Something's off

And that's why I'm successful at dissecting tracks! :)



I think most players have forgotten, or are too young to have experienced how many blatant musical/lyrical/production mistakes were released to radio in the not too distant past. Timing issues, lyric flubs, arrangement flubs (someone came in at the wrong place...), tuning, bad punches & edits, etc etc. But we accepted those things because as listeners, we weren't over-educated about performance and production and what to expect from a track or a band. Players and producers and labels were only slightly ahead of us, since they went ahead and released those recordings anyway!

I don't think the track in question is so egregious, it's that so many of us have come to demand perfection. Funny, many of the same people decry the use of clicks & sequences. And artists and producers have generally risen to meet the demand that they basically created when they got better at what they did. It's gotten to the point where even the slighest variance can spark a discussion like this.

In my mind, a song or track either makes me feel good, or it doesn't. In this case, I just don't happen to like the track, but it has nothing to do with the organic nature of it at times. Playing it 'correctly' wouldn't improve it.

As for listening to the old songs - and still some new ones - with anomalies, I 'hear' them, but they're not really a big deal. I don't sit around pondering how those groups managed to be popular, and in some cases, still endure. It was what it was.

Bermuda


A classic example is Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue"; An engineer had mistakenly set the tape at a very slight slower speed, this ended up giving the album a ethereal kind of feel. Some elitist jazz critics knocked him for releasing it that way. You can actually buy the corrected version on a specially released CD, I'm a vinyl listener so I won't need to do that. Same thing happened with the Doobie Brothers "Black Water, the engineer hit a mute button of sorts and the result was the Acapulco chorus, now famous. Mistakes in the studio can be fortuitous.
 
A classic example is Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue"; An engineer had mistakenly set the tape at a very slight slower speed, this ended up giving the album a ethereal kind of feel. Some elitist jazz critics knocked him for releasing it that way. You can actually buy the corrected version on a specially released CD, I'm a vinyl listener so I won't need to do that. Same thing happened with the Doobie Brothers "Black Water, the engineer hit a mute button of sorts and the result was the Acapulco chorus, now famous. Mistakes in the studio can be fortuitous.

True, there are many 'happy accidents' that are just part of a song or album, and have become sort of cool. But today, it's unlikely that mistakes or anomalies would be allowed to make it to the final release of a song. So if it seems like there's something iffy with the Kid Rock track, that looseness may simply be below the 'problem' threshhold in the ears of the artist, producer, and label (all of whom obviously approved it before it was released...) while other listeners are more sensitive to that looseness than they might have been 30 years ago.

But I don't think the guitars were made to be deliberately loose, they just got put out that way. The track must have felt good to everyone involved, or obviously we wouldn't be hearing it.

Bermuda
 
Bass guitar is playing standard Country style notes/rhythm, drum machine guy/girl is playing classic rock back beat. Not good bed fellows. Wonder who produced it?

I agree. I think the bass line is giving the kick an odd pushing feel. It sounds very thrown together.
 
Maybe the song was created without the use of a pro studio, just a shot in the dark...

That wouldn't exlpain why parts are a little loose. Perhaps they were deliberately trying to create an organic feel? There are better ways to do that, up to and including cutting the track live. If they really wanted drum samples, they could simply 'sound replace' them over live parts.

Bermuda
 
A classic example is Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue"; An engineer had mistakenly set the tape at a very slight slower speed, this ended up giving the album a ethereal kind of feel. Some elitist jazz critics knocked him for releasing it that way. You can actually buy the corrected version on a specially released CD, I'm a vinyl listener so I won't need to do that. Same thing happened with the Doobie Brothers "Black Water, the engineer hit a mute button of sorts and the result was the Acapulco chorus, now famous. Mistakes in the studio can be fortuitous.

Yea, I've heard this too. Its just the track "So What". If you play and melodic instrument its actually very obvious if you try to play along because the track is about a 1/4 tone flat. Its crazy how things like this happen

It also very eye opening when you delve into how past producers were able to achieve certain effects without powerful computers and synthesizes. The Weather Report track "Milky Way" sounds like its coming from a freaky synthesizer, but its actually an acoustic piano that they micked in a very creative way. There is this Todd Rundgren song that has a really crazy effect during the guitar solo. It wasn't implemented by a pedal on any software. Todd actually stood in the room during recording and spun a microphone in circles around his head to create the effect. Too cool.
 
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