It’s all about the result

Does the music sound as good as it did in your head? Congratulations, you win! How you got there makes zero difference to the people enjoying the outcome of your creative process.

Music making is about having a creative vision and turning it into reality. When you produce music, you’re trying to convey an emotion and get a message across. How well the end result does that is really the only thing that matters.
The most important part of the production in most musical styles is the vocals. Today’s modern music production style is certainly no exception. It doesn’t matter if your genre is R’n’B, pop, hip hop, EDM, or modern sounding rock and metal—the lead vocals in a modern production style are clean, controlled and in your face. Every word comes across, every nuance is there for a reason. Backing harmony vocals can easily be made up of ten or twenty different parts, and they’re all smooth, lush and tight. It’s large and impressive, and everything is in its right place—that vocal production style is a large part of the signature sound of today’s music.

Singing and playing is not sport. There is no judging panel sitting in your studio, holding up score signs after each take. The only thing that matters is the end result.

Achieving this sound and style is incredibly difficult without specialist tools. Very few singers are able to dub themselves as tightly as that style requires, and having a group of different singers do it is near impossible. To get that type of result, you want to have fantastic singers stack part after part to create that massive backing vocal sound. To then have it all sounding like they’re almost one voice, but still many, you need to align the timing, pitch and level of those recordings.

This is not cheating, by the way. Using the word “cheating” implies that singers and musicians are somehow taking part in a competition, or had no talent in the first place. But singing and playing is not sport. There is no judging panel sitting in your studio, holding up score signs after each take. The only thing that matters is the end result, and the battle for achieving your creative vision is the only one you should care about. Does the music sound as good as it did in your head? Congratulations, you win! How you got there makes zero difference to the people enjoying the outcome of your creative process.

If your production style is going after a raw and unpolished expression, where imperfections are a part of the style—go for it! But if a modern day, high production value sound is part of your creative vision—then there is no excuse not to use any digital tools at your disposal.