Are instrumentation differences why music is so much more segregated than it once was?

Anywho, you have an interesting point. I'll add more later.

Second, digital stuff is just as much the province of electronic music (one area I think you may be looking over) as it is hip-hop, and most mainstream rock is pretty digital too in recording and production. All analog all the time is much more the province of Albini & co., with the White Stripes being really the only bigish rock act I can think of to make a point of analog recording. And being really hard to recreate live is something found in "rock" music ever since the Beatles/Beach Boys studio opuses, not something that's only come about recently.

Anyway, I don't know if I buy that modern rock in particular is any more segregated than it has been at any point in the last thirty years or so.

PE/Anthrax killed. And about half the Judgment Night soundtrack is still hotness.

Also, if rappers collaboed w/ rock bands it would suck since all the major label multiplatium rock bands are dogshit. Why do you think that Lil Jon/Korn track never surfaced?

Imagine if Lil Jon did that with Lamb Of God. Or Dillinger Escape Plan? Tell me that wouldn't be fire.

Also, white and black electronic artists take ideas from each other often, and electronic and hip-hop artists take ideas from each other as well, it's just that there isn't really any white electronic music that's that big right now, at least in the States. Also, Britney Spears and other white pop singers are definitely using hip-hop ideas, and even sometimes the same producers.

Trash him all you want, but, as we've all read, John Mayer has expressed a great love for "Voodoo", and his skills as a musician have been trumpted by none other than ?uestlove. I think if gets his head out of his ass...musically, because maybe he's into that whole head-in-ass thing, and that's cool...and starts playing what he feels, we may hear this Abercrombie model cop some D'Angelo. That would be alright in my book.

i think genres do generally cluster round instrumental practice however

It was a hybrid of rock and hardcore [rave], and I don't believe it was successul (aesthetically).

But that's just me.

(x-post)

I'm not sure that sales figures would agree with you there...well, certainly not in America. The situation in Europe is another story.

Snapping's appropriate where it's appropriate. It can make an engineer's life a lot easier if they're applying a lot of envelope-intensive effects (as you'll have a strict BPM-based reference grid in which to work). Many do and not just in the rap/rock genre. It's also useful when expensive studio time is running out and/or the drummer is utter shit. Like most of these effects you'd be surprised which records use it and which don't. RapMetal uses it the most obviously, mostly down to a continuation of the Metallica-Production-Ethic of using every high end tool that's new you can get your hands on whether or not they're appropriate or not (cf. And Justice for All and that last piece of shit they did). It all goes back to the Hendrix/Clapton race to get the first Wah-wah on a record if you ask me. Personally I think it works for RapMetal - Imagine those bands without it.

Digital audio production has you working in precise frames, eg. the definite ceiling of your recording format to non-rotary, digitally-valued process and effects controls. By association this makes people think in a lot more precise terms about their work and something I personally try to counter in any way possible. With an analog setup there was a lot of unquantified parameters going on, with digital you can pretty much get the numbers on anything. One learns not to look and go back to Test One, your own ears. The New Bad Engineers tend to rely on these numbers as much as the Old Bad Engineers fawned over the new and expensive analog kit, chasing that elusive spectre, "warmth".

Both approaches have their upsides and downsides. I usually cite Sister Lovers, Murmur and Crooked Rain as records that show off the beauty of analog and couldn't possibly get made using digital kit, similarly there's more records than I can count now that couldn't have been pulled off pre-digital (and by that I mean post-sound-source obviously you can't build a graintable synth out of twigs).

I don't agree with Tuomas's point - I think Radiohead et al are trying to blend their existing rock blueprints with electronica rather than trying to ape it - but they fall down by taking the worst elements of both rather than the good ones.

the other characteristic sound of protools = autotune, and the compression-like sheen it coats vocals with, even when used sparingly

2. Compression does not add sheen. In fact, it takes away sheen by losing some of the treble frequencies due to the ADSR nature of how the effect is applied to the peaks. "Sheen" is added to signals by Exiters - basically a band-passed distortion of the high frequencies or, more recently, formant-based EQ processes such as BBE's Sonic Maximiser of Waves MaxxBass.

Yessiree bob, right you are

and compressed vocals sound sheeny to me – actually chromey – but yes i realize they aren't actually being sonically draped in chrome

I'm not commenting on the "sound" of pro-tools, merely saying that if you took a number of different players w/different "feels", recorded them into pro tools (or cubase, or digital performer, or logic etc etc etc) and then quantise them, then they're all going to sound more alike, aren't they?

I don't really have any agenda wrt pro tools, I mean I can't afford it, so I'm not into like evaluating it or anything!

(multi x-posts here b/c omgwtf i've actually had a customer here. a rarity these days.)

jody OTM.

personally, i don't like the super-compressed, brittle and almost tinny sound of most rock music these days.

But doesnt this have more to do with the fact that electronic musicians and hip hop artists are using the same equipment, than it being about everything that could've possibly be done with a guitar, drum bass set up was exhausted in 50 years?

(you even get ppl saying utterly dotty things like "beyoncé is talentless" = "those were grapes were sour" x 1000000000000) (i don't mean you have to like what she does w.her voice but to claim that A.NOther Rock Singer could up and do it IF HE CHOSE is plainly mad)

evidently rapping fits better into the routine rock vocal aesthetic - bcz it sounds shouty? - than elaborate/ecstatic melisma does

i think you should start with THIS as a fact - even if it's to yr ears an unfortunate fact - and judge proximity of form from this (that is, if yr argt is that similarity of form means more mutual borrowing)

beats and loops is a function of how ALL music is made in studios these days: the ease of cross-fertilsation arises from that i think

("proof" = lack of satisfactory of convincing crossover between jazz - which IS still essentially "live", i think - and rock: where it finally occurred - miles or weather report, say - the rfecord-making process was all about tape-splice cut-and-paste, same as rock mostly always has been)

(tape-splice is a good way to distinguish rock from its 50s forebears: "wipeout!!")