Listening to an oldies station today it struck me that one thing that music has lost in the modern era is performance. Hearing bands play their hits of the day in (say) the 60s you know they were giving it their all and trying to get the best take they could. Sound processing was crude and post production was adding a bit of echo or trimming a bum note of the tape via some tricky manual tape editting! Today its too easy for a singer to go in a studio and sing to sterile backing tracks and have any tuning issues corrected digitally. Fans of older music have, in recent years, been able to hear any number of studio outtakes of bands & singers working up to the versions of the hit we are familiar with - a creative process that just doesn't happen in a modern studio. I'm not decrying the technology of our time - there is no denying the convenience and flexibility of today's recording methods but that performance ethos, the moment the recording light comes on and the whole band comes together to create something unique is lost.

MM