A Quote by Devin Townsend

The records I make, I'm there from the writing of the first note through the click tracks to the miking of the drums to the editing of everything to the production to the vocals to the artwork.
I hate click tracks. A lot of people I know like to use click tracks. Like my son is perfect on the click tracks. It makes me to edgy.
Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.
In the studio you can auto tune vocals, and with drums, you can put them on a grid and make them perfect. I hate that sound. When someone hands me a record and the drums are perfectly gridded and the vocals are perfectly auto tuned, I throw it out the window. I have no interest in rock music being like that.
We hear so many records these days that are done with click tracks, as opposed to a drummer.
Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to The Smithsonian. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn't make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.
There's the drums, the music, the melodies, the lyrics, the production, the artwork: there are so many elements to making an album, and the drumming is just a very small fraction of what I focus on.
Radio or no radio, I just like the way records sound when the drums and vocals are loud.
There are things about the production I'm not crazy about though. People mix records to be heard in cars and to have the bass incredibly loud so the vocals have to fight with everything so there's no dynamic left, and that's kind of a bummer. That may not be my taste but I'm not going to go, "Kanye's not very good," because he's pretty badass. It's a difference in taste, like the New Pornographers and myself have different taste in production as well but it all works out in the end.
Most records, you build from the drums and bass up. This one, we started with the vocals in Nashville and recorded them live with just the guitars and tried to make that complete and lovely-sounding without any adornment at all. I really wanted to get something with the vocal that I've never gotten before Armchair Apocrypha.
Drums isn't my one thing anymore. I love to produce. I love to make tracks, write tracks, produce tracks, and I can't just sit back as a drummer anymore.
As far as favorite 'overall package' record of all time, I'd have to say 'My Girl' by The Temptations. I like everything about it, not only the composition - but the arrangement, the production, the lead vocals, the background vocals, the horns, the strings. That one I listen to over and over again.
Sometimes the most difficult thing you can do as an editor is not make a single note - the idea that everything and everyone needs editing is, in reality, a fiction. I've gotten pieces where I thought, Well, I could do this or that, or change this word, but in the end, I leave it. Changing something is not necessarily equivalent to making the piece more true to itself, which is the point of editing: it's just changing it because you feel you can or should or must.
There are a lot of people using technology that are playing to a click with backing vocals already stuck in there on some computerized thing that runs along in time to the show so they have these amazing vocals that are only partly the guys on stage producing them at the time.
I hate click tracks. I'm to busy in the click track to feel my own heart rhythm, my own soul beat.
I want the feeling where you don't really know what to do with yourself - in the vocals, in the production. Everything.
I used to put the vocals on top and piece it together. Now I start with the vocals and the string parts I write; the drums are kind of an afterthought. And who knows, maybe that will get boring, but right now that's the most interesting way for me.
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