4/5/07
I’m really enjoying the presentations – but I will talk more on them next time!
This week, I’d like to ask a question that came to me fairly early on in the MTF sessions. I have been meaning to ask it of Steve – and this now seems the most appropriate forum for it.
Q: Now that we can do anything we want in the studio (thanks to the progress of technology), what is it that constitutes being creative these days??
Steve touched on this in our first or second session – and he played us some really creative tracks that creatively use ‘the studio’ from the 1970s or so. It really struck me (and I think this was Steve’s point…) that these productions ‘back in the day’ were more interesting and cutting edge than a lot of what passes for creativity and experimentation today. Have we become less creative, now that our creative boundaries have been pushed so far by developing technology?
Other versions of this question might be: is technology a creative friend or enemy?
If we need to be pushing against the boundaries to be really creative, then it seems to me that it might be more difficult to be creative today. Why? Well, the boundaries are just further away, and therefore harder to reach.
Do we even know what the boundaries are? Or has technology made the boundaries of creative production techniques so distant from us that we are never likely to approach them, let alone ‘push them’.
I utterly love technology (said in sniveling little music-tech-geek voice…). I love Autotune. But when I come to mix a track these days, I am presented with such a vast array of possible choices about how to mix, what effects to run, (etc) that it now feels like a kind of paralysis can set in. We might call this pathology: creative freedom induced panic paralysis syndrome. (Otherwise known as inexperience….)
And maybe technology will be our saviour here. Perhaps we need to find some cutting edge software and get right into it: find out where its boundaries are and then: push like we’ve never pushed before!! If I am disciplined enough to restrict myself to the use of just one plug-in and really force myself to use it for things it wasn’t designed to, I might be creating an artificial barrier that I will then have to push against.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
MTF presentation - write up: Stock Aitken and Waterman
Stock Aitken and Waterman
Disclaimer: I haven’t chosen these guys because they’re people I like. I’ve chosen them because they represent something that is very interesting to me. I am fascinated by the role of the producer. And in my view, SAW took this role to an extreme. Their production style could easily be called ‘overproduction’ (in fact it’s been called much worse!!).
SAW are worth looking at, in my opinion, because they caricature the producer role. And sometimes when we look at caricatures we see things that we wouldn’t notice in real life.
The SAW sound.
It is the sound of success. Sound on Sound stated (1994) that Mike Stock had ‘worked on over 100 top 40 records, making him the most successful producer of all time.’
This is indeed a shed-load of commercial credibility, and demands to be taken notice of.
SAW were influential enough to have shaped the pop sound-scape of he 80’s. But I think that calling them 80’s synth pop would be an oversimplification. They combined genuine underground club grooves with the classic commercial pop (read: squeaky clean) themes. (Wikipedia, 2007)
I remember (as if it were only yesterday) that in 1986/1987 the underground dance radio shows on air in Adelaide (Club FM, Eurobeat, Soul Spectrum for anyone who remembers or cares..) would play quite a bit of SAW material alongside more serious club tracks. SAW, it seems played a role in bringing the club sound into the mainstream.
A summary of the SAW musical style:
• Very electronic/synthetic in terms of sounds used – and early work was easily mistaken for serious club/dance music
• Worked predominantly with female vocalists
• Wrote many of the songs that they produced
• They were prolific: produced a great volume of material, but it all had a very familiar ring to it. In fact, their style was pretty easily spotted by the shrewd 80’s music punter.
How they worked
Broadly speaking, SAW had 2 different approaches to their work. They would either work with artists that were already established and transform their sounds in the SAW direction. Or, they would work with new, emerging artists and (again) transform their sound into the SAW direction.
An example of their first approach is their work with Bananarama. The SAW transformation here is very significant. Pre-SAW, Bananarama were a somewhat average female pop group. (In fact I am still haunted by the very average vocal performance on the track ‘Don’t it make you feel good’ released in their earlier years).
Bananarama’s first release with SAW was ‘Venus’. This was a landmark track for their career. It redefined the image of Bananarama as slick pop with a real club influence.
This is a significant part of the SAW working method: they had influence on the image and presentation of the artists they worked with.
And so Bananarama went on to become a very popular, slick and well produced part of the pop music scene through to the early 90’s.
SAW also were very good at sourcing new talent and finding them a place in the charts.
They seemed to excel at taking artists who already had a profile (eg soap stars) and teaching them how to sing the SAW way.
Kylie Minogue is their most accomplished project. She was recruited right off the set of Neighbours and enjoyed phenomenal chart success immediately, thanks to the superb branding and packaging of SAW. They also worked with Jason Donovan.
By combining the elements of
• Song writing
• Slick production, based on club grooves
• Careful talent selection (i.e. worked with very marketable artists)
• Image production and manipulation
SAW were able to produce musical packages which the marketplace found irresistible.
Stock Aitken and Waterman seemed to have a great sense of how to put together an appealing package of music for the mainstream commercial market. The evidence of this is the consistent success of their work.
It could certainly be suggested that their work was less about the music, and more about the production of a marketable commodity. I believe that this is likely true, but we cannot underestimate the power of music in this equation.
SAW often worked with artists who already had a profile – so there was already a sector of their market with posters of Kylie and Jason on their bedroom wall. Having Kylie and Jason sing as well was a natural and powerful extension of this desire, on the part of young teens all over the world to ‘swoon’ over their favourite stars.
