Professional Skills and Music

Albini and in Utero In the audio engineer's quest to produce ever more quality sounds in the studio, the question of authenticity arose. For some musicians who felt that in polishing their material through the use of modern equipment in technology -- through computers that could digitally edit out their mistakes -- the effect was like telling a musical lie. Steve Albini was one such artist and engineer.

The moment -- the transitory feeling, even if off key or consisting of a wrong note, a mistake (such as in the tape deck recordings of a young Daniel Johnston playing songs on his piano in the basement of his parents' home) -- was really the only thing that mattered: music was not meant to be captured.

And yet here was the technology to do so -- and as the technology advanced, the music was capable of being altered, the moment changed -- like a wild animal is caught and made a captive in a zoo for the public to come and see. The animal's surroundings are made to seem natural, to match its preferred habitat -- but there is nothing authentic about it. It is as though the public is seeing something it should not be seeing.

It is Nick Cave's complaint in One More Time with Feeling. It was Nirvana's issue as the band set out to record In Utero, the 1993 follow-up to the group's smash hit Nevermind. This paper will discuss the skills that were required of the audio engineer Steve Albini and how the capabilities and options made possible by the studio were, in the end, at odds with what the band and Albini sought to achieve with regards to authenticity.

The history of sound capture can be divided into four eras (Morton, 2004) -- the acoustic era (pre-1925, the electrical era (1925-1945), the magnetic era (1945 to 1975) and the digital era (1975 to current). Each era has been shaped by advances in technology and sound recording.

The first two eras were essentially mechanical eras in that the recordings were produced by mechanical parts, moved by sound waves -- the first era somewhat more primitively than the second (the phonograph compared to the Victrola -- which even Les Paul found useful in his early days as a young recorder of music) (Cunningham, 1996, p. 24). The magnetic era changed that (thanks to German engineering obtained in the post-War period).

This was the era of the magnetic strip, used in cassettes, which allowed for a more "faithful" or "live-sounding" recording, leading to the ascent of the hi-fi market and multi-track tape recordings by audio engineers, who could isolate individual sources of sound and now mix them in the studio. Everyone from Les Paul to Elvis Presley to Pink Floyd laid down tracks in this manner, as sound became not just a thing to be captured but also a thing to be manipulated.

This manipulation was key to the advances that this era of recording provided -- and it was also a factor in how later artists would consider their own works, especially in the light of push-back from rock-n-roll/punk rock performers who would eschew the neat, clean sounds of the studio-mixed, engineered album and opt for the more authentic, raw, quickly and cheaply produced album that spoke and restricted itself to capturing sound rather than manipulating.

The final era, the digital era, produced the ultimate in sound manipulation -- to the extent that performances could now be produced on a computer -- instruments effected through the aid of software, voices changed, missing notes supplied. The digital era of sound capture made the engineer into the musical artist, feasibly displacing the musician. It saw the rise of the DJ -- but not all musicians celebrated in this advancement.

Playback devices also changed over these periods -- from the gramophone to the record player to the cassette tape player to the CD to the digital file MP3.

Audiences have been mixed in the preference of one playback method over another, with some listeners saying that vinyl records sound the best (pointing that each play essentially is a new performance as the needle wears out the grooves and thus changes it -- though this argument is not necessarily one that supports the authenticity of the musical performance itself as it is a mechanism that is altering the music and not the performers themselves).

Others prefer the digital sound of digital playback because of the wider range of possibilities afforded by this method (one can deepen the bass, raise the treble, fade sounds, etc.). This complexity of preference has impacted the audio engineer in different ways, with some going more towards the digitalized interpretation of music and some moving back towards the anachronistic mechanisms of the past and the presentation of music as something captured but not manipulated. This is essentially the direction in which Steve Albino took his method of audio engineering.

Nirvana, a group whose Nevermind, soared to the top of the charts with its poppy, fresh, studio sound, wanted to distance itself from the sterilized environment of the audio engineer's studio and return to the pure, simple sounds achieved through simple sound capture -- with minimal intrusion on the engineer's part.

This was their way to be more "punk rock" and achieve the authenticity of sound that they desired -- that was more in line with live performances, that was more grounded in reality and not the outcome of digital manipulation.

For a group that prided itself on producing songs full of emotionally raw intensity, probing lyrics, and introspective aims, having a pure sound -- even if grainy, full of hard to stand screeches and scratches, and lacking in polish -- was desirable and preferable to the poppy contrived sounds being pumped out by engineers in the studio system.

