"obviously using the computer programme ProTools"

This phrase has cropped up a few times in reviews I've read lately.
Most recently in this absolutely TERRIBLE review of Chinese Democracy http://tinyurl.com/5m7dsg. I'd never noticed Andrew Perry before (probably because he writes for The Telegraph), but he really seems like an ill informed, borderline retard.
Anyway...
Why do "journalists" / bloggers insist on name dropping software etc. that they obviously know nothing about? I imagine it's in some wild hope that they will seem knowledgeable and therefore worthy of sharing their opinions, but it generally just makes them look really, really stupid.
(See also, Auto-tune)

i think there are credits for ProTools in the booklet to chinese democracy

while some bands/albums make it easy for people (a perfect circle sounds like a protools demo for chrissakes), there aren't many reviews that say anything like 'obviously using a drum machine' or something

Bitching about ProTools seems weird (that's like bitching about the kind of mixing board someone used or something). Bitching about autotune (or rather the way autotune is used) seems fair though (note: I love autotune.)

I am pretty sure they have been using Pro-Tools. I guess what he means is that they are abusing Pro-Tools, which is pretty much usual these days too.

"ProTools" and "AutoTune" get used the same way, though -- often by critics who learn the name of the software associated with an effect, and then over-use the name of the software to describe that aesthetic. People constantly use "AutoTune" to refer to talkboxes, vocoders, or pitch correction that could be coming from nearly anything; ProTools seems to have enough (rock) market saturation that you're less likely to be wrong about it, but you'll often see people mention the program as if it's synonymous with over-editing, despite the bulk of what they consider not over-edited probably having passed through it, too.

perfect circle sounds like a protools demo for chrissakes

See I have no idea what this means

I believe it means that the music they create sounds like the demonstration/tutorial files that come with the ProTools program.

Pro-Tools is also being abused to exaggerate dynamic range compression, that is what I thought of when I said abusing.

That doesn't make sense by itself, Geir -- I hate to say this, but you're going to need to explain yourself further. (ProTools is a tracking program, and its workings are generally independent of whether or not you feel like compressing the range.)

i think there are credits for ProTools in the booklet to chinese democracy

― banana thug (M@tt He1ges0n), Monday, November 24, 2008 9:23 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

I don't see the problem there. Artists give credit to Fender, Zildjian, Moog or Sunn amps as well. They're all 'instruments' to the musician, in the true sense of the word. And I agree with Debord that this phrase (although not having read it before) makes no sense whatsoever.

Pro-Tools is also being abused to exaggerate dynamic range compression, that is what I thought of when I said abusing.

― Geir Hongro, Monday, 24 November 2008 21:43 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

Here Geir has been kind enough to demonstrate the exact kind of faux intelligent commentary I'm on about. Cheers dude.

i wasn't saying there was a problem...just the original post on this thread called out the reviewer for using ProTools in a wrong sense or not knowing what he was talking about, when the album in question clearly credited that Axl WAS using protools, so it doesn't seem like the reviewer was talking out of his ass wrt ProTools and Chinese Democracy

and like if you've heard chinese democracy it's pretty impossible to discuss it WITHOUT discussing protool/digital recording/edit blah blah blah

"People constantly use "AutoTune" to refer to talkboxes, vocoders, or pitch correction that could be coming from nearly anything"

Mostly it's just people bitching about T-Pain.

xpost - That's a weird comparison, LBI -- ProTools isn't an "instrument" in the sense that cymbals or amps are, it's only an instrument in the "studio as instrument" sense, and to be honest I can't think of any situation where an artist has credited Fostex or Alesis for the reel-to-reel or mixing deck.

I mean, fundamentally and philosophically, I can't really think of much ProTools lets you do that you couldn't have done with analog tape, given an endless supply of funds, man-hours, and razors -- it just happens to make it all so easy and efficient that it becomes tempting to detail the hell out of every sound. Which, when it's a problem, is obviously a production problem, not a software one.

I don't see the problem there. Artists give credit to Fender, Zildjian, Moog or Sunn amps as well. They're all 'instruments' to the musician, in the true sense of the word. And I agree with Debord that this phrase (although not having read it before) makes no sense whatsoever

Also: some engineers are better with ProTools that others - it's something you can develop a special skill-set around. It's not at all uncommon to see a separate "ProTools Engineer" credit - this isn't really the same as crediting Zildjian etc. I don't have the credits to hand so I'm not sure if there's just a shout-out to ProTools (which would mean: ProTools comped the studio/project up-to-date ProTools HD rigs, which aren't at all cheap) or a credit specifically for the guy who had enough game to drag-and-drop Axl's big mess into shape.

i am a gun at PT editing

The difference with "autotune" is that the name of the process also describes the effect sought, such that it does make sense with regard to pitch manipulation techniques that might have been achieved using other means. I think it's too late to put "autotune" back in the box as it were, and restrict it to a more specific usage.

