Pop Gets Crackle, Snap Back

What do rapper Eminem, country singer Toby Keith and the Transplants, an alternative-rock band, have in common?

Listen to certain songs on their latest albums, and you’ll pick up the scratchy clues. Each CD features the kind of snaps, crackles and pops that marred the bygone era of vinyl records. But these noises were not caused by wear, tear or an inebriated party guest bumping into a phonograph. They were put there deliberately.

Today’s pure-sounding digital CDs leave some musicians and listeners cold, like a hearth with a blazing fire that’s all flame, no crackle or heat.

So, like furniture manufacturers who pound, ding and scratch tables and chairs to make them look time-ravaged, or jeans makers who pre-fade their denims to save customers the bother, musicians and record producers are using computer technology to make songs captured in crystalline digital audio sound as if they’ve been spinning on a cheap record player for years.

“A lot of contemporary recordings can sound very similar,” says singer-songwriter Pete Yorn, whose modern-rock hit, “Life on a Chain,” starts out sounding like a battered 78 rpm. “So, an old record that’s very dirty sounding and all staticky can sound pretty good when you put it on.”

For some artists, surface noise is a novelty, a way to make their recordings stand out.

For others, it’s a heartfelt nod to an earlier era in music, when records themselves, not just the music within their grooves, were cherished objects whose nicks and scars, like the dogeared pages of a beloved book, attested to the years of enjoyment they’d given.

Today’s computer-conjured imperfections can provide a shortcut to instant character, similar to the post-production tricks that make new movies look like pitted and scratched black-and-white films.

Eminem tosses in vinyl noise at the start of “Without Me,” the lively hit single from “The Eminem Show,” the bestselling album of 2002.

Keith uses it on “Good to Go to Mexico” from his “Unleashed” album, one of the top-selling country collections of the year.

The Transplants’ “Diamonds and Guns,” one of the hottest songs on alternative-rock stations across the country, sounds as if it has taken a few too many rides on someone’s turntable.

More hissing, ticks and assorted noise turn up on recent tracks by alt-rock groups Wilco and Bright Eyes, R&B; singer-songwriter Lamya, even country music titan Johnny Cash.

“I think it’s an answer to how pristine everything sounds today,” says Jeff Greenberg, chief executive of the Village, one of the busiest recording studios in Los Angeles, and vice president of the Society of Professional Audio Recording Services.

“Everybody’s striving for such technical perfection, they’re forgetting that some of the greatest records in history were done in scratchy old mono. You could tell that the players put their hearts and souls into their playing. The performances moved you, and it had nothing to do with 96 channels of high-sample-rate digital audio.”

Perfect Pitch

Two decades ago, the music and consumer electronics industries trumpeted a quantum leap in audio technology.

The birth of digital recording and the invention of the compact disc as a playback medium would forever eliminate the pops and scratches that often came between music and music lovers. And unlike vinyl LPs, CDs would never wear out.

But a funny thing happened on the way to sonic perfection: Some people found they missed the noise.

“If it’s your vinyl, all those scratches mean it’s your soundtrack,” says Pete Howard, publisher of ICE magazine, a monthly publication for music junkies.

Says Greenberg: “It puts a record into a frame of reference that suddenly orients you toward another time as well as a specific sound.”

That’s what Keith was after in “Good to Go to Mexico.”

“When I wrote that song, it had a real old-school sound to the opening chords,” says the Oklahoma singer and songwriter. “We wanted it to sound ... like something from the ‘30s or ‘40s, and then bring it up to the modern day for the rest of the song, which has a real modern Latin feel to it.”

In Keith’s song, as with most of the current examples, the simulated noise appears for a few seconds, then gives way to digital purity.

Some say these studio-incubated flaws, far from detracting from the music, actually make it stand out.

With digital recordings, “there’s almost too much clarity, so you hear everything separately ... and sometimes that’s a little distracting to the music,” says Eric Persing, creative director of Spectrasonics, a Burbank software manufacturer. He’s the inventor of Stylus, the company’s software package that allows vinyl noise effects to be added during editing.

“Some aspects of older recordings make them a more pleasant way to listen to the music,” Persing added. “The brain is not trying to focus on all the individual elements, so it can focus on the song.”

The return of the clicks and skips partly reflects the enduring appeal of vinyl recordings.

