Sound effects

A couple of years ago I was invited to tour Compass Point Studios just outside Nassau in the Bahamas. Apart from its historical significance — this was once the home of Island Records, where Bob Marley recorded all his great hits — the experience was very illuminating. Compass Point is a state-of-the-art studio and I was able to talk to the recording engineer at some length.

There was once a time, he said, when somebody like Paul Simon would arrive with a huge entourage of musicians, take up residence for about ten weeks and the end result was usually a hit album. Today, a vocalist like Céline Dion will arrive with just her musical director. That’s because the huge orchestra that customarily backs her — the desks of violins, violas, cellos, arco basses, the trumpets, the trombones and the powerful rhythm section — all exist in cyberspace. Today, it’s possible to purchase legal samples of every instrument under the sun, enabling the sound engineer to construct an orchestral accompaniment on hard disc, starting with the rhythm tracks and building up through the rest of the orchestra through sampling alone.

Very cost-efficient in saving the fees of 40 session musicians being flown into the Bahamas, and nobody (except the real pros) can tell the difference. There’s also a carry-over to performance, my recording engineer pointed out. Today, at most big pop concerts, at least 70 per cent of the sound you will hear is prerecorded and pumped out through the PA, and mixed with real-time sounds. Vocals are terrifyingly in tune, he said, through a computerised voice-corrector, and the result is a kind of bland perfection.

This kind of sonic legerdemain is not just confined to pop music. In the 1950s, the English classical producer Walter Legge and others argued that a recording was superior to a live performance, if only because a performer could attempt take after take over hours, days or weeks before admitting the best performance into the public domain.