‘It could have happened’ – the evolution of music constructionSteven Savage San Francisco State University AbstractOne of my favorite activities as a recordist is applying the “it could have happened” aesthetic in making recordings. This is the process whereby musical performances are constructed using the wide-ranging capabilities of a digital audio workstation, and one of the standards used to judge the acceptability of the final recorded “performance” is whether or not it could have happened—whether the musician might reasonably have played or sung what has been constructed. The implication behind “it could have happened” is, of course, that it didn’t happen. That is, the recording presents a musical performance that did not happen on the specific time line that the listener hears.
Such activities expand the creative partnership of music making to include recordists—not just in the advisory role (traditional for the producer) but also in the construction of the content used in the final recorded performance. “It could have happened” performances are a key element in the transformation of music making in which the new paradigm of construction is replacing the old linear progression from composition through performance to master recording.
1 Introduction“The realm of the unknown is contiguous to the realm of failure. The gambler, deep down, has made a pact with failure. He’ll accept it because it has interesting neighbors. In such realms the soul, I think, is fed, not to mention exercised.” (Dunn, 2001. p.73)
In the above quote the poet Stephen Dunn is talking about gambling but he’s using this idea in the context of a larger discussion regarding the process of writing poetry. I think this sentiment also resonates with the process of performing music for recordings and I will tie it into my overall thinking at the end of this paper.
One of my favorite activities as a recordist is applying the “it could have happened” aesthetic in making recordings. This is the process whereby musical performances are constructed using the wide-ranging capabilities of a digital audio workstation (DAW), and one of the standards used to judge the acceptability of the final recorded “performance” is whether or not it could have happened—whether the musician might reasonably have played or sung what has been constructed. While I love the tools that allow me to construct performances in ways that never actually occurred in the traditional sense—done by repurposing recorded elements, manipulating both pitch and rhythm, and other outright sonic inventions—I also like hewing these constructions to the “it could have happened” standard. I’ve had the pleasure of living through the transition from the arduous tape splicing of performance elements to the amazing new world of digital editing and digital signal processing (DSP). The tools available now in the digital domain have exploded the “it could have happened” options beyond anything remotely possible as little as 20 years ago.
2 Example #1The first musical clip I am referencing is an example of the evolution of this “could have happened” process. This clip is from a CD that I recorded recently for the veteran blues singer JJ Malone (see discography below, CD available commercially and the track is available at iTunes and Amazon). One of the last sessions involved a duet with a guest vocalist, Frankie Lee. The instrumental tracks had already been recorded and, as is common in pop music production, the final vocals were being added at the end of the process. The two veteran blues singers were in the studio—each acoustically isolated but positioned so that they could see each other through a window. As they listened to the instrumental tracks on headphones they traded choruses, each also ad-libbing along with the other’s lead vocal. At the end of the song, during the vamp, they traded adlibs by drawing from the lyrics of the previous choruses. All well and good in principle—but the reality was a bit of a mess. The first take had great spirit and enthusiasm, but also a lot of “problems”— the vocalists were stepping on each other’s lines (the ad-libbing “comments” obscuring parts of the other singer’s chorus melody) and there were a variety of nonsensical passages when a less than apt choice of phrase was used to respond to the sung lyric. The trading in the vamp was equally spirited – and equally flawed.
We made a few more complete takes of the vocals but the flaws remained, and where the singers had been loose and excited on the first take, in the subsequent takes they lacked the same spontaneous enthusiasm. In the earlier, tape-based era of record production we would have had to resort to recording each section piece by piece, repeating the performance on each part until a satisfactory take was recorded. Eventually we would have gotten a performance that had sufficient compositional integrity to bear repeated listening, but it would surely have lacked the genuine excitement of that initial run through. Instead, I simply sent the singers to the lounge (they weren’t interested in the process, only the result) and went about reconstructing that first take by rearranging the parts so that they made musical and lyrical sense. This involved moving and adjusting vocal lines so that they fit neatly into a call and response kind of duet performance without conflicting with each other. I re-created the entire “ad-libbed” vamp by using phrases from the first sung vamp and incorporating ad-libbed bits from earlier in the song that fit more neatly at the end. In a few instances I actually reconstructed lyrics by taking fragments of sung lines and editing them together to create “new” lyrical content. Once I had put something together that made musical and lyrical sense to me I called the singers back in for a listen. They were delighted.
3 Example #2The second clip I am referencing is from a recent record I did with the guitarist Elvin Bishop. This track featured Warren Haynes from Government Mule and the Allman Bros, and Kim Wilson from the Fabulous Thunderbirds as guests – playing the guitar and harmonica solos on the title track ‘The Blues Rolls On’ (see discography below, CD available commercially and the track is available at iTunes and Amazon).
Many of the artists I work with are blues and roots oriented musicians. You can hear on this Elvin Bishop CD that he wanted that 50’s sort of ambient drum sound. These artists are adamant about the “it could have happened” ethic yet they are willing to use the technology to stretch the music making process well beyond what actually did happen. The construction of the Warren Haynes / Kim Wilson solo progressed in the following manner. Warren came to the studio after a gig with Government Mule so it was already late. After talking, listening and getting a guitar sound for him he played 3 solos—after each one Elvin voiced his approval—and then Warren said “I think you have enough stuff there so just put together whatever works for you.” Elvin said fine and that was the end of the session. Warren left the final composition (read construction) of the guitar solo to us. A few days later Elvin and I go together and reviewed the solos. We tried a variety of edits, but could only come up with two-thirds of a solo – there was no final section that fit well with the stuff we liked from the earlier parts, yet the solo we constructed had a satisfying ending. We tried editing out the final piece from Warren’s solo space and that didn’t work with the musical progression so instead we decided to have someone else solo over the remaining 8 bars. Several weeks later – when Kim Wilson came to guest on a different song on harp – we asked him to play on this tune and take the solo following Warren’s. The results sounded completely natural and satisfying. This kind of fluid compositional process is very common now, extending the timeline in which compositional decisions are made, and expanding the creative process to include a much broader range of potential participants.