Whereas "protools" means too many things to be useful. It ultimately becomes just an ideologically loaded statement (this isn't REAL SWEATY ROCK MUSIC anymore).

What annoys me is how this sort of lazy thinking seems to become more prominent the higher up the chain you go. The broadsheets are full of this crap. We just finished another season of Idol over here, and one of the two main papers had an article mentioning the winner and briefly discussing the likelihood of him attaining artistic longevity. They drafted in a "popular music analyst" who then went on a screed to the effect of: "his likelihood of producing something of longterm artistic value is restricted to the slim possibility of him escaping the evil clutches of the corporate franchise machine that will most likely reduce his music to the equivalent of tasteless processed fast food. If he can disavow the devil of big money and celebrity excess, he may have a chance. But most likely his music will be like McDonalds: too sugary, unhealthy, and enjoyed only by teenage girls." (I'm paraphrasing, but not by much)

How much do you think "popular music analysts" are paid to autobot bullshit? 'Cuz I want on that gravy train. I can autobot bullshit with the best of them.

I still want to know why APC sounds like "a ProTools demo" because the sir weeze has now said that approximately 1,234,623,273,636 times without expansion or context.

considering what i've read and what we all know about chinese democracy, i should hope the PT dude(s) get credit, my god

i mean, it's like a big union plaque on a bridge or something

Maybe we need a new sticker, like "Parental Advisory: Drums Comped with >1.5 Edits per Second"

P.S. God help me but I'm still genuinely curious whether Geir was just talking nonsense or whether he has a serious argument for why ProTools compels people to compress things more -- I can imagine there being perfectly reasonable arguments about how loads of digital editing might lock in with or incline people toward overcompressing, but I have no clue what those arguments would be.

I'm going to go and hoover the carpet.

the "loudness war" (ugh) happens just as much in the analog world

Can Axl's protools "abuse" become a representative iconic non-abusive abusive use of the tool the way Sly Stone's "abuse" of multi-track recording and overdubbing with Riot did?

please don't mock me for the poor wording of that idea. Hey, even better, don't mock me at all?

no, I think you're going to mocked

sorry dude

I'm going to go and hoover the carpet.

Sure, but the way some people use "ProTools" is a bit like if ... well, if you only looked at over-vacuumed carpets and said "damn hoover strikes again," suggesting that ordinary vacuumed carpets have nothing to do with hoovers. (I realize it is not really possible to over-vacuum a carpet, but you know what I mean.)

Can Axl's protools "abuse" become a representative iconic non-abusive abusive use of the tool the way Sly Stone's "abuse" of multi-track recording and overdubbing with Riot did?

From the bits of this I have heard, no -- I mean, you never know what things sound like decades down the road, but there does not appear to be any cool, interesting, or special aesthetic involved here. (Also, even if there were, I think the songs would have to be better for this to one day seem like an odd classic.)

(Also I don't know how any single artist could surpass the use of in-the-box editing in the average pop song far enough to make some kind of fascinating personal aesthetic out of it.)

as used in the article, 'pro tools' is used more as a way to say 'very multi-tracked' rather than 'over-edited'. which is sort of just as silly, esp when he also that mentioned roy thomas baker was one of the fired producers - 'bohemian rhapsody' was so heavily overdubbed that the tape it was recorded on had started to become translucent and they had to print it before the tape fell apart

when I hear reviewers talk about a 'ProTools' sound on a record that has no audible special effects or edits, music that ostensibly could have been performed live, but obviously, audibly wasn't, I still know exactly what they're trying to say -- too many things have been fixed

listening to the Beatles / Stevie Wonder / Marvin Gaye multitracks are fun, it is amazing how many flat-out mistakes or bizarre little anomalies are on those sessions when you isolate the tracks, the kinds of things your average PT operator would reflexively correct -- stop the transport, and devote 30-90 seconds to nudge aligning or pitch correcting or flying in 2 seconds of the right note from thirty seconds later in the solo

xpost to Nabisco, I can think of many records that take this as an aesthetic, actually, mostly teenpop records from Britney onwards. The music followed the self-conscious lead set down by the artificiality of the figurehead: acoustic vocals & instruments obviously no longer depict anything 'real' or performable. (I'd point to the 2nd and 3rd Shiina Ringo records as the first artistically successful examples of intrinsically 'ProTooled' records, where the fact that the editing itself not just audible but a main point of focus for the listener)

xpost to Nabisco, I can think of many records that take this as an aesthetic, actually, mostly teenpop records from Britney onwards.

