WRIT-340 WP3 Revised| If It Sounds Good, It Is Good
Exploring the Culture Surrounding Making Music
A few weeks ago I was sitting in a Guitar Center with a friend who was trying to find a new electric guitar. We sat for hours listening to and playing guitars of all different price ranges. Finally, he pulled down a Fender Custom Shop guitar. The buttercream guitar was loaded with the finest specs and had a relic finish, the tag attached to the head of the guitar revealed a price of $2,999.00, a small price to pay for an instrument that would last a lifetime. I realized that behind the excitement to play such a nice guitar was a bias towards this expensive equipment.
Everything in me wished for the guitar to sound amazing, and I had positioned myself to believe it would. To my disappointment the guitar was lackluster, the mids got lost in the noisy environment of the guitar center, and despite its comfortable feel, it just did not cut through the mix like we hoped it would. So we turned to my father, a very skilled musician and bass player, for help. He left us with the simple advice “if it sounds good, it is good”. These words were profound to me, I had been getting so caught up in the allure of expensive equipment and fancy gear that I had lost sight of the most fundamental part of music, sound.
Soon I began applying this saying to more than just shopping for guitars, as it was very relevant to creating music. It often helped me to not overthink the creative process. However, the more I applied it the more I began to question the constitution of “Sounding Good”. Who was the authority that got to decide what that meant? Such a subjective construct led me down the path of discovery. Emphasizing the importance of “sounding good”, regardless of equipment or recording circumstances, is where we can lose the plot at times. When we stop looking at recording equipment as a status symbol and instead focus on the equipment as tools to produce music we can expand our horizons to create projects and sounds we never previously considered.
To begin, its important to understand what “sounds good”. In music terms it is easy to get caught up in the little things. More often than not the qualifying factor of something sounding good is decided by the clarity of the recording. The clearness of each facet of a song contributes to the cohesiveness of the work and the ultimate decision on what “sounds good”.
The stress of clarity in recordings has led to the false equivalency that the most expensive, high tech equipment defines “good”. This false notion has propagated a culture that stresses expensive equipment as a necessity and the mark of a good artist, rather than a tool to create. What lies at the heart of “sounding good” is maximizing the potential of whatever equipment you are working with. Steve Lacy, a 2023 grammy award winning artist, coined this concept as the “Bare Maximum” in his TED talk below.
Although the clarity of records definitely plays a big role in defining what “sounds good”, it is not the determining factor. To those who have a keen ear, it may be crucial, but to the everyday listener, such small details often go over their heads. For example, Shiloh Dynasty, a relatively unknown artist came to relevance through short recordings on her iphone. Garnering millions of views on her short clips posted to social media, she eventually gained a following and popularity that would lead her to be sampled by XXXTENTACION, Young Thug, and JuiceWRLD, while also taking the Lofi hip hop genre by storm.
Had these creators been penciled in by the contemporary understanding of “sounding good”, Shiloh might have never came to prominence. Her mystique and distance from the public and media led to these short clips being the only available samples. These clips, recorded on an iPhone, are low quality but they sound good. For that reason they were sampled and even reached 19th on the Billboard Top 100 on XXXTENTACION’s song Joceyln Flores, where it charted for 20 weeks according to Billboard.
It must be noted that despite the samples being recorded on an iPhone, the rest of these songs were produced with quality. But the most expensive equipment is not a identifying marker of music that sounds good. There are plenty of songs that are produced and recorded clearly and tactfully yet don’t sound good to people.
You see the nature of listening to music is subjective, what one person finds amazing another person may hate. So it is necessary to push the boundaries of listening and creating to define what you as an individual believe to sound good. When describing the Beatles’ recording process, Paul McCartney said, “We would say, ‘Try it. Just try it for us. If it sounds crappy, OK, we’ll lose it. But it might just sound good.’ We were always pushing ahead: Louder, further, longer, more, different”. The idea of pushing boundaries to discover something that “sounds good” has been around forever, when creating or listening to music it is critical to challenge yourself to define what you think is good.
With a constantly changing target, it is impossible to pinpoint a collective agreement on the subject. There are far too many nuances in music to make everyone happy — between genres, styles, instruments, and much more there are literally an infinite number of possibilities. So to determine what “sounds good” an artist needs to determine for whom. Ultimately, YOU validate what sounds good to you and in doing so it is possible to break free from the culture of expensive gear being the tell for good songs, that surrounds creating and recording music.
