Ask Babbitt. He moved to Nashville to get work when he left NY (which is where he went after Mowtown moved out of Detroit). It's probable that he's all over those country hits you hear on the radio. Nashville is the one place left that they still want human beings on bass whenever possible.
While you're right about bass in Nashville being a totally human endeavor (the last time I heard of a sequenced or synth bass track being cut here - on a master - on anything but urban or Contemporary Christian stuff was around 1987), the part about Babbitt is exactly the kind of misinformation that spawns the kind of "truths" some have offered in this thread - which have nothing to do with reality. Bob moved back to Philly in 1993. That's eighteen years ago, to save you the math.
The idea that "producers tell you what to play" is how things worked in the heyday of the LA and NY session scenes. To my knowledge, it still happens there some, mostly on sessions where the parts are written out. It has never, EVER worked that way on Nashville sessions. Not when Owen Bradley began producing at the first label-owned studio here in the late 40s (Decca... The Quonset Hut), not in 1950 when Chet Atkins moved to town with the Carters to work the Opry and was hired by RCA's Steve Shoals to produce (and in time, to run RCA Nashville), and not at any time since. Again, that idea is only held by people who have never played a session here.
The most important job of a producer, as that work is practiced here, is hiring the right players. On some of the bigger sessions, the leader or producer will have number charts ready for everyone, but most of the time everyone gathers in the control room or lounge, listens to a work tape (well, mp3) or demo, and makes their own number charts. Then you go into the rooms & booths, put on your headphones and start coming up with
your own parts. The producer or leader will typically ask for a little more of this, or "can you try that", but by and large you
all talk through things and come up with the arrangement and specifics. The PLAYERS actually line-produce the track. "Hey, drummer, are you gonna push that 4 chord?" Stuff like that. It really is done that way, which is why choosing the right mix of players is so crucial. They not only have to play at a ridiculously high level, they also have to have a deep well of good ideas AND get along in a communally creative setting. This is how complete albums are cut in under a week. On demos, you go for five tunes in a three-hour session. And most of the demos out of here ROCK. I used to love taking visiting players along to watch a session. Guys from the coasts would always be floored by how fast these guys worked, and at the quality of the tracks.
"edited with razor blades"...??? Wasn't that technique beginning to fade like 20 years ago?
Yes. Which is why I wrote "back in the days of tape." The point being, people have been editing and tweaking recordings as much and for as long as technology has allowed. A large percentage of vocals are tuned these days. And notes/phrases are often shifted. But the idea that an entire groove is "invented" or fixed is simply fantasy (referring to your comment about "thanks to Beat Detective.") That may be how YOU make music, but it's not how we do it here.
But you did say: "commercial country has (at least) borrowed heavily from whatever was going on in pop and/or rock fifteen years or so before". So maybe Beat Detective, Melodyne, etc. hasn't arrived yet?
Borrowing stylistically has nothing whatever to do with the available technology. You seem to believe everyone here is hollerin' into big ol' tubes to make records. Nashville has some of the most technologically flush studios and mastering labs in the world. That's part of the reason so many pop/rock artists come here to cut, from Buddy Holly (several of his biggest hits, at the Quonset Hut) to Mark Knopfler, to Bob Dylan, to Steve Winwood, to... the list is endless. Walk through Blackbird sometime (Martina & John McBride's ridiculously-outfitted four-studio complex); then tell me what "hasn't arrived here" yet.
Nope, never sat in.
Except for Eddie Bayers, aren't those all players in your list? They, most likely, wouldn't be involved with post production. But, as I said, I was never there.
The second sentence in the above quote proves the rest of it (that you were never here). Eddie Bayers is perhaps the most recorded drummer on Nashville tracks in the last twenty years. No, the players aren't typically involved in post production. The whole idea of these guys just kind of hacking through things that a geek with a mouse will later "straighten out" is as insulting as it is uninformed - and that seems to be your premise. I'm sure you would be sitting there with your jaw on the ground if you actually heard what the A-Team cats lay down on a song they heard for the first time twenty minutes earlier. BTW, I don't know the numbers for the current playlists, but during the 90s I was an editor for Guitar Player magazine, and in researching an article I found that, during one 14-month period, the battery of Eddie Bayers and Michael Rhodes could be heard on at least four of the top ten country songs EVERY WEEK. So, yeah... Eddie's kinda a player.
And nowhere did I "dis" anything or anyone.
I disagree. By suggesting that the grooves heard on the records in question were "created" in post via Beat Detective rather than by the players, you most certainly did dis a lot of people.
You are nervously protesting too much.
I'm not nervous at all. And I ain't guessin' about this stuff. I've given twenty-seven years - exactly half my life to this point - to living in this city and working in and around its music industry. Many of the people mentioned in this thread are my friends. Many of them have helped me in more ways than I can count. Nashville's music community, while the business in general is at a difficult crossroads, remains a
genuine community. I suspect that if you saw someone posting things about your friends that you knew to be wildly untrue, you would do your best to set the record straight as well. I would hope so, anyway.
But more power to ANYONE that records, subtly fixes, utilizes minuscule editing, and mixes all in the analog/magnetic tape mediums.
There are still a few people here who occasionally cut to tape & mix digitally, or use some combination of the two technologies. But they do it because of the way tape saturates and sounds, not because "we heard tell of that fancy digital stuff, but we'uns ain't seen none of it as yet." Ray Kennedy comes to mind. You'll likely have to look him up, too - the Grammy rolls would be a good place to start. Largely, everything has been digital here since at least the mid 90s.
BTW, that would be "ANYONE
who records..."