This was Nirvana's chance to return to the kind of roots exposed by Daniel Johnston in his simply basement tape deck recordings that consisted of no audio manipulation whatsoever -- that sounded awful at first hearing -- but gradually grew on you because you were forced to listen to the actual music and words that Daniel sung and in focusing on this you were moved by the passion and art behind the music, never minding the poor sound quality.

It was meant to be a return to what actually made music worth listening to in the first place -- the heart, the art, the aim. For Nirvana, Steve Albini was just the man for the job: he was the audio engineer who understood the importance of the pure essence of music that the band was now seeking. Albini had been influenced by John Loder in the 1970s.

Loder had taken the approach to sound capture that the early wave of punk musicians favored -- from Crass to Jesus and Mary Chain, Fugazi, Ministry and Shellac (the latter of which Albini was part of). Loder's method of audio engineering appealed to the rebels of rock-n-roll -- those who rejected the major label system that "pimped" out the rock music genre and robbed it of its raw nuances in favor of a perky, more pristine, more packaged, and more readily marketable sound.

Albini took from Loder the sense that a group looking to bottle its essence and distribute it to the masses should eliminate as many barriers as possible between itself and the sound capturing mechanism. For this reason, Albini's method was simple: setting up microphones everywhere to catch as much sound as possible while the performers performed, hitting record and stepping back.

The purpose was to bottle, not augment or manipulate the performance -- and while this satisfied the group seeking an authentic production -- it did not sit well with the record label desirous of a smooth, crisp hit single that could top the charts, be played on the radio, and sell the album -- which is exactly what happened in the case of Nirvana and In Utero. The sound of most of the tracks on In Utero is best described as raw and authentic.

There is a distance evocative of the old mechanical recordings from the early two eras of sound capture. There is no sense of manipulation, of sounds being canned, mixed, polished in post -- except for "All Apologies" and "Heart-Shaped Box" -- which the studio had re-engineered by Scott Litt, who had previously worked with R.E.M. The effect was that these two songs, while sounding more "playable" and radio-friendly, cleaner and freer of the debris of raw rock-n-roll electricity, were out of step with the rest of the album.

They were the "candy" that Albini and the group had wished to avoid. Albini had in fact described Nevermind as "a standard hack recording that has been turned into a very, very controlled, compressed radio-friendly mix. not, in my opinion, very flattering to a rock band" (Azerrad, 1994, p. 317). For Albini, the spirit of rock-n-roll was about defying conventions, breaking taboos, bucking the system, rejecting the establishment, foregoing the polish, and presenting oneself as is -- without makeup.

The relationship between technical skill, critical listening skills and professional skills was one that really did not exist for him: the key to producing a great recording had as much to do with the ability of the performers as it did with the willingness of the audience to engage with that recorded performance. The audio engineer's job, as far as Albini was concerned, was to get out of the way -- to eliminate obstacles between the performer and the listener.

The studio-mix -- the cleaned-up, engineering of music thanks to the digital technology available -- was an obstacles as far as Albini was concerned, because it scrubbed the actual essence of the music away from the performance. A performance should not be manufactured in a lab anymore than a baby should be -- this was essentially the feeling of Albini.

Nature allowed man to make sounds with the instruments he developed -- but what nature frowned on was the artificial fabrication of life -- of music -- in what amounts to a test tube. Albini would allow music to be captured -- just as it had been captured by gramophones in the early days of sound capture. What he could not abide was for the music to be tampered with in utero. However, Albini's view on sound capture and audio engineering was not the mainstream view.

Historically, the relationship between technical skills, critical listening skills and professional skills for the audio engineer rose to a greater prominence in the magnetic era, when editing was done by recording over the magnetic strip or by cutting the tape just like a film is cut. The engineer had to listen critically, record with a focus on a particular sound effect desired to be achieved, instead of collecting sound and presenting it as is. The producer became, in a sense, the composer, as Moorefield (2005) has stated.

This relationship carried over into the digital era as engineers who had technical prowess with computers and software could eliminate much of the work conducted manually in the past by relying on looping software, editing software and engineering software with timecodes and the use of MIDI to help ease the engineer's job. Critical listening skills and professional skills became less specialized in the sense that anyone with access to the computers by the time the 21st century rolled around could essentially act as an audio engineer.

What concerned Albini was how such a generation with so much access to the tools to make things sound clean could really possess an authentic rock-n-roll spirit: it was as if a generation was being raised on sugar and soda pop and thinking that this was good for them. Rock-n-roll, for Albini, may not always sound pretty but it at least was real: the technical skills of the engineer were there to serve this reality, not to augment it.

They were there to help capture it, not to catch it and change it. Sound recordings should be like a photograph of the animal in the wild -- not a poison dart that tranquilizes the animal so that it can be hauled off to a zoo and set up for life like an inmate in a prison in.