In this third installment, I pass on from pitch correction but stick with the subject of tradeoffs in performing and recording music, pointing out that whether or not a compromise is justified depends very much on circumstances and very much on the ultimate goal—which may not be what you think it is.
Does music ever come in a relatively pure form? I think it does, to the degree that it is made for no other reason than to bring pleasure to someone, either the singer or the listener. I’ll admit that this definition aligns with my own preferences, but I recognize that the value I find in such purity is just a preference—I’ve learned to appreciate performances that are raw and unadorned, execution that is imperfect but heartfelt, words that convey meaning simply and directly.
But I won’t deny that equal beauty can be found on the other end of the spectrum, in careful composition and perfect execution and subtle meanings. And I think that purity as I define it can be achieved there as well. But it’s harder, because the added complexities require the musician to resist myriad additional temptations to make music for impure reasons. It can be done. But as complexity increases, so must an awareness of the new pitfalls that have been introduced.
Consider the example of harmony singing. It is a hallmark of bluegrass jamming; however informal and whatever the collective skill level, singers will usually give it a go. Some folks, Chris among them, are naturally gifted at working out the tenor or baritone part on the fly, as they sing a song for the first time. Many of the rest of us will take the trouble to learn harmony parts for popular songs so that we can contribute when they come around. The result can be ragged, but the pleasures are many—not just from the musical sound, which can be pleasing in its own way, but from the joy of tackling a challenging task, of singing with your friends, of helping others learn something new, and on and on.
There are ways to eliminate various sorts of raggedness, but each one comes at a price. Mismatched phrasing among the singers is a common source of raggedness. Chris is quite adept at matching his phrasing closely to that of the lead singer just by watching and listening and coming in just the tiniest bit late with his own vocal; the result is all benefit and no drawback, as it simply improves the overall sound.
The more common way to fix the problem is for the singers to practice together until they’ve settled on a common phrasing and memorized it. This is not such a bad thing, but it introduces an artificial note. Practice? Settle on? Memorize? These are performance techniques. It is true that jam sessions rise to the skill levels of those who are gathered, and when highly skilled performers gather to jam the result can be equal to a polished performance. But something can be lost as a result, the informality and openness and welcoming atmosphere of a ragged jam. You may like one better than the other, or you may be able to appreciate both for their own strengths.
Polished execution in a jam session can also have a distancing, even alienating effect. Chris and I sing the songs we know in a polished manner, and even when working with unfamiliar material our phrasing and harmonies are much tighter than normal, simply because we have spent so much time working with each other. Which means that in an informal group we have to be very sensitive to the impression we are making. Our own singing and playing can inspire others to unusual levels of excellence. Or it can put people off by seeming showy, or it can simply turn them from participants to listeners, preferring to hear our playing instead of their own.
We are fortunate enough to get plenty of air time outside of jamming situations, so we use our polish sparingly and carefully, only when it makes a positive contribution. Not everyone is as sensitive to this as we are, or as committed to controlling our individual impulses for the sake of group success. Often a skilled player will use the alienating potential of polished playing as a bullying tactic, to dominate a jam or even to force less skilled players out. The resulting sound may have improved in a narrow sense, but at the price of community.
My intent is not to condemn polished playing, but just to illustrate some of the costs it incurs. And for some folks the cost may be well worth it. The invention of bluegrass by Bill Monroe is an excellent example of such a tradeoff. Monroe took a music that was largely intended to accompany dancing—and as such didn’t need to provide more than a steady beat, with further polish being appreciated or ignored by the dancers as they saw fit—and by speeding it up and changing its structure to feature solos by the various instrumentalists and striking vocal harmonies, he made it into a performance art, something for an audience to appreciate rather than participate in. The result is excellent, something that has enriched my own life greatly. But it is not better than ragged jam sessions or unpolished dance accompaniments, just different, and different in ways that sacrifice some of the joys that were there in the earlier forms.
