A history of pop production in three tracks

Earlier this spring, I subbed for Adam Bell‘s Music Technology 101 class at Montclair State. His sections were populated more exclusively with classical conservatory kids than mine, so for my one-shot lesson, I figured I’d talk them through some items from my illicit collection of multitrack stems, and give them a sense of the history of the recorded art form.

First up was “A Day In The Life” by the Beatles.

The Beatles’ best work stands at the turning point between the idea of recordings as documents of a live performance (or at least a convincing illusion thereof) and recordings as dreamscapes that would be impossible to perform live. I suppose in theory you could perform “A Day In The Life,” but it would be difficult and impractical, and it would be way easier and more effective to just play the track instead.

I won’t recount the entire story of the track’s recording; you can read it here. The most conspicuous feature is the repeated orchestra buildups. They weren’t part of the original conception of the song. Lennon and McCartney knew there would be a twenty-four-bar transition between the two parts, but they didn’t have any real idea of what would happen during those twenty-four bars. The orchestra was added after the rest of the track was completed. One student wanted to know whether the orchestra was a “sample.” This was a decade and a half before digital sampling came into the studio, but it’s still a fair question, because the orchestra does have that tight and decontextualized feeling. The musicians were recorded in a relatively small studio room with a lot of compression, whereas orchestras are usually recorded in a concert hall with an open, airy and reverberant sound. The Beatles overlaid multiple takes of the buildup to create the insanely dense final product.

The students were amazed that “A Day In The Life” was recorded on just four tracks total. They were also surprised at how casual-sounding it is. When you hear the tracks in isolation, you discover giggling, talking, singing along, an alarm clock going off unintentionally, and tons of bleed between the tracks. The engineer loudly counting off the twenty-four bars under the orchestra build is especially funny. It’s good to be reminded that if you have a strong piece of music, it doesn’t have to be airtight and flawless to come across in recorded form.

Hearing Lennon’s voice by itself was a surprise for the classical singers, because you can hear how uneven his pitch control is. McCartney is a little smoother, but in general, the Beatles’ singing is very far from perfect. However, in isolation, you can also hear how intense Lennon is, especially vari-speeded up and layered with thick echo and reverb. Intensity beats perfection every time.

Next, we listened to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

Only fifteen years separate Thriller from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s been twice that long from Thriller to today! Even so, Thriller sounds much closer to the present than Sgt Pepper does. This is due, in part, to the fact that Michael had twelve times as many tracks to work with. The drum machines and synthesizers are another factor. The Beatles used synthesizers too, but not as a mainstay sound. “Beat It” seems guitar-driven, but underneath, there are layers and layers of synths.

“Beat It” gets some of its contemporary sound from its perceptual loudness. The Beatles’ audio waveforms have the characteristic peaks and valleys of natural-sounding dynamics. Michael’s waveforms have the solid “caterpillar” shape you see in current pop, with loudness maximized across the frequency spectrum. The remarkable thing is that Michael’s mix engineer Bruce Swedien didn’t use any compression, because he didn’t like the way it squashes transients. Swedien achieved consistent and balanced loudness by EQing and mixing everything really carefully by hand.

The classical voice kids were underwhelmed by Michael’s isolated vocals, due to his flat pitch and strained, nasal tone. They did like his “correct” use of exaggerated consonants, and they were suitably impressed by his dead-on timekeeping. Yet again, we have an example of emotion trumping technique. There are plenty of stronger vocalists in this world than Michael, but there are few better singers.

The drum tracks in “Beat It” sound peculiar in isolation. There’s a track of drum machine that has the highs filtered out, so it’s a big loud kick and a weak, muffled snare. Jeff Porcaro’s live drums sound equally lopsided; all of the lows are filtered out, and what’s left is all cymbals and snare. In isolation, they sound goofy, but when you mix them together, they complement each other perfectly. The backbeat is beefed up by more snares and handclaps. There’s also some Afro-Cuban percussion sprinkled here and there, and Michael himself is credited as beating on a drum case. Let me just add that Jeff Porcaro keeps incredibly good time; he blends seamlessly into the drum machine, and this was before automatic rhythm quantization. Let me also add that Porcaro is only one of the many members of Toto performing on this track.

When you listen to “Beat It,” the sound that jumps out most prominently (aside from the vocals) is the guitar. There are multiple layers of guitar with different sounds and effects, played by Steve Lukather and Paul Jackson Jr.  There’s also the iconic solo by Eddie Van Halen, complete with two-hand tapping and divebombs and all the other trademarks of eighties guitar virtuosity. The second take is the one that ended up on the record. Even though it’s dated, Van Halen’s guitar sound still comes off as awesome rather than silly, probably because he delivered it without a trace of irony.

Like I said before, “Beat It” has tons of keyboards, all mixed in the background. When you mute them, the foreground of the track sounds the same, but it loses its sonic fullness and depth. It’s the background layers that separate the good pop producers from the great ones. The keyboards in “Beat It” form a kaleidoscopic array of shifting timbres, all there in support of the guitars and vocals. Where the guitar riffs start on the weak beats, the keyboard parts land on the strong ones, creating a lively rhythmic counterpoint. There are also places where synths double the guitar lines to beef them up.

The freshest part of “Beat It” is the sixteen bar breakdown at 2:43. It serves no melodic or harmonic purpose; on a lead sheet it would just be sixteen bars with slashes through them. It seems like it’s just going to be some musical throat-clearing between the second chorus and the guitar solo, but just when you think the section is over, it extends twice as long. Michael Jackson knew what he was doing. While the top line of the section is empty, the groove is not; really, it’s the nastiest part of the track, the part that a club DJ might want to extend considerably. It’s here that the synths are the most intense, especially the arpeggiated helicopter sound and the huge bell tone also heard at the beginning of the song. Michael’s vocal isn’t the focal point here; it becomes an ambient texture, just one rhythmic component of the groove.

The final track in my lecture was “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen.

The sophisticates among you might be appalled that I’m including such a lightweight song alongside two immortal classics. In fact, I’m expecting a lot of this:

But hear me out. Whatever you think of “Call Me Maybe” as a song, it’s worth considering the track as a work of sonic art. It’s a remarkable soundscape, and it represents the state of the art well. I don’t have the multitracks, but I do have mix engineer Dave Ogilvie’s detailed explanation of the production, which in some ways is better. I won’t recap the whole thing, you can go read it here. The takeaway is that every sound is doubled or tripled or quadrupled or quintupled, that there are hundreds of tiny individual components, and that every one of those components has been given some careful treatment or processing.

It occurred to me while talking through “Call Me Maybe” that this kind of densely layered pop production has become more like orchestral arranging than anything else. Five kick drums might seem like overkill, but it’s not any more over the top than having ten French horns or twenty-six violins. You might object that the symphonic score  and a top forty pop track are in different artistic universes, but orchestras were originally used to produce vulgar popular entertainment too. When I studied film scoring, the teacher encouraged us to think of orchestration in pop song terms; you’re just distributing the melody, chords and bassline across very different combinations of instruments.

So, there we have it, pop music production in three songs. I’m sure that if you’re reading this, you’d pick a different three songs. I’m interested to hear alternatives in the comments.