagne?

@ Hurting, I'd agree that "no advance equals different recording dynamic" but I'd disagree that it means a tangible change in the quality or content of the music recorded. I do think Steely Dan could exist today, recording-wise, no question.

I disagree. I mean:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aja_(album)#Personnel

Most of these guys existed at all only because there was such a thing as steady, paying studio work. I.e. they could be full-time musicians, practice for job-like hours every day they weren't in session, focus on their craft, get tons of experience, etc. And Steely Dan could pay each of them to come in and lay down maybe a single solo on a single track. Obv some will say good riddance to that, it's awfully decadent, etc. But it's a different world, regardless, from the one where you get your friend who kind of played the cello in high school to lay down a bassline consisting mostly of the roots of a four-chord progression.

^^^

this is huge imho

aren't John Mayer and his tattoos positioning themselves as the studio rats of tomorrow?

and, guys, there are still hundreds of country sessioneers who still eke out a quite decent living under the old studio session system

I mean I don't want to paint too stark a picture. There will probably always be a supply of starving jazz school dudes who work as baristas, shed at night, and will lay down drum tracks for their bushwick loftmates.

you don't have to say 'good riddance to that' to realize that its a model that wasn't gonna last forever

Man there are dozens of gospel and COGIC gospel recordings I could link to right now that were made for peanuts and would blow the mind of any Aja fan

it's amazing it lasted as long as it did

xp

Man there are dozens of gospel and COGIC gospel recordings I could link to right now that were made for peanuts and would blow the mind of any Aja fan

presumably those are more about the performances than the recording itself

"Scott: do people really ask that much for Ray Lamontagne?"

ha, every once in a while. he's big around here. top two acts people ask for the most - that i usually don't have - would be townes van zandt and os mutantes.

presumably those are more about the performances than the recording itself

but the performances make the recording!

i want frogbs tempbanned just for consistently pulling this thread off the trail of interesting/productive discussion about as much as i ever wanted him tempbanned for making creepy racial comments

but the performances make the recording!

that's not what I'm getting at. Aja is praised as much for its SOUND - for how it's engineered, how the instruments are recorded and processed, how everything sounds so fucking clean and shiny and shrink-wrapped - as for its display of studio-musician-chops.

yeah as much as i hate what the big labels did to people - and minority artists definitely got the brunt of the awfulness - the reason i'm stuck in the 70's (and the 60's and 50's) is the sound. tons of people got to experiment in big studios with great gear and great players and good engineers/etc and that ain't ever gonna happen again. even if they only got a day to record, they got to record in some great places.

there were several elements that went into the finely tuned machine that was Steely Dan - impeccable mastery of the most expensive studio equipment of the time, high quality session musicians, and excellent songwriting - and all but maybe one of them (the songwriting) are pretty much unachievable without a lot of time and money.

xp

scott OTM and recording studios are gonna start to die out too (if they aren't already) due to a lack of a customer base. increasing numbers of people are just gonna think they can do all their shit on a laptop and who cares cuz no one's paying for it anyway and all that expensive studio machinery and engineering expertise is going to become more and more rare.

and I say this as someone who loves and has engaged in a lot of "lo-fi" stuff. there's gonna be a lot more of it in the future.

While all this is going on:

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/record-labels/lyor-cohen-on-music-s-future-i-hate-when-1007360752.story

yeah its sad. and the only people who will care about good recordings will be horrible people like jack white. sorry, i haven't said anything bad about him in a while. i try to monthly.