4 The progression to music constructionThe implication behind “it could have happened” is, of course, that it didn’t happen. That is, the recording presents a musical performance that did not happen on the specific time line that the finished product presents. This kind of reformulation began with the earliest edited performances – and that dates all the way back to the wire recorders invented in 1890. Tape-based systems, which provided the necessary “plasticity” for the large-scale practice of audio editing of non-contiguous musical elements, were commercially marketed starting in the late 1940s. In these earlier forms of editing, recordings of different live performances of the same material were pieced together to create the impression of one continuous performance. This type of editing became common for both Western art music and pop music recording, and in both cases there are elements of recomposition in the choices made. For example, the process allows the recordist to choose between one cadenza and another, or between one recording of a song’s verse and another. The choices made yield a constructed piece of recorded music, though the differences from any one of the original, complete performances are usually rather small. Generally, this type of editing retains the original progression of musical events and preserves the essential compositional integrity of the original score or song arrangement.
But within the DAW, editing decisions can easily range far beyond simple choices about subtle variations in performance. The story of the blues duet is an example of much deeper alterations in both arrangement and composition. On the Elvin Bishop recording composition was also a fluid process over an extended time period. Intervention in compositional elements as part of the recording/editing process is prevalent in the world of pop music. Large-scale intervention occurs with some frequency: whole arrangements may be altered by moving, adding or deleting entire sections of the composition.
Even more intrusive intervention can occur with the use of DSP to alter the basic structure of performances. Musical passages may be rhythmically lengthened or shortened through time expansion and compression techniques (without changing pitch), or pitches fixed or reharmonized using subtle re-tuning tools that allow very fine frequency control. Passages that were sung out of tune may be adjusted to whatever extent the collaborators desire, and may still meet the “it could have happened” criterion: the singer could have sung the line in tune (in theory): he or she just didn’t happen to do so. This gets trickier when distinctly new note choices are made—could the singer actually have moved between those notes in the manner now created? Similarly, when small segments of a phrase are put together to re-create something like a guitar solo—could the guitarist actually have negotiated the passage in this particular way? This is part of the fun and the challenge of the “it could have happened” process: I strive to construct performances that are musically and instrumentally appropriate to a single performance, and which at the same time capture as much musical interest and creative energy as possible using all the tools available.
Technology has collaborated with ingenuity to develop these new processes of music making that are more akin to construction than to the previous performance paradigm. The technological progression to music construction is outlined below:
• Recording of complete live performances.
• Multiple recordings of ensemble performances from which sections are edited together.
• Multiple recordings of individual performances (using multitrack technology) from which the best takes are selected.
• Recorded performances from which specific elements are “fixed” by overdubbing (punching in).
• Multiple takes intended as building materials.
5 ConclusionsI begin with a response to one of the questions posed in the description of the call for papers for this stream of the conference: How have changes in recording practice affected performance practice amongst recording musicians? Performances are often considered building materials for the constructed recording rather than as complete or coherent performances. The starting point is now frequently “I’ll play a bunch of solos and you can take what you like.” Often this leads to a very creative and collaborative process, but not always. One question that came up at my presentation was the extent to which musicians use this new environment to avoid taking ultimate responsibility for their performance. I have had circumstances where musicians wanted to stop playing, claiming that there must be enough material to construct an acceptable performance, when that wasn’t the case. However, more frequently I find the same attention to musical integrity within the vastly expanded arena of music construction.
Other questions from this stream’s description motivate further reflections on the “it could have happened” process: How do record producers, musicians and sound engineers communicate in the studio? How do they view each other? How is the creative power distributed between musicians, producers, record companies and technicians? I argue that “it could have happened” performances are a key element in the transformation of music making in which the new paradigm of construction is replacing the old linear progression from composition through performance to master recording. As a part of this process we are seeing a more collaborative and flexible relationship between record producers, musicians and sound engineers. In most cases many of the participants have considerable experience in all three of these activities so the rolls, and along with them the ‘creative power,’ are constantly shifting over the course of the creative process.
Finally I want to make a larger assertion regarding the process of renewal in popular music. I believe that these capabilities to manipulate musical performance, aligned with the ‘it could have happened aesthetic,’ have stimulated a large portion of the creative community in popular music and helped fuel a renewal of enthusiasm for the recording process. This gets me back to the Dunn quote at the beginning of this paper. Starting with basic tape-splice editing we have moved further and further from the restrictive effect of recording on performance. Because musicians know that they have the power of the DAW available to them it allows them to tap into the unknown, to risk failure, knowing that they can retrieve the results and use them to conform to the “it could have happened” aesthetic. This is a luxury of reconstruction, a reprise from the pact with failure, which the recording musician now shares with the poet, though it is denied to the musician in live performance just as it is to the gambler.
6 AcknowledgmentsPortions of this paper appear in an essay I wrote with the same title for The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music.
ReferencesDunn, Stephen. 2001. Walking Light. Rochester, NY. BOA Editions, Ltd.
DiscographyMalone, JJ. 2001. ‘Bring it On Home to Me’ on and the band played on. Blues Express.
Bishop, Elvin. 2006. ‘The Blues Rolls On’ on The Blues Rolls On. Delta Groove.
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