Chris and I gravitate towards the roughness and lack of polish of Appalachian mountain music. We do as much as we can to preserve it in our own performance. But it is a calculated thing—we practice very hard to get a properly unpolished sound. And it’s probably not accurate to call the sound unpolished; rather, it very deliberately recreates a sound that was originally produced by a people who were not deliberate at all in their music, but simple and direct and unadorned.
And it tries to do so in a way that is considerate to the audience, providing a warm and gentle introduction to a kind of music that can be forbidding when approached directly. In the end, we are engaged in popularizing mountain music, and we cannot accomplish that unless we can get the uninitiated to listen to us. And they won’t listen to us unless we take their own very valid concerns and preferences into account.
In the end, our sound is very carefully crafted, employing many of the tools that are used to produce modern industrial music but aiming for a quite different product. We are confronted with the same choices that confront any recording musician; in some cases we choose very differently than is usual, and in others we choose no differently at all.
For example, the CDs that Chris and I have made are very underproduced—we record our performance live, and if we’re not happy with it we record the whole thing again. An extremist might say that even this is too calculated, that we are conveying a level of perfection on the record (by picking the least error-prone of a number of takes) that we are unable to provide in real life. Beyond that, when in the studio we use individual microphones for each vocal and each instrument, and afterwards we will adjust the balance and equalization to get something that sounds good to us, even if it isn’t exactly how we sounded as we recorded.
Worse, on our first CD, we had a good take of one song where I flubbed one word on the chorus; rather than do another take, we let the engineer copy a section from another chorus where I sang the word properly and paste it over the offending word. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with reasons that I did not think that this was cheating.
Something we have not tried out yet is multitracking, where each instrument and voice is recorded onto a separate track so that the individual tracks can be added, left out, or manipulated at will. Part of the reason is that we aren’t skilled enough yet to make this work, since it does require specific skills (e.g. ability to play along to a metronome track) that are otherwise useless to us.
In principle, I have nothing against multitracking—since just about everything recorded after 1965 was done that way, many of our favorite artists use that technique. And we are thinking about using it in the future in a minimalist way, recording the vocals separately from the instruments, because we have noticed that on a capella tracks our singing is better—presumably because we don’t have to split our concentration between our singing and our playing. So we’ll try it, and if the result is noticeably better we will move to that, otherwise we will stick with recording everything live.
Many of our favorites artists never used multitracking, since they recorded before it was possible. And the lack of multi-tracking as an option required a band to be sharp enough to do a record-quality performance in one take, often around one microphone, a level of proficiency that carried over into live performance. It is astonishing to watch the old Flatt & Scruggs tv shows, where the band grinds out stellar versions of their songs one after another without breaking a sweat. I’m not putting that forward as an ultimate standard of professionalism, but it is something you can enjoy for its own sake—and something you don’t see much anymore.
Likewise, the use of pitch correction is nothing I object to for its own sake, any more than I object to putting frets on an instrument for the same reason. My only concerns are practical ones: what do you gain? what do you lose? is the tradeoff worth it? In the case of frets, with a guitar and mandolin they seems to be a net win, while frets make banjos different but not better, and a fretted fiddle would lose much of what makes a fiddle distinctive.
In the case of pitch correction, the advantages are obvious but perhaps overvalued, while the losses are subtle but perhaps more important, especially as they accumulate. A sour note is called sour for a reason, and having it enshrined on an otherwise good recording for the listener to encounter again and again is not a good thing. Whether that note should be fixed with a particular piece of technical wizardry … well, it depends. Is it a particularly important part of the song? Do you have the time/money/energy to do it over? Is the singer likely to ever get it right? Will fixing it with technology make the overall result less pleasing in some intangible way? Can we live with it if we leave it alone?
Although I can’t always keep my voice as steady as I would like, I can usually sing on pitch to my own satisfaction. But there was one spot on the studio CD we just recorded where my voice went noticeably sharp at the end of a phrase. It bugged me, but not Chris or Kevin. In the end, we decided to leave it alone, and it doesn’t bother me as much as it first did. And just about anyone who buys a copy will never notice it, or care much if they do. Fixing it would have been solely for my sake, which is not nothing but is nowhere near the most important thing. All that said, if Kevin had been able to adjust it quickly using pitch correction, I probably would have had him do it; sparing other folks potential irritation, however small, is worth something.