Umm, this is pretty much what I just said -- I can't think of how any single artist can surpass the way this functions in the average pop song enough to make an interesting personal aesthetic out of it. I.e., it's par for the course in such a big chunk of pop music that you're never going to make it sound like your own special vision.

I wasn't challenging you, I was just naming names. I agree it'd be an awkward place for one person to attempt to personally speak from. let's give it another decade.

Oh, sorry. Yeah, I'm kinda charmed by the idea of modern pop one day having that appeal. I hope to eventual read interviews with an indie band going "yeah, we're really into that turn-of-the-century Matrix sound, like on those old Avril Lavigne records, we collect old CDs and really want to capture that vintage feel"

I think there's one other, pretty important piece of this argument that hasn't been mentioned here: the tendency with ProTools to copy and paste parts from one section to another. On analog, this could be done, but it wasn't as common; when Teo Macero did it for In a Silent Way, people accused Miles of being lazy, a horrible sell-out, etc.

But for users of ProTools, it's extremely common to record, say, the background vocals in the chorus of a pop song, get the harmonies and blend just right and paste the lot of them in every time the chorus plays. The effect can be to create the impression of a live performance but one that is, in essence, identical.

The use of ProTools in this way has definitely contributed to the speed and, hence, amount of music being made -- it's just easier to produce this way, certainly to compose. Obviously, if you're recording on a huge budget, it's feasible to demo tracks this way by tracking things to ProTools initially (instead of tape) and then re-record the parts individually later on in the full-blown studio. But in an era of declining sales and profits, I often wonder how much that's actually done. A decade ago, when I engineered in ProTools studios, we tracked to ProTools initially and just edited from there.

At any rate, I'm pretty torn about it myself. I use audio editing software pretty relentlessly and I think it's been every bit as much a drag on my creativity as it has been a boon to my productivity. And vice-versa.

Holy shit, is it my mp3's or is Chinese Democracy supposed to sound like this??

hahaha yeah it's fucking nuts

If I were the Protools company, I'd be happy our product is synonymous with all forms of computer manipulation of music, even if it is largely unflattering, the same way Nintendo should be happy that Gameboy is now the generic term for all 'blippy' video game music, even if it were made on an Amiga, say.

I mean, there is never going to be a competing product that is going to be synonymous with all good manipulation of music, right? So there's no disadvantage to paying reviewers to use the word 'protools' everywhere in almost every context.

I mean, it's pretty fucking obvious he's using ProTools!

I think there's one other, pretty important piece of this argument that hasn't been mentioned here: the tendency with ProTools to copy and paste parts from one section to another.

that is exactly what i mean when i bitch about pro tools (often murkily used as a euphemism for "sounds like software"). it can make music sound "blocky" (cut-copy-paste funk). there is always going to be room for interesting abuse of this kind of thing though. this abstract goes into a bit of detail regarding the ramifications of software on music. musician ---> designer.

i think the same thing happened with the quantization of beats.

ok not to turn every thread into a GNR thread. but I will share one story about this record from a friend that has more to do with the record itself than another 'Axl is fucking crazy' story

so Freese has to retire from the lineup, and Axl (for whatever reason) decides that all the drum parts have to be entirely re-recorded. he tells Brian to replicate the current drum arrangements down to the fills. he pays a guy to chart out Freese's drum parts down to the bar: an entire month of copyist bills, and the stack of charts was the size of a telephone directory, then weeks spent rehearsing, all on the clock. the engineer then rerecords every single last drum part, then comps them to the original tracks. the causes for the stiffness on this album goes way beyond any one PT operator, it's really kind of a personal mania.

that is awesome. i have to hear this.

I haven't heard it, but can assure you, you don't.

honestly i'm really intrigued. recently whenever i'd pop over here to ilm, i'd see the CD thread revived and i thought it was for more speculation. i had no idea the album actually was being released.

