Billy Higgins

loucollins

I used to spend time with my 4-track just starting to drop track after track, building up a recording as it came. I hadn’t done this for well over a decade until I did that last recording, a bit over a week ago. This one has a more conventional structure and a clearly defined rhythm, and is probably a better piece all-told.

To some extent the point merely reiterates what I said on that last post about recording, but the limitations of a 4-track cassette machine are in many ways a musical help. I remember reading an interview with Ralf Hutter some years ago, and he pointed out that Kraftwerk‘s classic recordings were generally very simple, using an 8-track reel-to-reel machine (I am not so sure about Computer World on this count). When you work with a limited number of tracks, you have to make each track count for something. There are only four tracks on this recording, no ping-ponging, and each adds something.

Digital recording allows a lot of flexibility but it can be a temptation to overdo it. I had read a number of things about Animal Collective when their last record came out, and checked it out to see what the fuss was about. I was disappointed, though I could hear talent in the record. What I didn’t appreciate was a general muddiness to the recording, not in terms of what people generally think of as sound quality, but because too many things were put into the recording. One can “layer” things ad infinitum, but with fewer sounds on a recording it allows the music to breathe, and the listener to better connect. The trick of course is that those fewer sounds really need to hold up.