The Human Flavours...

...that make a song more vibrant to me.

I want to ask all the musicians out there. I couldn’t listen to my albums - That Was Then… This Is Now / Tell Me - after I released them for several years, because of all the little details that I thought I could’ve done better creating and mixing the songs. How was it for you?

Like I always say, there’s only a German Shepherd dog and me that can hear certain details that bugs the hell out of me. When my voice was slightly flat (the songs were recorded without Auto-tune) or a guitar lick was not really how I wanted to be. But now fast forward to 2022 when I started to produce new songs again and now I’m listening and comparing them to my sixteen and twenty-six years old productions and it’s really fascinating.

The details that used to bug me are now a human touch that I appreciate, because of all the polished and cleaned up tracks you hear nowadays on the radio. I categorise them now as songs with enough dirt under their fingernails to make them authentic, if you know what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, with all the samples and loops, which are a great tool to use, the palette of sounds got even wider than before, but I like the hum of an amp or the singer moving in front of the microphone. There are classic recordings, where you can hear the drum pedal squeaking or recordings from the 1940’s and 1950’s where you can hear that they recorded with one or maybe two microphones and the drummer has to sit all the way back of the room, the backup singers stack up the way they stand so the blend of their harmonies match perfectly and the saxophone player walks up to the microphone to play his solo and steps back to blend back in with the band. Check out Louis Prima.

I love it when you hear Ringo only on the left speaker on certain The Beatles songs and the botched count-in of ‘Dig A Pony’. There are countless examples of human flavours in songs that make them fun to listen to and that’s what I strive for.

There’s even an album - Tore Down House - by Scott Henderson where after the last song ‘Same As You’ ends, you wait until the 5:07 mark and you can listen to the monster drummer Kirk Covington talking during the count-ins and fade-outs. Some hilarious stuff there and absolutely nerdy.

If you have any discoveries that are worth a listen, let me know and put them in the comments below.