Having been a recording drummer on over 100 songs for various bands, I recall one particularly interesting moment in the studio. Near the end of recording a song, I had lost track and continued playing past the song’s finale. The producer told me not to worry as he proceeded to simply delete the extra note I’d played. This didn’t seem so bad—he essentially pressed “stop” on the record-button but just after the fact.
As a result, the residual ringing of the previous cymbal note rang too long and so the producer digitally shaved that down and rounded it out. This felt a bit more dishonest: though I did, in fact, hit the cymbal, I didn’t hit it that way. Regardless, it was a minor tweak and something they “do all the time.”
Lastly, regarding one other mis-hit of mine, he “cut and pasted” a different note played on the same drum in its place: here, I did actually play the note, though not at that time nor in that particular way, which is really the important part about playing notes (my three year old can just hit a drum, play a piano note, etc.). It all made me begin to wonder where to draw the line regarding ethical musicianship.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal explored a particular facet of the music recording business: “Speed Metal” drumming. For those not familiar with the genre, it’s like twelve popcorn poppers simultaneously erupting—actually, it’s more like twelve automatic rifles being fired simultaneously. Speed metal drummers display an awesome blend of athleticism and precision.
The article explained that the current music has outpaced human drummers: many bands now employ drum machines in order to record the notes required at such a neck-breaking pace. A fan quoted in the article accused these bands (and their drummers) of “cheating.” One music producer told the story of an album on which the drummer didn’t play a single base drum note: that they were all plugged in digitally.1 He went on to make a comparison to magazines that consistently airbrush photos of models.
There’s clearly some form of deception going on in the cheating-drummer example: when we buy an album, we assume that the instruments have been played by the musicians. But it is very rare that an album avoids any form of production: actually, in the rare cases that it does, critics highlight it as being “raw” as though you’re there in the garage with them, the band playing the music live just as they do in “real life.” More commonly, digital effects enhance the music to make it more palatable—the vocals are auto-tuned, a few notes shaved off or added, subtle mistakes polished. All for our listening enjoyment (and, yes, to sell more albums).
In many senses, when buying an album, one might feel cheated if these effects were not added. It’s not so much that we want a certain person to have played the base drum, but that the base drum notes appear in the right place, with the correct tone, and all those other things that musicians and producers do that we don’t understand.
It’s much different than if we were to see a band play live and then come to find out that they did not, in fact, play the instruments they pretended to play. There’s a different relationship with the artist live then there is on an album. This is why people are so aghast when they discover a live artist lip-synching. (See various examples in recent history such as Milli Vanilli and Beyoncé.) It’s an agreed-upon ethically unacceptable form of deception.
No one really seems harmed by the inclusion of the drum machine on an album.2 If anything, we benefit by an increased aesthetic value. Though the question worth discussing is this: do the drummer and the band get something (i.e. money, credit) that they don’t deserve?
In the producer’s analogy of air brushed models, this becomes trickier. In part because this false sense of beauty actually has been shown to do harm. Countless studies demonstrate that readers (mostly young women) experience a decreased sense of self after viewing models in beauty magazines.3 As an illuminating video by Dove depicts, very often the models in advertisements and magazines appear very little like they do in real life: their photos are digitally enhanced to the point that the women couldn’t exist with the disembodiment enacted by the various digital changes.
Here, then, we recognize that harm actually occurs: these images cause people to feel worse about themselves and they also promote a body image which is not only unhealthy but impossible. In addition, the models achieve credit for maintaining a false beauty.
Assigning moral condemnation to an act requires someone’s being harmed. Cheating, too, involves someone getting something they don’t deserve.
Here’s where the comparison to drumming and modeling pays off: in the disanalogous nature of it. The one great benefit we have when evaluating the morality of actions in the sporting realm is that we have a clear set of rules upon which all who participate agree and understand. An athlete cheats any time he gets something he doesn’t deserve—and in doing so, he harms his competitor.4 Cheating affords the cheater something that he doesn’t deserve. And because of the explicit zero sum nature of sport, the cheater’s competitor loses something that he did not deserve to lose and is thus harmed in the process.5
1 Consider the moral difference between this example—a drummer who cannot play the song himself and so it’s digitally enhanced—and the above example in which I could play the song but just missed a hit and had it digitally replaced.
2 Though, if one argues that recording a song implies that the band played every note without the aid of technology, then that person might consider the drum machine a form of deception that, like most lies, does do harm in and of themselves. An additional potential harm involves other bands who don’t use technology losing out to those who do—in a capitalistic, competitive market, this more closely resembles a zero sum relationship.
3 I suppose one could argue that digitally enhanced drumming may also cause some sort of harm to young drummers who experience a decrease in self-worth, but it likely wouldn’t lead to the serious deleterious affects of the body image issues in modeling.
4 Harm need not be physical, as a person is harmed when stolen from, for example.
5 In addition to the competitor’s undeserved loss, those competing with the cheater for playing time also lose—for example, the back-up/reserve quarterback, the non-cheaters in the minor leagues, etc. Thanks to Tito Bianchi for this insight.