I just read this about the White Stripes and it mystified me

[Popinjay]

[ QUOTE ]
The onion is a parody website. What you read was probably a joke

[/ QUOTE ]

Nah it was legitimate. Their reviews and interviews are.

[gusmahler]

Dream Theater has done that for a lot of its recent albums. They just rent a studio for 5 months or so and jam. Once they get an idea going, they record it immediately. This way, they get the a freshness in the song. If you get the special edition of their new album (Systematic Chaos), there is a long documentary DVD of the recording process.

OTOH, Roger Waters used to write songs on tour and they would play them on tour as a way of perfecting the song before they recorded it. E.g., their Dark Side of the Moon tour featured a first set of them playing songs from Animals and Wish You Were Here (songs that none of the audience had ever heard), before a second act of them playing Dark Side in its entirety.

[gusmahler]

[ QUOTE ]
Dream Theater has done that for a lot of its recent albums. They just rent a studio for 5 months or so and jam. Once they get an idea going, they record it immediately. This way, they get the a freshness in the song. If you get the special edition of their new album (Systematic Chaos), there is a long documentary DVD of the recording process.


[/ QUOTE ]I just watched the "Making of" feature for the latest Lamb of God CD, Sacrament. They use a procedure that probably comports more with what OP thinks of bands doing.

* They rent a practice facility and develop new songs. One of the guys brings in a riff/progression and they develop it into a song.

* Then they bring in a producer and do pre-production. This involves the producer giving his thoughts and suggestions regarding the songs. The producer has Pro Tools with him and they record rough versions of the songs.

* Then they go into the studio. First, the drummer, guided by a click track and the rough versions of the guitars, lays down all of the drum tracks. Then the rest of the band comes in and lays down their respective bass, guitar, vocal tracks.

The thing that gets me is how ghetto everything seemed compared to Dream Theater. Dream Theater has a space for 5 months and can do anything they want (they self-produce). Lamb of God is forced into a cramped practice space to work out the songs. Only then do they rent the studio. Plus, the band schlepped their own gear. I'm pretty sure that Dream Theater doesn't schlep their own gear (the drummer has said that the only reason his drum kit is so big is because he doesn't have to set it up.)

The odd thing is that, going by Wikipedia's list of US albums sales, Lamb of God is much bigger than Dream Theater, selling 400k+ copies of their previous album and 300k copies of Sacrament, while Dream Theater hasn't gone past 200k albums since 1994. (Systematic Chaos hasn't even broken 100k.

The difference may be international sales, though. Dream Theater is popular in Europe and Japan and I don't know if Lamb of God has an international following.

[RERAISE5823]

Well, when your songs are as simple as his...I can see it.

[jeffnc]

This is simple. If you sell your art, then you expose yourself to criticism (which you might or might not care about, but which is *always* legitimate), and you enter a Darwinian process whereby you make what you're worth.

Just because an artist has a "vision" doesn't mean the vision is very "good". Plenty of artists have done things they themselves later thought was crap. Even if they didn't, their audience might, and their audience might put up with it because they like other aspects of their art. (Or then again they might just be blindly following some fool who told them it was "good".)

For example, I really like the Stripes' music, and I absolutely hate the "low fi" trend. I buy Stripes music anyway, in spite of the recording technique, because I think the music trumps the recording usually.

In my opinion, anyone who does like "low fi" is juvenile and faux-hip. And my opinion is just as valid in the context of the entire artistic system as any other opinion, including that of the artist. If the artist doesn't want there to be opinions on his work, then he is free to keep it out of the public domain.

[thecincykiddo]

[ QUOTE ]
This is simple. If you sell your art, then you expose yourself to criticism (which you might or might not care about, but which is *always* legitimate), and you enter a Darwinian process whereby you make what you're worth.

[/ QUOTE ]

How's your sense of art history, Tonto?

Nevermind that your premise is false (and the product of much too much opinion and far too little thinking) but you have to admit that if this were true, there would be no such thing as art. At least, not as humans have been defining it for a few millenia or so.

You're confusing artistic conversation with capitalism.

I suppose that's an easy thing to do with someone like Jack White, who helps to head up the current sphere of pop musical culture and whose face isn't uncommon to see in the grocery aisle next to a whole slew of Hollywood stars who have commodified their entire lives for your bored veiwing.

But...not getting into all of that...wasn't the purpose of this thread to ask about the musical process itself? To get back to that for a moment, White might have been taking advantage of an inspirational burst by writing most of those songs in one fell swoop. It happens, and it happens a lot to an artist who has been creating for a while. Essentially, inspiration is elusive, but the more it gets tapped, the more it can sort of be funneled and anticipated.

So it doesn't surprise me too much that he wrote all of those songs (or at very least saved the bulk of his energy for the studio) in those few weeks. When you're making something like an album, which generally requires some cohesion in its concepts and lyrics and phrasing to really make it all gel, you kind of want to get it all out with a reasonable amount of timing. Taking a long time gets trickier, especially if you're still really growing as an artist, because there will be more inconstencies in your work, both artistically and technically speaking.

[jeffnc]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
This is simple. If you sell your art, then you expose yourself to criticism (which you might or might not care about, but which is *always* legitimate), and you enter a Darwinian process whereby you make what you're worth.

[/ QUOTE ]

How's your sense of art history, Tonto?

Nevermind that your premise is false (and the product of much too much opinion and far too little thinking) but you have to admit that if this were true, there would be no such thing as art. At least, not as humans have been defining it for a few millenia or so.[ QUOTE ]


I admit no such thing. If you think a little more flexibly you'd probably feel the same way.

You're confusing artistic conversation with capitalism.

[/ QUOTE ]

Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Public art goes through an evolution with or without money (or whatever barter form you want.)

[thecincykiddo]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
This is simple. If you sell your art, then you expose yourself to criticism (which you might or might not care about, but which is *always* legitimate), and you enter a Darwinian process whereby you make what you're worth.

[/ QUOTE ]

How's your sense of art history, Tonto?

Nevermind that your premise is false (and the product of much too much opinion and far too little thinking) but you have to admit that if this were true, there would be no such thing as art. At least, not as humans have been defining it for a few millenia or so.[ QUOTE ]


I admit no such thing. If you think a little more flexibly you'd probably feel the same way.

You're confusing artistic conversation with capitalism.

[/ QUOTE ]

Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Public art goes through an evolution with or without money (or whatever barter form you want.)

[/ QUOTE ]


Here's what you wrote:

This is simple. If you sell your art, then you expose yourself to criticism (which you might or might not care about, but which is *always* legitimate), and you enter a Darwinian process whereby you make what you're worth.

But now you're arguing that money has nothing to do with it.

Are you high?

[magister ludi]

[ QUOTE ]
In general, I really don't like overly processed, unnatural sound, or lo-fi unnatural sound. I want to hear what's coming out of Jack's amp, and if he wants to change it I'd prefer he alter his guitar or amp.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the recording process. Under no circumstances, will what you hear on the CD sound exactly like what the amp sounds like in real life. The microphone, preamp, console, recording medium, effects, etc... all color the sound and are all parts of the recording process that cannot be removed. What you hear on CD is never going to be exactly the same as what you hear live.

[jeffnc]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Here's what you wrote:

This is simple. If you sell your art, then you expose yourself to criticism (which you might or might not care about, but which is *always* legitimate), and you enter a Darwinian process whereby you make what you're worth.

But now you're arguing that money has nothing to do with it.

Are you high?

[/ QUOTE ]

Ignoring your screwed up quoting, no I'm not high. I didn't say money has nothing to do with it, I said money isn't the point. I did'nt mention money in the quote you posted either. If you can't figure out the nuances of what I'm writing, then ask a high school English teacher to explain it. Or stop reading it with your filter on.