“There’d be three people standing on a desk with hand on Faders each”: David Gilmour explains why Pro Tools made music creation much easier
David Gilmour has revealed his appreciation for the DAW – specifically Pro Tools – and the way it has made some aspects of his music making “enormously easier”.
The advent of Pro Tools has forever changed the face of music making — though for better or for worse depending on whom you’re asking. For every Gilmour singing its praises, there’s a Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins lamenting that it has “made music much worse.”
According to Corgan, the tech has “brought a lot of people into the music business that really have no business being in the music business”, with the way it allows “people who can’t play guitar” to now “sound like they can.”
READ MORE: “That was strange, after 10 years of being with him”: Jason Bonham says he’s “a little shocked” about being let go from Sammy Hagar’s Best Of All Worlds tour
By contrast, Gilmour – who certainly has no problem playing the guitar with or without Pro Tools – says in a new interview with Rick Beato that mixing tracks these days is much easier compared to the past, before the days of Pro Tools.
“In the old days, you just do the whole mix again and just rehearse your fader moves. And they would be very complex,” he says [via Ultimate Guitar]. “There were times, many, many, many, many years ago, and there’d be three people standing on a desk with hand on Faders each.”
“Now, with Pro Tools, it’s great. And the process of me doing the demo recordings is made enormously easier by that,” Gilmour adds. “I found techniques. I’ll tell you now, I don’t actually use the automation on the Pro Tools very much. I don’t use MIDI on Pro Tools either. I get a bit of thing, cut it, and it’s got a little DB thing down in one corner. I pull that up and down, so I can always go back to something, and adjust it.”
“I do most of it myself, in my process with changing the levels on the tracks, without the faders and without the automation.”
While he’s “normally totally involved in it all the way,” Gilmour notes that his team also plays an important role in navigating the complexities of assembling a mix.
“Some of the processes are so complex on Pro Tools, and there are layers,” he says. “I don’t know how they do this layering of stuff, and I’ve no idea how they keep track of what bits they want to keep. The process of assembling a mix is long. There are times when a day or several hours go by, and I’m not going to be sitting there through all of that, so they pretty much know what we are going for at the beginning. And then when it’s getting close, I come back and cast my ear over what we’re doing and put my oar in.”
The post “There’d be three people standing on a desk with hand on Faders each”: David Gilmour explains why Pro Tools made music creation much easier appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
