Kevin Davis wrote:McParadigm wrote:But what live performance does not do, and what the equipment-end designs and setups are subsequently not built to capture, is nuance. At their best, studio recordings offer not only a creative pursuit of the heart of an idea that live music can not, but also capture a depth of texture to playing, tone, and atmosphere within the song.
I think there are just as many occasions where you could say the exact opposite, though, where studio processes actually
obscure the nuance of the playing, or create it artificially, while the rawness of the live performance allows those textures to naturally materialize.
McParadigm wrote:At their best, studio recordings offer...
On a record like "Binaural," for instance, I think you actually hear what you call "a depth of texture to playing" a lot better in the live versions--you hear the sounds that are more naturally coming off the instruments, and in the better moments, you get a sense of cooperative band interplay (good versions of "Of the Girl," the instrumental passages of "Light Years" and "Insignificance") that, to my ears, create an atmosphere within the playing itself that is harder to achieve with five guys recording separately over backing tracks in isolated booths. A lot of what you're hearing on that record, and on many records where people talk up virtues like nuance and texture, is a meticulously manipulated studio process, not "a depth of texture to the playing."
There's not a lot of meticulous studio process to Binaural at all. Even the EQ sculpting work is fantastically gentle. Nor is there (in any of the Vitalogy-Riot Act era) a particular abundance of iso booth work outside of vocals (and even then, it's not always guaranteed). There's so much mic bleed going on, you couldn't "fix" problems even if you wanted to half the time.
The best live recordings simply provide a clear document of what happened onstage on any given night, and as much as the band as a collective unit is capable of attaining these things (texture, nuance, tone, atmosphere, etc.) naturally, a good live recording will capture it.
Live recordings don't capture CLEAR documents of anything. Clarity is not a goal with live rock band engineering. A rock concert is an event, taking place in a frequency bouncing echo trap, and the audio is directed towards achieving volume and promoting event at the expense of clarity.
Furthermore, there are too many great artists whose creative developments have unfolded in concert as much as in the studio (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, The Grateful Dead, to name a few recognizable ones) for me to believe that what you call "the creative pursuit of the heart of an idea" can't be equally evident on live recordings.
The ability to accurately capture and (without manipulation) share sound varies, dependent upon style and format. Comparing what can be captured by Miles Davis at the Fillmore or at a live outdoor festival in front of a jazz audience, to what a noisy rock band with noisy fans in a concrete nightmare can capture, is a purposeless exercise. It's also worth noting that the Grateful Dead are still, to this day, held up among engineers as being not only head and shoulders, but torso, hips, and thighs above any other performing rock band for the craft and care they brought to their live sound setup. And Dan Healy is something of a prodigy when in comes to such things. I've attached an interview snippet with him below that is pretty insightful.
Granted, modern Pearl Jam aren't necessarily the best example of this.
Pearl Jam were never a good example of what you're referring to above.
But to my ears, a jam section in the middle of a 2000 version of "RVM" sacrifices nothing in the way of nuance simply because it was generated on a stage in front of 10,000 people and not in a recording studio.
That's a dubious example, since it only exists in live versions and has no studio comparison. There's no way to disprove it or to actually compare. But it's also an example of interpreting the word 'nuance' to apply only to performance, and not to the capturing of, which is still only arguing against 50% of my point.
You also seem to still be responding as though I'm saying live recordings are useless or "bad" recordings, which I'm still not saying.
The Dan Healy interview:
DH: I do scale drawings before the fact. When we get to the hall, everything references off a stake that's in the front center lip of the stage. Everything is measured from that, so the stage is vectored out on angles from that [which is] known and predetermined. They literally take a transit and set it up just as if you were surveying, and you take that pole and go [to the location points]. But you have to use surveying tools. You can't use a tape measure—you have to be serious about it!
FD: One thing that struck me about your sound. Audiophiles are always talking about three dimensionality, soundstaging, and layered depth. Most concerts, the sound is horrible...
DH: Yeah, it's not even worth discussing.
FD: You're lucky if you hear anything even close to a reasonable frequency response. You take it as a given that properly set up High End equipment can give you better sound than even a recording studio. Here, I heard better sound quality than, maybe, any High End system I've ever heard!
DH: We should take you outdoors sometime. This is mediocre compared to what we can do outside. We can do halls better than anyone else in the world, but you should hear what we can do outside. It'll dazzle you!
FD: What kind of microphones do you use?
DH: I've used them all. The latest state-of-the-art, vintage Neumanns and RCAs, you name it. Sometimes I'll change vocal mikes three times during the course of a tour. There aren't any microphones I'm really satisfied with. I think there's room for another generation of microphones before they bottom out on the physical limitations of the technology. I think you'll see this in the next year or so. I may be more outspoken than most, but I think that any engineer that's been engineering for any length of time would, if they told you the truth, admit that one of the biggest letdowns in the whole audio industry is microphones.
FD: People put so much emphasis on the reproduction of sound that they don't pay enough attention to the production of it. Once the sound hits the microphone, you've already made the potential for perfect reproduction impossible.
DH: You got it.
FD: How about an audiophile question: What type of cable do you use?
DH: We use oxygen free copper. Made to our specifications—it's more rugged than most. It also has a good capacitance specification—about 13pf per foot. The cable used in the snake [the long cable connecting the control systems in the sound booth to the amplifiers on stage] has even less capacitance, about 6 pf per foot. I'm sure all the "hi-fi" guys are advocates of that sort of thing...essentially, non-inductive speaker cable. Although I think these considerations applied to a three foot length of [interconnect] is a little bit ridiculous.
FD: The whole High End cable industry is built around differences in cables and connectors and things like that. Valid to a point, but a lot of it is just an attempt to take advantage of people who want a new toy every couple of months.
The band was willing to put tremendous amounts of their money back into the equipment. That Wall of Sound cost millions of dollars! It was a means to an end for them to have the opportunity to play through [a system] that was truly worthwhile, because they, too, shared the dream of, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could go into one of these places and play music and have it be a truly great experience for us as musicians, as well as for the audience." It was a common goal between the band, the sound freaks, and the audience. It was fortunate that a bunch of genius-quality sound freaks got together and decided that we'd forego your own personalities, at least for a period of time, and collaborate. It yielded a tremendous amount of information that we now use. If nothing else, we found out what we didn't want to do. It's like all breadboard situations—the more flexible something is, the less expedient it is. Flexibility is paid for by the cash of expediency. That's just a reality of life. If you want something that does 20 different things, then it's not going to be as streamlined as the thing that does only one thing.
We were the first ones to start using time alignment. Direct coupling. Getting rid of capacitors. Do you know that this sound system is direct coupled?
FD: I can't believe you guys have the nerve to do that! What happens if somebody trips on a cord?
DH: It's decoupled going into the power amps.
FD: Oh, okay! (Laughter) I was picturing the worst...
