Electronics, Digitisation, Faithful Acoustics and EQ

With acoustic instruments, it is fairly straightforward using equalisation to render a recorded channel faithful to the natural sound. Usually it is as close as possible to the ideal, or to be contrary, it is deliberately or accidentally made to sound different to achieve a particular effect. 

For example, acoustic steel string guitars rarely sound "good in the mix" unless the middle frequencies are taken out, often with both extremes of the bass and treble range boosted as well. Mainly this is to make the guitar stand out, as the middle frequencies clash because they are shared by vocals and so many other instruments of the middle register. 

However, we have no way of knowing in unbiased reality what electronic/digital instruments actually sound like 'unprocessed' (think Moog synthesiser), because their sounds do not occur in nature. They only come out of amplifiers and speakers, and depending on the types used, sound completely different in different set-ups.

 Even without effects processing, every amplifier lends its own colouration to any driven sound. And so do speaker systems - even more so. A quick and simple way to grasp this concept is to try to put the bottom end through tweeters and the treble end through woofers. Neither speaker is designed to faithfully replicate those opposite ends of the frequency spectrum, and they end up 'colouring' them to the point where both sound like someone banging a china plate on a table. There goes your cymbals and bass drum, gone! 

In fact we are so used to the way sound engineers have mixed electronic instruments in the past (think Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Rick Wakeman) that we take it for granted that's the way they're supposed to sound. 

And in the same way that our subconscious mind interprets film score cues - pizzicato strings to build suspense, tubas to illustrate clumsy buffoon-like idiocy, violins for romance, or bass and guitar riffs for Al Capone drama (theme from Peter Gunn, James Bond) - in a similar fashion à la Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf - we attribute certain digitally fabricated tones such as the famous Fairlight CMI and even the analogically generated ones such as the Hammond B3 organ and Moog synth as an unquestioned 'given'. We expect them to sound a certain way purely from being conditioned by our past experiences. 

But - they all sound different depending on which amp and speakers are used. And without them you won't hear nuthin'. They don't have a sound of their own. Except maybe, if you're old enough you'll know the sound of putting a needle on a spinning record without amplification. Sort of like a bunch of ants yelling in a foam coffee cup. I suspect that if digital music had a similar naturally produced sound it'd be like the old dialup to get on the net. A cacophony of bleeps and squawks. 

I hear a lot of so-called 'music' these days that simply would not exist without electricity. Or computers. It is impossible to reproduce those sounds on any acoustic instrument apart from the human voice. And therein lies their only validity - if it wasn't for that, I would just call it noise. Any of that rap, dance, house and hip-hop converted and played on purely acoustic instruments would immediately sound like a Weird Al Jankovic send-up. 

Which just gave me an idea, to record my next song totally á cappella, mimicking synthesisers and drum machines. Weird Sam Yankabit.