Post #355452 by pablus on Wed, Jan 16, 2008 10:05 PM

I believe that since many of these tunes have already been recorded, to just duplicate them is merely an exercise and not really so worthy of an effort. Especially with the limited audience this music obviously has.

We're doing "Little Island Girl" on our current CD and want to get as close to the original recording as we can, but we'll never be able to re-create that "4 guys around 1 microphone" sound that I love so much.

In a way, we're doing an exercise too. Same key, same vocalizations. Yet we're also playing a little bit through technology and instrumentation. It's a cool song and we want to be true to the tune and the idea of it in all of its simplicity, but we're also adding a slit drum that wasn't originally in there. We're adding it because it's a vintage drum I bought off of the incredible Dick Sanft. It's kind of a tribute to the original artists and to Dick, in a way.

I know you're not discussing simple tones and tambres here, but it seems to me that recorded music makes even the attempt to stay "true" to the original intent of the author moot since that interpretation has generally been recorded definitively by the composer or with his/her nod to the recording. It's history at this point.

You could easily meander into simple mimickry.

We love the Hapa Haole stuff and Haole Kats stay as close as anyone to the original intent, but there's always a certain tempo or instrumentation that makes its way into a performance and to deny that for posterity's sake would stifle the few who enjoy the genre, in my opinion.

[ Edited by: pablus 2008-01-16 22:18 ]