This brings me to what I feel is the greatest strength of the SAW production. They unashamedly produced material which was EXACTLY on the level that the audience (or consumers) wanted. SAW were able to truly engage with their audience. Their music was not overly complicated (infuriatingly so!), and it existed alongside an attractive artist profile. This made for tasty consumable morsels of music that the record buying public (mostly teens) gorged themselves on.
Conclusion
Most of us don’t want to make music in a vacuum. I have a strong desire to produce cool music, but in particular, I want to produce cool music that engages meaningfully with some audience. Thus, I find it interesting and challenging to look at how well SAW were able to produce music which so readily engaged with an audience.
I find that my passion for music means that I view music differently from ‘normal people’. If this drives me to produce something so esoteric that only music-techno-geeks really ‘get it’ I reckon I will have fallen short of what I set out to do.
References
Sound on Sound, August 1994; Relative Media (Article entitled: Production Lines: Mike Stock)
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_Aitken_Waterman; viewed on 4.4.07
Disclaimer: I haven’t chosen these guys because they’re people I like. I’ve chosen them because they represent something that is very interesting to me. I am fascinated by the role of the producer. And in my view, SAW took this role to an extreme. Their production style could easily be called ‘overproduction’ (in fact it’s been called much worse!!).
SAW are worth looking at, in my opinion, because they caricature the producer role. And sometimes when we look at caricatures we see things that we wouldn’t notice in real life.
The SAW sound.
It is the sound of success. Sound on Sound stated (1994) that Mike Stock had ‘worked on over 100 top 40 records, making him the most successful producer of all time.’
This is indeed a shed-load of commercial credibility, and demands to be taken notice of.
SAW were influential enough to have shaped the pop sound-scape of he 80’s. But I think that calling them 80’s synth pop would be an oversimplification. They combined genuine underground club grooves with the classic commercial pop (read: squeaky clean) themes. (Wikipedia, 2007)
I remember (as if it were only yesterday) that in 1986/1987 the underground dance radio shows on air in Adelaide (Club FM, Eurobeat, Soul Spectrum for anyone who remembers or cares..) would play quite a bit of SAW material alongside more serious club tracks. SAW, it seems played a role in bringing the club sound into the mainstream.
A summary of the SAW musical style:
• Very electronic/synthetic in terms of sounds used – and early work was easily mistaken for serious club/dance music
• Worked predominantly with female vocalists
• Wrote many of the songs that they produced
• They were prolific: produced a great volume of material, but it all had a very familiar ring to it. In fact, their style was pretty easily spotted by the shrewd 80’s music punter.
How they worked
Broadly speaking, SAW had 2 different approaches to their work. They would either work with artists that were already established and transform their sounds in the SAW direction. Or, they would work with new, emerging artists and (again) transform their sound into the SAW direction.
An example of their first approach is their work with Bananarama. The SAW transformation here is very significant. Pre-SAW, Bananarama were a somewhat average female pop group. (In fact I am still haunted by the very average vocal performance on the track ‘Don’t it make you feel good’ released in their earlier years).
Bananarama’s first release with SAW was ‘Venus’. This was a landmark track for their career. It redefined the image of Bananarama as slick pop with a real club influence.
This is a significant part of the SAW working method: they had influence on the image and presentation of the artists they worked with.
And so Bananarama went on to become a very popular, slick and well produced part of the pop music scene through to the early 90’s.
SAW also were very good at sourcing new talent and finding them a place in the charts.
They seemed to excel at taking artists who already had a profile (eg soap stars) and teaching them how to sing the SAW way.
Kylie Minogue is their most accomplished project. She was recruited right off the set of Neighbours and enjoyed phenomenal chart success immediately, thanks to the superb branding and packaging of SAW. They also worked with Jason Donovan.
By combining the elements of
• Song writing
• Slick production, based on club grooves
• Careful talent selection (i.e. worked with very marketable artists)
• Image production and manipulation
SAW were able to produce musical packages which the marketplace found irresistible.
Stock Aitken and Waterman seemed to have a great sense of how to put together an appealing package of music for the mainstream commercial market. The evidence of this is the consistent success of their work.
It could certainly be suggested that their work was less about the music, and more about the production of a marketable commodity. I believe that this is likely true, but we cannot underestimate the power of music in this equation.
SAW often worked with artists who already had a profile – so there was already a sector of their market with posters of Kylie and Jason on their bedroom wall. Having Kylie and Jason sing as well was a natural and powerful extension of this desire, on the part of young teens all over the world to ‘swoon’ over their favourite stars.
This brings me to what I feel is the greatest strength of the SAW production. They unashamedly produced material which was EXACTLY on the level that the audience (or consumers) wanted. SAW were able to truly engage with their audience. Their music was not overly complicated (infuriatingly so!), and it existed alongside an attractive artist profile. This made for tasty consumable morsels of music that the record buying public (mostly teens) gorged themselves on.
Conclusion
Most of us don’t want to make music in a vacuum. I have a strong desire to produce cool music, but in particular, I want to produce cool music that engages meaningfully with some audience. Thus, I find it interesting and challenging to look at how well SAW were able to produce music which so readily engaged with an audience.
I find that my passion for music means that I view music differently from ‘normal people’. If this drives me to produce something so esoteric that only music-techno-geeks really ‘get it’ I reckon I will have fallen short of what I set out to do.
References
Sound on Sound, August 1994; Relative Media (Article entitled: Production Lines: Mike Stock)
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_Aitken_Waterman; viewed on 4.4.07
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