This culture has been eroding away in relation to the accessibility of music making. New forms of media and platforms have allowed people to bridge an otherwise inaccessible gap. In the recent past it was only possible to record music in a studio, a privilege reserved for a select few. Nowadays anyone can record anywhere, creating music is an arms reach away with apps available on the iPhone such as Garageband or Bandlab. This new era of accessibility has given people a platform to put out their music and discover what they believe sounds good. Without platforms such as Soundcloud, artists such as Lil Uzi Vert, who had over 25 billion total steams would have never been discovered.
Understanding that this home-studio, accessible music is valid and “sounds good” is different from what the culture around music has been accustomed to. To those stuck in the past, a survey by Viberate, a music data company, revealed that “51% of A&Rs say that they have discovered new artists on SoundCloud who later became commercially successful”. Regardless of how you define what “sounds good” to you, it is important to not impose your definition on to others. What you enjoy listening to or creating is good, its that simple.
When defining what “Sounds Good” for myself, I base it off of my enjoyment. For me, this concept is not set on the quality of the recording or equipment but rather based off what I find to be engaging. As a listener I have a unique perspective on music. This is because what I think “Sounds Good” is exclusive to me, and while there may be some overlap with others, no one has the exact same taste. The most important factor I value in determining what I believe to “Sound Good” is how it ultimately makes me feel. Music that I can easily engage with is what I gravitate towards. This is because engaging with a work means to take something from it. Whether I listen to a song and it evokes an emotion or I listen and the sounds make me feel pleasant, engaging music is my criteria for “Sounding Good”. When listening its possible to engage at many different levels of a song; the melody, the lyrics, the message, the feel, the rhythm, and more. I am inclined to songs that I engage with at several of these levels. At the end of the day what I think “Sounds Good” is unique to me, and how I define it.
There is no need to overthink music. If you like the way it sounds that is what should matter. So I tried this, I created a song and recorded the song on three different platforms, with varying degrees of equipment. The result was as follows:
This song was recorded on Logic Pro in my home studio. The guitar I used was my American Original Fender Strat, and the bass was a custom bass created for my dad. The drums were a combination of a Yamaha keyboard and Logic loops. The vocals were recorded on Neumann U 87 Ai, with all this equipment slated into an Apollo x4 Universal Audio Interface and a MacBook Pro. Basically, I used the most expensive equipment I had on hand to make this song which I think it sounds good. It has a unique sound thanks to the equipment used (several plug ins and effects from Logic) and does not sound like the other recordings of the song. I am better versed on Logic Pro than I am Garage Band, so I felt like that may have contributed to the differing sounds.
This song was recorded on Garage Band on my MacBook. The guitar is an old acoustic that was a hand me down, and the drums are the free loops on garage band combined with a cheap Midi Keyboard. The bass is still my father’s (because I do not have another one) and the vocals and guitar were recorded on a SM57. This song was created with the “Bare Maximum” in mind and I think it sounds good. It sounds completely different from the first recording, but I enjoy it, I do wish I was better with Garage Band to truly draw out the best on this platform.
This is a recording of us playing the song live, recorded on an iPhone camera. I am playing the same acoustic guitar mentioned before. There is no bass or drums but during the chorus I am playing the parts of bass line on guitar. We just recorded in our living room where the studio is. Regardless of the acoustics of the room, I think the song sounds good. It sounds different again due to the nature of a live performance, the timing is slightly different and there are no layers on vocals, but it sounds good in its own way.
What I found from this exercise was that each of these songs are engaging in unique aspects. Because they are created differently, I can engage and connect with each work in a different way. This experience led me to conclude that all three works sound good in their own right. My engagement with the live version of the song lies in my love for the rawness and grit of this recording. While my engagement with the acoustic version of the song is found in the feel of the percussion, as it makes me move. And my engagement with the studio version of the song is in the catchiness that the layering of the vocals and guitars creates. This version, although having the same melody, sounds more full and makes me want to sing along. Because of the various differences, I can conclude that I am engaged in different ways for each song. Despite the differences in which I am engaged, I enjoy all of them in a unique way.
The songs I created all pass under my definition of what “Sounds Good”. But this might not be the same for another listener, the point of defining what you like is to cultivate your unique artistic identity and create or listen to music that resonates with you at an authentic level. Rather than trying to achieve the status quo when making music we should be creating music we like because expressing individuality and artistic vision can help us engage with one another at an authentic level. Getting absorbed into the false notions of sounding good limits us as artists, and propagates a toxic culture of status based on the price of equipment. Instead we should be reinforcing the concept of the “Bare Maximum”, utilizing whatever we have at our expense to create works that we genuinely enjoy and believe sound good.