I still want to know why APC sounds like "a ProTools demo" because the sir weeze has now said that approximately 1,234,623,273,636 times without expansion or context.

what i mean is that the guitar bass and vocal effects all sound like generic protools presets, and their approach to using them sounded like 'hey, we havent used THIS one yet!'

there is no such thing as a generic protools preset. generic plugin presets is another matter

esoj can I escort you back to the mid-nineties so you can help me tell people that no, they don't really know what a Tascam 4-track "sounds like"

haha

i've been guilty of this bullshit but i blame it on 99% of rock music sounding like absolute garbage these days (whether the tunes kick ass or not)

scratch that, that hyperbole

My personal mea culpa on this front is that I sometimes feel weird using the word "bedroom" in describing things that are not really likely to have been recorded in a bedroom.

(Especially given the huge proportion of totally non-"bedroomy" dance and hip-hop music that quite likely is made in bedrooms.)

I can't think of any situation where an artist has credited Fostex or Alesis for the reel-to-reel or mixing deck.

Rush used to credit Fostex.

Maybe this should be another thread but compare/contrast
protools with powerpoint.
A lot of the arguments for/against seem interchangeable.

The use of "powerpoint abuse" as a shorthand for presentation critique seems like a reasonable shorthand to adopt, even if say the actual presentation was done in keynote, like the al gore movie. So why not the same with "protool abuse"? Those phrases both capture an impulse to indulge in cosmetic manipulations simply because the software makes it easy to do it.

protools kind of rules and powerpoint is an annoying piece of shit, though

xpost aw <3 rush!

Powerpoint = <3

Because it's easier to blame the technology than the people using it. I.e. Protools/auto-tune/synth presets don't kill people, I do, etc.

powerpoint equals a heart? a bum? a pointed chef?

Eh, I think PowerPoint, as a program, is way more tied in with form of the presentations made with it than ProTools, as a program, is tied in with the music made with it.

There is no such thing as an invisible PowerPoint presentation, but there can be invisible use of ProTools.

This post on videogame journalists getting out of their depths using graphics engines as shorthand for a certain kind of game look or mechanic is perhaps relevant:

http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2008/11/the_sameness_engine_or_write_what_you_know.htm

In other words, understanding and explicating the technical details of a game is not required to successfully discuss it critically, so why try? The technological aspect of video games is a rabbit hole, an endless source of technical jargon and arcane concepts and subtle nuances that will keep cropping up as long as you can stand to look for them. If the most you’ve learned is some vague notion that this engine is powerful or that engine is flexible, you’re walking into a minefield if you try to actually use that “knowledge” to make a point. The more you try to use the lingo, the sillier it sounds (“the geometry count is low”) and the more your attempts to explain why you feel the way you do about the game are undermined. This is the kind of thing developers pick up on as one of the reasons writing about games is so poor, and why they end up criticizing reviewers for not understanding the technical aspects of their titles. Speaking to your direct experience will serve you far better than any half-baked attempt to speculate about the underlying technology.

See: Music reviewers mentioning Pro Tools for further examples.

Oh, lol. I thought caek posted that in the game blogging thread :P

journalists or even listeners (whichever) criticising perceived creative processes in this manner is almost always a bad hustle as far as I can see. firstly it implies that they know how the work came to exist in its entirety when the tool used to create something or realise it is not the same as the idea. in any case people usually get this stuff kinda wrong, eg in techno the amount of "just fire up some ableton" criticisms that are made without any genuinely detailed analysis...

if critics thoroughly dissected how a track was made and got it spot on then this would be interesting, but mostly the names of computer programme brands are just bywords for "shit" to the layman.

x-post interesting post, I think people like to try and blind readers with "science", or at least preach to the converted and "prove" music (or a video game) is objectively bad.

haha xp

"x-post interesting post, I think people like to try and blind readers with "science", or at least preach to the converted and "prove" music (or a video game) is objectively bad."

I think this is the key issue: whereas an average listener might disagree with a reviewer's assertion that the music has been "over-finnessed", "smoothed out" etc. only a listener who has a basic familiarity with ProTools can meaningfully dispute the claim that "this was made with Protools."

We can see from politics that the "she blinded me with science" approach tends not to be successful as an argumentative technique except when preaching to the converted (who, because they assume they agree with the reviewer/politician, mentally insert their own sympathetic explanations of the point the reviewer/politician was laboriously making).

Yeah, see, my slight complaining about this isn't built out of some kind of pedantry (amazingly), it's that if someone goes overboard with editing, looping, processing, overdubbing, or whatever, the problem isn't that they went overboard with some specific thing the program does -- it's that they went overboard with editing, looping, etc. Attaching a name brand to those processes strikes me as just creating misinformation, especially when a huge chunk of the world's "live"-sounding records are being put together in the exact same software; it's almost like reading a really crafted novel and saying "eh, this writer's going nuts with the editing functions in Word."

