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mcnally
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Is it live or is it Memorex?
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Aug 15 10:21 UTC 1991 |
Which do you like better (generally), live music or studio recordings?
If you like live music better, do you like rambling, improvisational
performances or do you prefer that they stay closer to the studio material?
Who sounds better live? Who sounds better canned?
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| 41 responses total. |
mcnally
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response 1 of 41:
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Aug 15 10:31 UTC 1991 |
Though I generally prefer studio recordings there are some exceptions.
For instance, when I went to see Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty
Guitarists last year their concert just blew me away. I enjoy the two
albums they've released but they don't come anywhere near to equalling
the concert. On the other hand, everyone's been to concerts that were
just plain lousy. The Bob Dylan concert I saw at Hill Auditorium was
that way. It was almost completely devoid of enjoyment.
And then there are other shows I've been to have worked out to about
equal. I suspect a large part of these shows was due to the environment
(volume of the music, emotion of the crowd, the fact that you're pretty
determined to enjoy the concert that you just spent $20.00 on even if
it kills you, etc..) and they'd come across as inferior if I were just
listening to a recording of the show.
What bands are best to see live? Surely there are some bands out
there who perform amazingly on stage but have no following because they
are terrible recorded.. Who produces good live recordings? Who should
be legally prohibited from touring?
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mew
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response 2 of 41:
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Aug 15 19:40 UTC 1991 |
I hated Jethro Tull live. Well actually it was good to see them live
once. The energy was great and I liked watching Ian Anderson hop
around. But the SOUND SUCKED!!!! I HATE rock concerts that way.
You can never understand the lyrics at all and any subtleties of mix
are usually completely lost. sigh. Same thing with seeing Bowie live.
Although I wanted to see Bowie so much and was so hyped up I had a great
time. I enjoy new Pentangle better in studio I think. They suffer
from lacking the flute player here or the mandolin there... There
new music starts to sound too similar to me live. Now I suspect I would
have LOVED to see OLD Pentangle live. wow.
Michael Hedges: live. If you ever get a chance to see him live take it.
The man is amazing. He is one of the most vibrant, energetic guitarists
around. Ditto with Michelle Shocked. She is so powerful live.
I saw her at St. Andrews in Detroit. She was singing The Ballad of
Penny Evans (An acappella slow ballad about the vietnam war). There was
a drunk who yelled "Tell us about it". She didn't miss a beat- she just
turned all her energy towards him and SANG the next line right to him.
I swear you could FEEL the energy. He shut up for the rest of the concert.
Phew. To have that kind of control! wow.
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mythago
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response 3 of 41:
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Aug 16 12:00 UTC 1991 |
(I didn't find Tull terrible live.)
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krj
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response 4 of 41:
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Aug 18 00:37 UTC 1991 |
I'm afraid I'm far too much into the objectifying/consumerist approach to
music: I love having it reduced to a tangible thing that I can posess and
replay at will. I really need to get out to more live music; only made about
five shows at the Ark this year.
That said, I find that many of my favorite performers are much better live
than on disk. We can start with Richard Thompson; as good as many or most
of his records are, the live shows usually blow them away. In particular,
the live versions have been significantly improved over the recorded versions
of most things he's recorded since 1986 (DARING ADVENTURES). Thompson usually
sticks within the studio framework of his songs, but many of them get dragged
out to epic length live, with lots of soloing. The best example would be
the recent live performance of "Mystery Wind", which was turned into a
jazz improvisation fest for Pete Zorn; that's an aspect that isn't present at
all on the original recording.
Peter Bellamy and the Boys of the Lough, to pick two names from the folk bin,
are much better live than on recordings.
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ty
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response 5 of 41:
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Aug 19 05:07 UTC 1991 |
I think Pink Floyd and Springsteen are better live than in the studio.
I'd be curious to hear what a Peter Gabriel concert is like.
The Beatles were always better in the studio because of the fans.
