So, what led to the muddy guitar tone? An enquiry, part II

Yesterday I shared that, in investigating the source of The Muddy Guitar Tone, I realized that the first issue was that the producer made a technical error in recording said guitar.

And that’s okay! We’re all learning, and sometimes we make mistakes. But it brings us to the more important point here, I think:

Recording a bad sound is fine — no harm, no foul. We all do it sometimes. I certainly do. No one’s perfect. The problem is that the producer subsequently made the decision to keep the bad guitar sound that they had recorded. And that’s something that you simply shouldn’t do!

Production is a literal idea — you’re making something. And it’s incumbent upon us as the people in charge of that process to make the affirmative decision, over and over and over, to have extremely high standards for what we make. I record a LOT of stuff that I don’t keep, because I have extremely high standards. I keep working and working until each part is as good as it can be. And I would suggest that you should do that too. And, on that topic, here’s an empowering idea for you:

Having high standards is free!

Seriously: it doesn’t cost any extra money to have high standards. And it doesn’t take fancy gear. It’s purely a question of discipline and rigor. Even if your sound is intentionally lo-fi, you can do it well, or not. You can choose to be lazy and let some subpar stuff onto your recordings — or you can choose not to do that. Which recording would you ultimately rather be responsible for? I think we both know the answer. It’s simple when you think about it abstractly. It can of course be much harder in practice.

So, why is it hard sometimes to exert discipline over a recording process? In my experience, it has to do with feeling insecure about one’s role. I know that, personally, when I first started producing records for people, I was insecure as hell. I was nominally in charge of a process that I felt very not in charge of. And I made up for it in a very human way, by pretending to be more knowledgeable than I was — possessed of an effortless expertise that naturally translated into a quick and easy recording process.

The way that manifested for me was that I would give some interesting-sounding pseudo-Rick Rubin / Brian Eno mumbo-jumbo “direction,” and then I would record, like, I don’t know, ONE TAKE, and most of the time it would not be The One, and then I would spend twenty times as much time trying to make that subpar take sound good in the computer as it would’ve taken me just to work a bit more on recording the part.

But what you should do, I’ve subsequently figured out, is you should record that first take, and you should listen back to it, and you should go, “I don’t think this is good as it can be,” and you should keep working on it until it is as good as it can be.

So that’s Thought Two: we should have high standards, and we should commit to doing the work to achieve them.

Tenaciously — jamie