Mars and Venus

These days, there are two main types of recording music: analog and digital. Analog predates digital recording, and yes, I know that analog is old school, difficult, obsolete and maybe even low in quality, whereas digital recording is easy, always improving and is available to pretty much anyone in a first world country. However, I have to wince when I hear someone say that one is better than the other.

Permit me just one analogy: analog and digital recording are like two uninhabited planets, because they are very different from each other, have their various characteristics, and are equally habitable provided you have the right equipment.  They are different from each other, not one an evolved form of the other.

For the sake of my argument, I’ll use a song that was recorded with both methods. The song is Physical (You Are), first by Adam and the Ants, using the analog method, and later by the Nine Inch Nails, using the digital method.

The first thing one might notice is the overall “vibe” from the songs. Adam gives us a very brash, rockin’ song that gives me the inclination to go ride my skateboard in the middle of the highway and really just be a punk. All the instruments are very distorted, and even the vocals are not mixed. It’s the kind of song that gives you a copy of what it would sound like live. Nine Inch Nails on the other hand gives us a more refined, clean sounding version, with much more attention to musical aspects. It is not difficult to set guitars and bass track tracks apart.

This is the benefit of digital recording. You can take a horrible, or even good recording and turn it into gold on the computer. However, as a musical purist, I am highly critical of music that is good because of a computer and not the musician.

Instrumentation is also dramatically different. There are probably two guitars at the most, drums bass and vocals for Adam. This is interesting, because analog makes these instruments sound very large and fat. Another benefit of digital is that you can have 20 or 30 different instruments, ad mix them well so they aren’t muddy. If you were to record Adam digitally, it would sound very empty I think. Nine Inch Nails I guarantee probably has over ten tracks. Let’s go reverse for a second; if you recorded nine inch nails using analog, it would not even be recognizable.

As I said, they both have their benefits. They also carry different eras with them. In other words, they are both associated with a certain culture, similar to how Avicii is attached to the age of digital music, and Chuck Berry symbolizes the old way. So the next time you listen to some analog stuff, just imagine how this sounded to people thirty, even twenty years. It was rad man, in the same way that ravers would be if they showed up in old Mayberry.