An A Cappella Manifesto

[ivyfic]

And now for your Wednesday rant...

I just read Pitch Perfect and have been listening again to my burgeoning collection of college a cappella albums. What this throws into even starker relief is the difference in recording between the groups with gobs of money ($30,000 for one Tufts Beelzebubs album), and those without.

More than that, on that album, they have disclaimer that says "all the sounds on this album came from our fifteen mouths." That's entirely untrue. The studio itself is an instrument. There comes a point where you're achieving things in the studio that could not be done live—not if you had enough people for every part, not if you had a perfect day where no one was pitchy or out of tempo, not if you had nifty mics, never. If someone spent twenty hours splicing together clips of your voice, it's not a cappella anymore. You've got an instrument—a studio. And more than that, you're paying a professional to play that instrument so you can't even claim that the end result is entirely yours anymore.

That being said, albums with no production at all sound like ass. (See "Purple Tides" by the Princeton Footnotes, which sounds like it was recorded in a bathtub.)

So, here's a proposal for some limitations on a cappella recording, for eligibility in the competitions:

Allowed studio techniques:
-reverb
-overdubbing, doubling, use of multiple tracks
-click tracks
-pitch tracks
-innovative mic placement (like miccing the Adam's apple of the beatbox)

Not allowed techniques:
-Autopitch (pitch correction)
-Altering pitch (like up or down an octave)
-distortion
-cutting together individual notes (i.e., shortening each note in a very fast run so that it plays much faster than anyone could sing it, or having the singer just sing each pitch seperately, then assembling it into a musical phrase—same goes, especially, for vocal percussion)
-reversing tape
-looping tape

The difference, I think, is the first set of techniques makes your group sound the best it can. The second makes it sound a way it couldn't, either because your group isn't talented enough to sound that good, or because it's physically impossible to do so. To make a good album with the first set, you need to have talent. To make a good album with the second, all you need is time and money.

Now I'm not saying it's unethical to record albums using every tool available. I like quite a few albums that do. But when it comes to competitions, right now if you pick up BOCA (Best of College A Cappella), all you're listening to is money. Mickey Rapkin (author of Pitch Perfect) wasn't kidding when he said you could buy a spot on it. I think it is unethical to compete with that kind of an edge and still call it a cappella.

Or we could just call this competition what it is: Best of College A Cappella Record Producers.

Comments

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Something you mentioned last night that didn't make it into this rant: The author's claim that acappella groups make money. I think oblvndrgn summed that one up best with, "If by make, you mean hemorrage."

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Oh, there'll be a seperate post about the book...

I also got home and remembered six more points about Dr. Horrible. I'll have to post that rant sometime too, I guess.