Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan Compares Recording Advances To An ‘Instagram Filter’
Billy Corgan, Chief of The Smashing Pumpkinsrecently gave his take on making albums today versus before, when there were no computers and everything was recorded on tape.
During an interview with famous YouTuber and former music producer Rick Beato, Corgan commented on the positives and negatives of these technological advancements.
The Smashing Pumpkins are known for their influential records such as Gish (1991) and Siamese Dream (1993), which were created long before DAWs (digital audio stations, the software in which music is recorded nowadays) were widely available.
Asked by Beato about the possibility of “returning to the spirit of 1992”, Corgan replied: “Honestly, it’s hard to get back into that mindset. In 92… you could use a click [métronome]but we didn’t do it, because it was too laborious. It was better to get a good take, and then play some nice stuff over it. You had to work around the right grip.”
“Unconsciously, now, if you try [d’enregistrer de la même façon]you say to yourself in the back of your mind: ‘Well, if I mess up, we can fix it, move it…’. And when you start doing that – it’s over. It’s like the filter on Instagram, right? As soon as you use the filter, you say to yourself: ‘It’s better like that!’. We do not return to the unfiltered image. So I think that’s the difficulty.”
However, Corgan admits that the old method also had some advantages: “There are definitely songs, like Jelly Belly or Cherub Rockthat you could never, under any circumstances, save [avec un métronome]. Today you would have a hard time getting people to accept [d’enregistrer sans cela] ; even producers, engineers, mixers… they got used to it.”
The first installment of the Smashing Pumpkins rock opera ATUM was released on November 15.
Billy Corgan interview with Rick Beato:
