mtf 7: I think I see a pattern forming

This week’s talks made me wonder about a few things. Separation of instruments when recording, analogue versus digital and the complete and utter pointlessness of 5.1 surround sound in music. Kevin Shirley recorded some of rock/metal’s big names in a live setting. Why do we go to all the effort and hassle of recording instrumental lines separately? Every band member needs to hear the rest of the instruments to be able to play their part and recording parts separately is quite time consuming. Shirley has proven that you can record commercial releases live, I am left wondering why more producers don't make use of this. And that brings me to my next query. What the heck is with so called 'live' albums being multi-tracked and tampered with post gig? If anything should be possible to get down in one take, it's one of these. A quick note on Shirley's drum micing technique, Shirley regards the drum kit as one instrument and refuses to mic up each individual part. He close-mics up the kick and the two toms and uses overheads for the rest, something I am actually pretty keen to try as I tend to find the crack of the snare to always be too sharp/bright and painful to listen to up loud. Perhaps micing it with an overhead would positively affect the sound. Next, on mixing and matching recording platforms (something that just keeps cropping up in peoples’ talks). What of those of us that are only just getting into production now and learning it at a theoretical level (rather than from an old professional)? We know analogue exists but we are being trained on digital, Will we even know how to use analogue should we encounter it? Will we care? We certainly aren't going to actively seek it out without knowing what its glories are. Surely it is only a matter of time before it dies out. A talk on Ross Robertson (giver of voice to the fad of Nu-metal...later, denouncer of fad of Nu-metal as it stagnated) brought up the issue of raw sound versus ‘plug-in’ sound. I guess the choice of raw or ‘plug-in’ is an artistic choice, or maybe it’s a case of just staying with what you know. It might be that a synthesized sound or a raw guitar sound lends itself to the writing of song. If the song is a good one, it will be able to cross over from raw to synthesized to raw again easily. The proof? A cover of Nine Inch Nails’ hurt by Johnny Cash. Nine Inch Nails: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgSWRicWIy4&mode=related&search= Johnny Cash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO9dbmJ_2zU (this was the last song Cash released by the looks of it, how cool is that?! How honoured would Reznor feel!) I wasn’t sure if presentations would lend themselves to worthwhile blog writing in the beginning but it has proven interesting to see, time and time again, these same old statements cropping up. If anyone can ‘sell’ 5.1 surround to me, I’d love to hear them try.