Although CDs long ago replaced LPs and cassette tapes as the music industry’s dominant playback format, a dedicated cult of vinyl worshipers persists. These fans say that so-called analog recordings, pressed on vinyl, sound warmer and capture performances more faithfully than do digital CDs.

Analog recording transforms sound waves into electrical signals that are etched into the grooves of the vinyl disc and converted back into sound waves by a phonograph needle, amplifier and loudspeakers.

Vinyl loyalists contend that digital recordings can sound harsh and icily sterile because the process breaks up the continuous sound waves into millions of separate bits that are translated into numbers for storage, editing and duplication via computer.

Pop acts from Beck to Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers to Jurassic 5 cater to LP aficionados by releasing limited editions of their albums on vinyl.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America reports that more than $82 million worth of LPs were sold in 2001, up slightly from the previous two years. Sales of CDs totaled $12.2 billion last year, the association says.

Some suggest that introducing a smidgen of aural junk into contamination-free digital recordings makes them better reflect real life.

“In the age we live in, there are not many pure environments for people to hear things clearly anyway,” says singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy of the alt-rock group Wilco, who regularly incorporates all manner of noise, from vinyl scratches to radio static, in the group’s recordings.

“Especially for anyone living in a city, our environment is pretty polluted, and I think we’ve grown very comfortable with that. It makes things sound very unreal not to have something competing with what supposedly is the content, what is supposed to be the meaning.”

Idea Is an Oldie

The idea of adding noise to recordings isn’t new.

The New Vaudeville Band had a No. 1 hit in 1966 with “Winchester Cathedral,” which mimicked the compressed range and rickety sound of a 78-rpm record from the 1920s. Two years later, the Beatles added scratchy vinyl noise to “Rocky Raccoon” on the album “The Beatles,” popularly known as “The White Album.”

The Monkees went a step further in 1968 with the song “Magnolia Simms,” which sounded as if the record was skipping and the needle was being carelessly dragged across the grooves.

In 1996, the Long Beach punk-reggae band Sublime had a modern-rock radio hit with “Doin’ Time,” which incorporated noisy vinyl effects in the opening bars.

In the digital age, vinyl noise has shown up most frequently in hip-hop music, one genre that never abandoned vinyl. DJs create “scratching” sound effects by manually manipulating vinyl records on turntables as rappers fire out their rhymes.

But advances in recording technology have made it possible to create such effects at will in the studio. Editing software allows editing and mixing on desktop and laptop computers, instead of the old method of physically cutting and pasting audiotape.

Any sound can now be digitally recorded, then mixed with the strains of guitars, strings, horns or other instruments wherever a musician wants. These sampled sounds -- noise included -- can be altered in pitch, tempo or other sonic characteristics, like colors added to a painter’s palette.

The noises associated with vinyl records, like the lines on country-music legend Merle Haggard’s face or the white hairs in Santa’s beard, are so instantly evocative of age, character and experience that musicians and producers find them hard to resist.

“It does give you a historical reference and point of view, and it brings back a certain listening experience that you don’t get from a CD,” says Rick Rubin, head of American Recordings and producer of the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty and other acts.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a more desirable sound. It’s like the Technicolor film process. It doesn’t look more realistic than the color we have today, but it can be more beautiful.”

The very idea of getting nostalgic over vinyl noise strikes some as akin to pining for the smoky exhaust of that 1964 Studebaker.

“I think it’s kind of silly,” says Glen Ballard, a Grammy-winning producer, songwriter and arranger who has worked with Michael Jackson, No Doubt, Christina Aguilera, Alanis Morissette and others.

“If it’s used as a special effect for some real purpose, I think it’s fine. But on evoking nostalgia, especially for a lot of listeners who haven’t played a vinyl record in their lives, it’s sort of two steps removed from any real-world connection.”

Others, however, look at record noise the way Andy Warhol viewed soup cans -- as part of Americans’ shared cultural vocabulary.

“It’s not considered just a sound effect any more,” says Spectrasonics’ Persing. “The sounds that a record player makes have really become part of the lexicon of musical sound.”

“It’s similar to that ‘Wizard of Oz’ effect, where [the film] starts out in black and white and becomes color. It elicits a certain response of going back in time. Vinyl noise means that now, and it has a certain cultural significance.”