'60s
Vanilla Fudge recordings were RAW.
Jimi Hendrix recordings were RAW.
Cream recordings were RAW.
BUT NOW, we have
White Stripes - VERY RAW
Eagles of Death Metal - RAWER AND BOXIER THAN ANY '60s RECORDING
The Strokes - KINDA RAW
Wolfmother - RAW AND SOUNDS LIKE A BLAST FROM THE 70S
The Sword - SOUNDS LIKE '70s SABBATH, AND RAW
Lenny Kravitz - need I say more
For me, the issue is not about fidelity. In the past, when you recorded direct to tape, you had to make use of 4 glorious tracks on 1" tape. Maybe you needed 2 decks. So imagine how much premixes or mike experimentation had to be done to make the most out of 4 or 8 tracks. But when you talk about the raw sound of ANALOG, it is a completely different monster. The fidelity losses in the high frequencies yielded a fatness and a nice compressed midrange. That is where our connotation of "raw" comes to mind.
But NOW, recording direct to digital doesn't yield the same results unlike analog. The raw sound of digital is THIN, LIFELESS, and for a lack of a better term, 1-dimensional sounding. Now in order to recreate that "rawness" of analog, the irony is to process your tracks to death to get that "raw analog sound" we are all familiar with.
I had the pleasure of working with Inigo's band, THE HANEPS. They had a very anti-modern approach to production, except that we only can record digital (that's what we can only afford). At first I was very skeptical about one of their songs standing out in a huge playlist of songs. Hey, lo and behold, one of their songs stayed in the charts for almost 3 weeks! Was it because of the song? Or the production? The drums were boxy and roomy, cymbals were trashy, the guitars were recorded the classic/traditional way (i.e. Marshall Plexi cranked to high heavens), bass recorded with an amp miked with condenser mic, vocals recorded with an SM58. We tuned the drums high to pitch, except for the snare fairly low-pitched, and took out any muffling in the kick drum with very tight tuning. It was anti-hifi, anti-punch in a sense. BUT IT WORKED FOR THEM. But it would be ridiculous to say the same configuration would work for a different band as different artists call for different setups, different tools, and different work flows.
It's not a matter of hi-fi or lo-fi, or punchy or flabby - whatever you do in your production should support the musical statements. Otherwise, if you suck a template down through every band or artist's throat, they'll start to sound the same...
