recording the room

Mr. Richards discusses technology.
-------------------- [excerpt, Life] ------------------------ Very soon after Exile, so much technology came in that even the smartest engineer in the world didn't know what was really going on. 

How come I could get a great drum sound back in Denmark Street with one microphone, and now with fifteen microphones I get a drum sound that's like someone shitting on a tin roof? 

Everybody got carried away with technology and slowly they're swimming back. 

In classical music, they're rerecording everything they rerecorded digitally in the '80s and '90s because it just doesn't come up to scratch. 

I always felt that I was actually fighting technology, that it was no help at all.  And that's why it would take so long to do things.  Fraboni has been through all of that, that notion that if you didn't have fifteen microphones on a drum kit, you didn't know what you were doing.  Then the bass player would be battened off, so they were all in their little pigeonholes and cubicles.  And you're playing this enormous room and not using any of it. 

This idea of separation is the total antithesis of rock and roll, which is a bunch of guys in a room making a sound and just capturing it.  It's the sound they make together, not separated.  This  mythical bullshit about stereo and high tech and Dolby, it's just totally against the whole grain of what music should be.

Nobody had the balls to dismantle it.  And I started to think, what was it that turned me on to doing this?  It was these guys that made records in one room with three microphones.  They weren't recording every little snitch of the drums or the bass.  They were recording the room. You can't get these indefinable things by stripping it apart. 

The enthusiasm, the spirit, the soul, whatever you want to call it, where's the microphone for that?  The records could have been a lot better in the '80s if we'd cottoned on to that earlier and not been led by the nose by technology.

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{Life.  Keith Richards.  Copyright 2010, Back Bay / Little Brown.}

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