Imagine, if you will, Bob Dylan as a young man.

Now, imagine this young Bob Dylan appearing on some current reality talent show such as Idol or America's Got Talent, etc.

How long do you think he'd last as a contestant?

Now, imagine that Dylan actually did have an Idol-winning vocal approach, and hear in your mind what 'Rainy Day Women (a.k.a. 'Everybody Must Get Stoned)', 'Like a Rolling Stone' or 'All Along the Watchtower' would sound like with such a vocal delivery.

I'd take a wild guess that you'd hate the results. Even if you're no fan of Dylan (and personally, I appreciate his music a lot more than I like it, if you get my meaning), his anti-technique technique when singing fits his material perfectly. Part of what allows him to tell it like it is is that he sings it like it is - world-weary, not pretty, not privileged, take-it-or-leave-it. Tom Waits, Mark Knopfler and Robbie Robertson are just a few of many singers who took a page from that songbook.

I'm bringing this up because I was listening to a friend's original music recently, and it reminded me of a lot of other do-it-yourself recordings I'd heard over the years.

These recordings don't sound technically amateur in the conventional sense - the sounds are clean, the frequencies and textures are nicely balanced, the vocals are in tune and of pleasant timbre. In short, everything has been done right - and that's what's wrong.

We listen to music because of how it makes us feel - and in most cases, the more strongly the music makes us feel, the more we like it (excepting feelings of hatred, annoyance or boredom, of course). True, we don't want our listeners to be distracted by bum notes or the guitarist getting lost, but it can be rather dull or even just as distracting when the performance is too careful or sterile. We like to hear manifestations of real emotion, conviction, and attitude - and we tend to prefer that to technical perfection or flourish. Granted, it can be a fine line to walk between a performance that's sloppy-yet-charming and one that just comes off sloppy. Both Kiss and Cheap Trick sold spectacularly few copies of their first three (very cleanly-produced) studio albums. Their first platinum-sellers were live albums, and these warts-and-all recordings were what put both bands on the pop-culture map. Yet - both live recordings were 'doctored', too, to eliminate the occasional mistake, drop-out or bad sound. The records were certainly rough - but not too rough.

Granted, I don't hang out with any punk or lounge musicians these days, so perhaps I'd get a different perspective on current recording trends from them; but for the artists I've been hearing lately, my advice would be to get to know your tunes intimately before recording them, then - 'forget' them. Deliver them from your most un-analytical, primitive core, use no facile devices, and 'welcome' mistakes (you might be pleasantly surprised to find how few you make with that mindset). The same goes with instrument tones - it's far better to have a lot of character in your tone than an engineer's idea of perfection. Unless you intend to sell all your music to recording engineers, imperfection is far more interesting. In fact, that 'imperfect' tone might just be what perks up listeners' ears.
 
I once worked with an engineer who studiously removed all traces of my breathing sounds from my lead vocal track. That might work for some music, but I'm more from the Tori Amos school of breath philosophy: breathe, and the audience breathes with you. Automatic, subliminal empathy. Probably not such a bad description of music itself.