Brian Eno's "dangers" of digital...

A not too old, not too recent Brian Eno interview posted in one of the synth forums is a superb concentration of many ideas and aspects that exemplify how countless (and sometimes endless) threads on topics like DAW vs. DAWless recording, digital vs. analogue etc. have often contrived premises.

To confuse or deliberately conflate medium and content, tool and its user, technology and its use cases is a fundamental reasoning error, irrespective of the subject matter and regardless of who of what stature may commit it.

So how does a short article with a short interview manage to condense such a respectable list of faux pas? Well, where the journalist goes wrong is the classic problem of considering who says something instead of looking at what is being said, without suspending one's analytical and reasoning abilities. Also, he makes huge leaps based on what Eno is saying, some sweeping statements are not just simply wrong, but also disregard vast segments of the creative community in order to make some highly tendentious points.

The article suggests that digital, allowing myriad editing and correcting, is somehow more "dangerous" as we may "lose" something that we may have had if we had laboured on that recording via unforgiving and immutable means.

"Do I resist the temptation to perfect this thing? What do I lose by perfecting it? It’s difficult. Because now it is possible to mend anything, correct anything. "

Well, as complicated and philosophical one might make it, it is remarkably simple: everything is a mere matter of choice.

As the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, when he was told some of his street photography shots were "lucky" shots: there is no such thing as luck. Everything is a choice, N people with cameras may have been there at that moment, but maybe only one chose to take a shot and chose how to take that shot. 

He may have had the desire later to "perfect" it, i.e. eliminate some unfortunate framing or detail that happened in the spur of the moment. He may not have had that possibility back then. 

If he had the ability to crop or tweak the shot, then it would have been purely his artistic decision to make use of it and in certain ways - technology would not have 'made' him tweak the shot.

Eno mentions Bob Dylan going back to bare bone recording methods for his album Shadows in the Night.

Dylan said that “I could only record these songs one way, and that was live on the floor with a very small number of mics. No headphones, no overdubs, no vocal booth, no separate tracking…The engineer had his own equipment, left over from bygone days, and he brought all that in… There was no mixing. That’s just the way it sounded… We used as little technology as possible.”

Yes, the finality of recording without any editing possibility commands or at least demands respect. We appreciate the acrobats without safety nets more - but this is not only about the existence or absence of a safety net for the recording artist.

Here Eno is again blurring some boundaries... as he is mixing tool with the use of the tool, without even distinguishing between purely mechanical (or procedural) efforts and the actual creative efforts.

In the early days of wax cylinder recordings and later direct recordings onto gramophone master disc, the recording process offered absolutely zero editing or correcting possibilities. One threw away the take or not, that was pretty much the only choice one had. 

The fact, that technology allows endless corrections and tweaking does not mean it is technology's fault that some may over-use these. 

Ansel Adams has laboured for days in his dark room to achieve his superb prints, but he was using eminently analogue gear - and the shot on the negative was "it", often impossible to reproduce again. Same goes for his end results, some of his prints are unique, full stop. 

This, though, while it should not be fetishised for obvious reasons, is not an example of how "bad" endless tweaking offered by modern technology is in itself. 

“So the question that everybody’s asking is, is it getting any better as a result of all this?"

As obvious as it may sound, "better" depends on the end objective and the artistic intent. A monstrous bum note will not be left in, when it is a recording for a film soundtrack - just to consider one trivial example. However, if this is a recording of a jam in studio or at an event, with a number of great performers, then clearly a good choice would be to leave it as it is, for authenticity. 

How can this be even asked and have a subtext of questioning the actual technological possibilities, without even having a balanced set of use case examples? 

"But it’s such a hard temptation to resist. You’re recording a song and find a note that is really quite out of tune. In the past, you’d have said, it’s a great performance, so we’ll just live with it. What you do now is retune that note. So you’re always asking yourself, have we lost something of the tension of the performance, of the feeling of humanity and vulnerability and organic truth or whatever, by making these corrections? It does make you question the role of new technology in the studio. "

Again, as absolutely basic and simple it sounds (and it really is...), it is an artistic and technical choice: do we leave the performance untouched or - because now we can - we correct it?

The temptation being hard to resist, well, this point really puts the matter squarely in the lap of the artist (assuming he/she has a say).  If the artist is not making that decision, that is a problem with the management chain and not the technology.

Is "it" getting any better if we do tweak it for days or months? Well, it simply depends on the central aesthetics and the end goal set by the musician(s) and engineer(s). 

To do something just because we can is certainly a technological and artistic path that can backfire or make things totally sterile and overworked. 

But to say that this is somehow the technology's fault, it is absolutely remarkable - especially coming from someone of this stature. 

As he reminisces over the heroic years with very limited technology and editing possibilities, Eno does make the valid point that many who buy endless heaps of synthesizers and studio equipment can take heed of. 

“It’s partly to do with engineers working with very limited resources and really understanding them well. If you’ve only got two mics, one compressor and a couple of pre-amps, you really know what they do, because you’re using them every single day. It’s like an artist who is extremely good with water colours. Water colour is a very limited medium but you can become incredibly good with it if that is all you have. "

Indeed, in electronic music, as in any recorded music and in photography, too, the advent of 'modern' technology makes us quite pampered by having virtually infinite choices of instruments and recording equipment. 

One does admire the sheer effort that went into an artwork or music recording, but going back to the Ansel Adams example: the reduction of effort spent on the non-creative mechanics of a creative workflow is, in itself, not a negative - but a net a positive. 

If one can achieve in the studio in minutes or hours what used to take days in the 'heroic' era, then one is gaining more immediacy, more and not less creative possibilities by not spending so much time and effort on the... mechanics. 

If Ansel Adams could use a burning and dodging brush in Photoshop, instead of paper cutouts and numerous segments to balance selectively the exposure on regions of his prints, would his prints worth less?

Some might say yes, but they are factoring in some assumptions about the process, and attributing certain subjective value to certain stages of that process - instead of considering the end result and the creative intent.

This interview article is a super condensed example of where these philosophical-sounding discussions go wrong.

Fetishising, or worse, fearing, certain workflow and certain tools, because they could be mis-used or exaggeratedly used, is not only often puerile, but fundamentally places tools above their users in elaborate attempts to make, by definition, flawed generalisations. 

There have been, and there are, numerous staggeringly innovative and deservedly illustrious artists who concentrate on their creative process, optimise their workflow and embrace all technology.

They do this because they, consciously or not, refuse to waste their time and efforts on logically void musings on how more numerous and more complex tools could be misused by somebody... to then label the tools themselves as "dangerously" making us "lose" some je-ne-sais-quois in the artistic end result.