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ragnar
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response 6 of 41:
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Sep 4 00:22 UTC 1991 |
The blues must be done live to see what it really is, live recordings count
here. The clean studio versions are much easier to play along to to develop
technique etc... It's been a long time since I've done that, but most
players really like to let loose on stage with stuff beginners are not
ready for.
In general, the recording I take home comes first. I'll see shows if I can,
but I can't afford to often. They are really different experiences, hard
to directly compare, but I can say that live shows, especially arena rock
sets, are much more fun if you know the songs first.
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mew
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response 7 of 41:
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Sep 5 21:19 UTC 1991 |
I went to see Gabriel Live once. To be honest I don't remember much except
that the energy was certainly there, the African musicians backing him
were great and the crowd singing along on Biko was neat.
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hawkeye
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response 8 of 41:
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Sep 9 18:36 UTC 1991 |
Saw Gabriel twice. Once in the comfort of the main floor of Hill Auditorium
and once at Joe Louis. The concert at Hill remains the best concert I have
ever seen. The one at the Joe four years later was disappointing.
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mcnally
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response 9 of 41:
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Sep 13 07:46 UTC 1991 |
I was very disappointed in the Pere Ubu appearance on the Letterman show
Wednesday night. The whole thing seemed doomed to start with. Mercury,
their record company, wouldn't pay the money to fly them to New York to appear
(god alone knows why the record company wouldn't put up $2500 (according to
rec.music.misc) in exchange for the sort of publicity the band could get
by appearing on a late-night show with a very large audience.) Apparently
the band couldn't afford it either (hell, if I needed to, *I* could probably
scrape up $2500 if it'd help my career as much as being on Letterman would.)
Maybe David Thomas spent it all on Twinkies or something..
In any case, the money wound up being donated by a combination of fans
and several famous musicians so they made the show. After all that trouble,
though, they were only allowed to perform one song, and even then they had
to suffer the Letterman band and Paul Schaffer (sp?) playing along. As if
that weren't bad enough, something seemed wrong with the sound and some of
the intruments kept fading in and out. After having seen them perform live
at the Blind Pig in June and looking forward to this appearance, I was doubly
disappointed. Sometimes you'll see a band on Letterman (or even more often,
Saturday Night Live) and conclude from the performance that however competent
they were in the studio, they sucked live. Now I'm no longer sure just how
valid those conclusions are, since I know this band *can* play live, yet I'd
never have suspected it from the broadcast..
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krj
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response 10 of 41:
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Sep 14 07:22 UTC 1991 |
"One song" and "Paul & co. play along" are the Letterman standards.
Somewhere we have the videotape of Richard Thompson's Letterman appearance,
complete with Paul Schaffer's flubs.
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mcnally
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response 11 of 41:
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Sep 14 17:16 UTC 1991 |
I've seen other bands perform 2 or even 3 songs in the past.
The part about Paul & the band playing alongs is standard, true,
but it's still annoying.
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ragnar
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response 12 of 41:
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Sep 17 05:01 UTC 1991 |
And you wonder why Mercury didn't want to pay to send them
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mcnally
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response 13 of 41:
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Sep 17 06:17 UTC 1991 |
It's still a huge amount of cheap publicity. But you're right..
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mythago
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response 14 of 41:
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Sep 17 10:33 UTC 1991 |
If anyone has information on the upcoming Tull tour, please post it.
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md
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response 15 of 41:
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Sep 26 13:16 UTC 1991 |
I think I prefer studio over live for all kinds of music, but especially
for classical. I've never heard a "flawless" concert performance of
any Bartok string quartet, so the meticulously pieced-together CD
recordings by the Emerson quartet I've been listening to lately are
certainly artificial, inhuman, unnatural, and all the other things
edited CDs are accused of being. But they are flawless, and therefore
they include everything Bartok intended and exclude everything he didn't
intend. They sound the way the score looks. This kind of fidelity to
the composer can only be achieved through splicing and editing.
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arabella
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response 16 of 41:
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Sep 27 19:35 UTC 1991 |
Yes, but that inhumanly perfect quality can be very soulless.