What I wouldn't disapprove of is saying that someone went nuts with ... with the far reaches and possibilities of onboard in-the-box digital production, which might wind up less snappy in its wording, but has the advantage of being true.

so otm in the first paragraph...the problem isn't "ableton" or "pro tools" or whatever, the problem with a (record you feel is a) bad record is usually that it's a bad record...it all betrays this weird quasi-mystical view of the technology.

Ha, what's funny is that I think people toss around "Ableton" even less specifically than "ProTools," but the nature of Ableton is such that it'd be much more valid to talk about how the program influences the music coming out of it.

i prefer records where the artist is obviously using the recreational drug CoCaine

there is a whole generation of Ableton music I suppose, that said, I don't think I've ever read someone interestingly or clearly or valuably dissect a track that was made using Ableton...negative feelings about music don't often breed insightful criticism tho.

xpost, agreeing about guilty Ableton, beyond the way it structures looping, Ableton introduces distinctive (& terrible) artifacts into the sound when you do just about anything

Pro Tools' original brand name was Sound Tools, evoking MS Word for waveform editing, and it's a much better descriptor, generic / vanilla / transparent

I don't think it'd really work on a single track, but someone who's immersed in the larger flow of records could very validly start complaining about the overuse of specific effects/techniques coming out of Ableton, or theorizing about the program's workflow pushing things in certain directions. The saving grace with dance music, though, is how much it's historically been about exactly this stuff -- technology and technique helping suggest sounds, right down to entire trends based around "accidental" side-effects of certain tools.

i think the process of music editing should be renamed 'quistgarding'

xpost to caek

i like that blog, it's been an interesting read for awhile.

that said...just to..um...defend myself a bit i guess...i would say that equating this stuff in music and games is a bit misleading IMO. in general, yes i would say reviewer probably talk way too much tech jargon, etc...

but in games, things can be objectively BROKEN or very flawed in an pretty objective way. like for instance, to some a lo-fi recording like Times New Viking might sound horrible...to others, it might sound amazing (i like TNV)...

but there's really never been a benefit to, say, having a broken camera system in a third-person action game...or having pretty obvious things like bad textures or seam tearing or pop-up or fogging on the horizon...or having an inconsistent or chuggy framerate when there are lots of characters onscreen....in those cases, i don't see any way that you can avoid talking about technical issues.....games are art yes, but there is a functional quality to them that isn't really there in, say, music or film or books. they are to be PLAYED not just "experienced" and technical issues can make the play experience less enjoyable.

otm

"There is no such thing as an invisible PowerPoint presentation, but there can be invisible use of ProTools."

It's perfectly possible to create an unobtrusive powerpoint presentation without the visual flourishes that make it all "power-pointy" (like that clip-art picture of the stick figure dood scratching its head). I mean, it is possible right? Is David Byrne the only defender of powerpoint?

(I defended Powerpoint.)

http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/7562/imageuploadimagetm5.jpg

^a producer, yesterday

TS: Pro Tools sound vs. Logic sound.

^^^ was just thinking about that question.

You might be able to ID a "digitally recorded/mixed" sound vs. analog, since you can do so much more with the former. But does PT itself leave a fingerprint aside from the nature of the medium? I don't think so.

absolutely not, fuck no

The dude who engineered the last session my band did claimed to be able to detect auto-tune with high accuracy. Considering what he did to MY vox, I'm not so sure. (xp)

(I'm a crappy singer.)

autotune isn't that hard to pick out, tho sometimes it's a lot easier than others

lolbini

lol thread full of wooden-eared wannabes.

As for the "she blinded me with science" approach...I think, honestly, it depends on whether the critic knows what he or she is talking about. It's extremely relevant if he or she, in fact, does. Personally, I'm fascinated with the choices technology can lead the artist toward making. For instance, take Milton's point about Ableton and the way it structures looping, everyone talks about the program's ability to make loops in different pitches and tempos play together. But I think the program's most interesting feature is how it allows you to write by matrix rather than piano scroll (I use it more for MIDI than audio loops anyway, so the artifacts issue is rarely relevant). Because everything's laid out in rows and columns, it's incredibly easy to write music with dramatic butt-splices and so forth in a way that it isn't in ProTools -- you can still do it in PT, but not as easily.

If anything, I think there isn't ENOUGH serious writing about the effects of technology on music. Key word: "serious."

If you are even talking about the PT issue then the album is obviously not interesting enough to keep yr attention for its musical content, however PT-ized that may be.