Technology has an important role to play in music today. Have we gone too far?
The blues band shuffling nonchalantly onstage look like they could use a shave and their battered guitars and shabby equipment complete a picture of rustic standards at best. Not surprisingly expectations are correspondingly low that they are going to sound like much. But what’s that on the floor in front of the guitarist? Tiny blue and red LED lights flash on and off on the board of small metal boxes at his feet as he takes his first solo. And what a solo! The sound of his ostensibly old guitar is suddenly finely tuned and breaking through the air with a beautifully produced tonal complexion matching the best violins and the newest guitars?
Fooled again?
While he may indeed look casual and indifferent in his onstage attitude, the fact is that the guitarist has taken a lot of time to sound so good and has paid careful selection to finding the right effects pedals to produce this beautiful, bluesy guitar sound reminiscent of the best recordings of his heroes such as Scott Henderson or Robben Ford.
Guitarists pay thousands of Baht and yes – even dollars – in pursuit of the ‘right’ sound. The best effects pedals they hunt down sometimes cost hundreds of dollars, but yield that wonderful ‘warm’, ‘smooth’, ‘silky’ sound they seek and thus emulating pioneering guitar heroes like Hendrix and Eric Clapton. The pedals in some cases actually emulate the creamy tones associated with the hard-driven tube amps of yesteryear, hard-wired vacuum tube amps which provide the quintessential overdriven sound that guitarists crave – amps with names like Marshall, Fender and Dumble.
Helpfully for cash-strapped guitarists, the pedal makers claim to reproduce those sweet tones by hooking up their pedals to virtually any amp, thus cutting out the need to buy and carry expensive branded and heavy amplifiers and cabinets around from gig to gig. Everything is in the pedal and its ‘secret’ electronics, and these ‘ideal’ FX pedals can be carried to any gig in the guitarist’s gig bag and combined with other effects to produce that ‘amazing’ sound.
And this is no casual pursuit. Guitar stores today dedicate as much as half of their store floor space to accommodate the huge selection of pedals on offer today from all corners of the globe. Many are made by the manufacturers of guitars anxious to garner knock-on sales from artists who favour branded. Products. But most FX pedals today are analog effects pedals, hand-made by enthusiasts who reckon they can combine certain chips, capacitors and other essential electronic components to get ‘that sound’ guitar players crave.
Basically a pedal – often called a stomp box – is an electronic effects unit housed in a small metal or plastic chassis used by musicians operating the pedal via a footswitch to modify their instrument’s sound. Even musicians playing electronic keyboards, organs, the electric bass, or electric violin use effects pedals. In all instruments the pedals help alter the sound quality or timbre of the input signal adding effects such as distortion, fuzz, overdrive, chorus, reverberation, wah-wah, flanging, phaser or pitch shifting. The sound of a guitar or other instrument that is played without an effects pedal is described as “clean” or “dry.”
Musicians refer to them as pedals because they sit on the floor and have large on/off switches on top that are activated using the foot. Some pedals, such as wah-wah or volume pedals employ what is known as an expression pedal. Expression pedals are manipulated while in operation by rocking a large foot-activated potentiometer (pot) back and forth. The relative position of the expression pedal changes some parameter of the effect, such as a filter response in a wah pedal.
The pedals allow the musician to activate and deactivate the effects uninterrupted and almost invisibly while playing the instrument and some musicians use rack-mounted effects processors, since the greater size of the rack and pedal combinations allows more processing power and a correspondingly huge variety of sounds or ‘effects’.
But what about the pop bands that have a totally professional sound but you can hear trumpets and saxophones and even more drums and other sounds filling out the sound the actual musicians on stage deliver and make a five or six-piece band sound like a 12-man showband?
For most professional musicians going out live and anxious to produce the most authentic ‘cover’ of the chart-topping songs they know the audience wants to hear, they employ software sequencers running on laptops or Macs. These mini studios on a laptop hard disk employ MIDI technology and nowadays a software sequencer will perform the required tasks for a live concert admirably.
The hard disk sequencer runs back pre-recorded songs and accompaniments pre-programmed from downloads or written using MIDI or proprietory softwares. These drive the keyboards and trigger at the appropriate beat or note in the song, rhythm programming, drum sounds, bass, organ, synth sounds and most other instruments including piano and entire brass sections, often employing plug-in modules and even portable racks with virtual eight-channel powered mixers and more.
While many musicians despise the technology for ‘stealing jobs’ and ‘faking it’ others believe it’s the best way to expand the band’s sound and appeal by providing an authentic audio representation of the often complex hit songs they cover. After all, all you require from a sequencer on the live stage is that it stores MIDI data generated in the studio and play it back.
So the next time you party at the local hop or any other downtown club or go see some great band sounding like something off MTV, you’ll know why they sound so good.
And imagine the same application of smooth technology to a Britney Spears or Madonna concert and suddenly it all makes sense why it sounds so slick and sophisticated and full – “just like the record”.
Here the concert sound engineers have the complete show pre-recorded on digital hard disks and very sophisticated sound mixing desks to control and fine-tune the entire output. The show runs to a set time-line, beat-by-beat and even note-by-note with the engineers in complete control of the onstage sound, each instrumentalist, and the auditorium mix, even tweaking the vocalist’s pitching of a note and running lip-sync (short for lip synchronization) – a technical term for matching lip movements with recorded voice.
Lip-synching in the case of live concert performances is generally considered controversial although in many instances it is justified from a production standpoint to ensure quality for broadcast, or to help a performer harmonize with their own vocals. But many despise the practice calling it a kind of fraud.