It can also be incredibly discouraging to developing musicians,
who imagine they must needs be as exactly perfect as what they
hear on recordings. If they start attending enough recitals and
concerts they start to realize that even the most technically
perfect musicians make mistakes... In addition, I would contend
that the only version of a Bartok string quartet that was
*exactly* as he conceived it is the version he played in his
own head. As a composer, I know too well that performances simply
can not replicate the perfection in my head. Performances are
really collaborations between performer and composer, whether that
is explicitly stated or not.
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md
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response 17 of 41:
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Sep 30 13:46 UTC 1991 |
Major food for thought in that response. I wish I could hear
Bartok's quartets as he heard them in his own head. (What an idea!)
Whatever he heard, though, it's unlikely that it included any miscues
or wrong notes.
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krj
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response 18 of 41:
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Dec 17 07:36 UTC 1991 |
Re: my mention of Peter Bellamy in response #4 above: one advantage
to recordings is that they outlive the performer. <krj sighs>
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craig
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response 19 of 41:
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Dec 19 00:04 UTC 1991 |
Some frequencies of music can not even be properly reproduced by
recording/playing media....
Take for instance, the Black Flag "My War" album, which had bass so low
it ended up sounding like mud on the album.... too bad, because if
you heard the songs at a concert, you were certainly affected by the
low frequency (basis for psychological experiments, but whatever..).
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mcnally
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response 20 of 41:
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Dec 19 10:07 UTC 1991 |
CDs should be able to adequately reproduce frequencies down to 20 hz,
I think. I gather that LPs have trouble doing it but I thought that you
could do it if you didn't care much about things like channel separation..
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craig
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response 21 of 41:
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Dec 19 11:42 UTC 1991 |
I believe 7 hz is more of psychological thing.
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mcnally
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response 22 of 41:
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Dec 19 12:00 UTC 1991 |
The alleged psychological effects of subsonic frequencies are
a matter of some debate, at least according to what little reading
I've done on the subject..
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craig
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response 23 of 41:
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Dec 21 08:58 UTC 1991 |
What one frequency will do to one subject, it will do differently
to another subject. Each of us has a resonance in our chest cavity
and head cavity which is affected by certain frequencies... Obviously,
this would not be the same for everyone.
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tcc
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response 24 of 41:
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Dec 23 09:14 UTC 1991 |
Any cavity will resonate when it is struck... by hammer or low frequency
sound-wave. Feeling a bass back-beat while standing in front of a huge speaker
adds untold thrills to 'just the music'.
Re 16: Much music is meant to be played as clockwork, such as Bach fugue
work. Any at all of the slightest miss-beat or over-legato fucks it up. The
feeling with a 6/8 tempestuous fugue spiraling around you with every note
being where and when you expect it is certainly NOT soulless music.
Re back to the track the item started with. I've had mixed experiences with
artists and their live vs. studio recorded works. When I went to see
Laurie Anderson this last time, I would've been really pissed to have to have
paid $60 a ticket to see the awful un-imaginative un-lush over-minimalist
one-person concert she gave. The Album that this tour was supposed to
coincide with was quite lush, very intense and thoughtful work, much unlike
the shit that the concert turned out to be. However, her earlier tours
, particularly the tour that went along with the 'Home Of the Brave' sountrack
album was quite impressive. 5 musicians, 3 backup singers, incredible amouts
of electronic gadgetry and imagery packed onto a busy crowded stage that kept
this viewer intent and interested.
also re 16: If you use electronic equipment music CAN most certainly attain
the perfection that is in your head. I've felt completely expressed after
putting it all into a computer and tweaking it until it was right.
Another performer that has lived up to his recorded works is Yanni. His
concert was simply breathtaking. He had 12 musicians on stage, including
a full string quartet that near the end all had the opportunity to JAM on one
of his best songs. It was one of those concerts that you simply refused to
close your eyes at. The music and the performers melted purely into each
other.
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