Saddening glissando strings
Posted by listenhear on June 7th, 2008
The first album I ever bought was Aladdin Sane (the second was a David Essex lp, so I can’t claim that many cool kid points), anyway….on my journey home tonight I revisited this Bowie classic and was once again just blown away by it’s brilliance. What really struck me this time was the fact that I’m now convinced we’ve all forgotten how to mix, we (OK, I, perhaps?) have become just to reliant on automation, non destructive wav editing and the many hundreds of plugins at our disposal.
Its a crash course for the ravers…
Listening to this recording is just mind blowing, remembering how a final mixdown was as much of a performance as anything else anyone did. For me you can just tell that everyone involved, from Bowie to the tape-op, just oozed talent, amazing creativity and the kind of technical skill I just haven’t heard or seen for such a long time. RCA apparently didn’t like the mix of some tracks which leads me to believe I need to dig around further and find out what else was around so I can compare, it may be, nevertheless, simply the case of this album being way ahead of it’s time…something which most A&R and record company employees (from my experience) are particularly bad at spotting and especially later admitting to.
So while I try a discover just when the world forgot how to mix, I suspect sometime in the late 80’s/early90’s, I’m going to once again enjoy Panic in Detroit (listen and remember what it was like performing a final mix down in real time) and I’ll probably lust, just a little, at the stunning snare sound on Cracked Actor.
Talking about cracked actors and forgetting how to mix here’s an out take from my week.
Vindice1 by Steven Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Based on a work at listenhear.podbean.com.
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