06-22-23

everything -- well, everything but country,

so goes one of music's most cliche refrains. if i had a dollar for every time i heard someone say this i could afford Taylor Swift's masters. not that i'm any better because i usually say the exact same thing, just trade out "country" for anything one would play at a rave. (note, i have great esteem and reverence for the genre innovators of club/house, and share powerful disdain for the jingoistic jagoffs of the country music scene.) anyway how i've come to explain it lately is that i favor acoustic instrumentation -- obviously not a hard and fast rule since i've shared a bunch of synthy and digital and sampled stuff here. but in terms of what i'm interested in analyzing, recording, mixing, making, it's mostly acoustic sound; plucked strings, cracked vocals, punchy drums; the stuff that digital can emulate in dazzling, fascinating ways, though perhaps not capture in all its original warmth. blah blah this long paragraph is to say that i listened to a bunch of acoustic songs in hifi today and you could literally hear, for example, violinists adjusting position, lower bout sliding against their clothes. sometimes i've been a crank about hifi and spatial streaming, partly because Tidal's $19.99/mo HiFi Plus paywall is not chump change for most people (ditto Apple Music, though i think it's significantly less cash), and in part because 16/44.1 crummy mono CD quality has always done the job for me. well, i'm still a crank, but i admit there's something to it. if you close your eyes and listen to those violinists press their face to the chin rests, you're there; how beautiful for those who can't always access live music, due to physical or financial limitations, and how beautiful to capture in such detail a performance you can listen to again and again and again.