I could go further and use pitch correction to give my voice the steadiness I wish it had. But for a number of reasons I prefer to leave it alone. For better or worse, that is what I sound like, and I want our CDs to honestly reflect that sound, shortcomings and all. Further, I’m not always the best judge of what people like and don’t like about my singing; my unsteadiness may be more appealing to others than it is to me, for any number of reasons—it lends character, or humanizes me, or adds expressiveness, or just has a pleasing sound. And finally, I take the fact that my singing doesn’t yet satisfy me as a challenge to be met; it keeps me thinking about the quality of my performance and how people respond to it, and trying different ways to improve the situation.
I also want to avoid pitch correction because I think it presents certain subtle dangers to the kind of music I perform. Chris and I don’t listen to modern bluegrass much. Occasionally when we are in southwest Virginia we will tune in the NPR station out of Johnson City, which plays modern bluegrass most of the day, but after awhile we will shut it off because it all sounds the same to us. I used to think that it was due to the narrowing of styles that commercial music inevitably undergoes, where everyone tries to sound like what they’re hearing on the radio—in order to get on the radio.
But after studying up on pitch correction, I’m beginning to think that it is in fact the real culprit. I think modern bluegrass all sounds alike to us because the harmony vocals have been tuned, whether through technology or long hours of practice, until the pitches are razor sharp—and sound just like everyone else’s razor-sharp harmonies. Every song has professional, polished, striking harmonies—and as a result they become indistinguishable. Even when pitch correction is not being employed, the singers have learned to aim for a certain sound that became available to most everyone because of pitch correction.
Chris and I often focus on singing harmonies so that our voices blend, and I don’t think that the adjustments we make are simply a matter of getting the pitch exactly right. Those who trust in pitch correction to polish their harmonies are avoiding the hard work of learning to blend, and thereby missing out on many non-pitch-related possibilities for improving the overall sound of a harmony.
Vocal blend not only used to be an important part of bluegrass music, it used to be distinctive—Bill Monroe’s harmonies were different from those of Flatt & Scruggs, which were different from the Stanley Brothers, which were different from the Osborne Brothers, which were different from the Sunny Mountain Boys, and on and on. Now there seems to be one dominant style of blend, if it can be called that; some may be better at it than others, but in general if you don’t like it there is no place to turn for something different, like in the old days.
I’ve dwelled on decisions we’ve had to made while recording—just a few of them, really—in order to illustrate how rapidly issues multiply once you move even a small distance away from the purist extreme. There is something special about folk music in an extremely pure form, heard on a front porch as an unpolished performer plays or sings a song for you, one that is experienced in the moment and then gone forever. But there is also something to be said for loosening the very strict limits that such purity imposes. At a public performance many more people can share something close to your front porch experience. A recording of a live performance loses more, but can be shared much more widely. Efforts to smooth rough edges and eliminate the less important idiosyncrasies can broaden the superficial appeal of the music, catching the attention of the uninitiated, some of whom may go on to a deeper exploration of it.
Wisdom does not choose a particular approach and champion it over the alternatives. Instead, wisdom works to understand the pros and cons of each individual choice. It looks to understand how particular choices interact to produce results, sometimes unexpected ones. It considers how wishful thinking can lead us to make poor choices, hoping that things will somehow turn out for the best. It distinguishes between practical matters and pragmatism. It recognizes that when no perfect path is available and knowledge is incomplete, it is often helpful to reserve judgment on what appear to be poor choices that others have made. Most important, it does not refuse to participate in projects that are less than ideal, but applies itself to bring whatever improvements it can to whatever circumstances present themselves.
In the next installment I plan to move on from music to another creative activity that presents some of the same basic difficulties, namely writing. I hope that by looking at another activity through the same lens, I can clear away some of the surface clutter and get a clearer look at the basic issues that are troubling me.




