The Ethics of Fake Guitar 🎸

[Amberwolf]

2 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Anyway, apologies, the video's topic isn't about credited guest performances, it's about what is "authentic." If there are people on YouTube faking performances and selling them as being done live in real time to show what awesome players they are, that's lame as hell. People who do it should be called out.

I guess it's different when people like me are using bits**** other people played and sold to be used in other people's music (though I find it weird that most of the stuff says in it's license specifically to *not* credit them, that it is not allowed...so the best I can do is to name the company providing the bundle and the name of the bundle (unless that's also prohibited)). 

I'm sure there are those that don't even do that much to give credit elsewhere.

 

****I may significantly alter what's provided, and I certainly don't use it the way they probably intended, or with any of the other bits meant to go with it....but I didn't "play' it in, even if I did so much to it that it isn't the same bit of musical playing or singing anymore.  Most of my recent months' tracks are done with a lot of that; the most recent two are just about exclusively that. 

Edited May 5 by Amberwolf

[T Boog]

18 minutes ago, Amberwolf said:

the best I can do is to name the company providing the bundle and the name of the bundle (unless that's also prohibited)). 

Cheers Wolf.  I'm not sure exactly how the legalities work with that stuff. All I know is, until I see you on the cover of Guitar World magazine taking  credit for someone else's playing, I personally have no beef with you.  😁

[Amberwolf]

4 hours ago, T Boog said:

Cheers Wolf.  I'm not sure exactly how the legalities work with that stuff. All I know is, until I see you on the cover of Guitar World magazine taking  credit for someone else's playing, I personally have no beef with you.  😁

Well, I'm safe...I'll never be on the cover of anything. :lol: 

[craigb]

I grabbed one of these, but gave it back.   Wrong color.  😁

[Rain]

I guess it's kind of subjective where we draw the line - but ultimately it's got to do with the musician's ability vs efficiency. Kind of like Michelangelo who had students handle some less important parts of his paintings. There is no question that he had the talent. Same with Gilmour. 

Personally though,  I would feel uncomfortable if I was credited for someone else's performance. I've no problem with Bob Kulick or Dick Wagner subbing for Ace Frehley on this or that solo on a KISS album, and it's been made public since, but I prefer when bands are more upfront about it and list who played what on each song. 

As for I, I tend to be a lot more scrupulous. To this day, I never could bring myself to punch in or even to do comps. I feel I should be able to at least get through an entire section in one take, whether it's a verse or a chorus or a solo. 

Reminds me...

My band had booked some time in the studio. My first time in a studio. When the time came for me to record my parts, everything went fine except for one lead that I just could not cut. It was the simplest thing, just a few bars of the most basic pentatonic lead you can imagine but I could not nail it. Take after take after take.

The engineer/producer said he wanted to try something. He had me plug my guitar into the other guitarist's rig - a MesaBoogie - which had tons more gain than my own rig which consisted of a tube overdrive into a 59 Fender Bassman. And with a classic single coil Strat.

I immediately nailed it. One take's all it took. 

Only, to this day I cringe whenever I hear it and feel like I cheated, because of all that gain. And it's not MY sound. From a producer's perspective though, I totally get it. 

Knowing me, we'd still be at it 28 years later...

Edited May 5 by Rain

[T Boog]

6 hours ago, Rain said:

Kind of like Michelangelo who had students handle some less important parts of his paintings. There is no question that he had the talent. Same with Gilmour

That's a great analogy Rain. 

And yeah, Ace Frehley had already established himself as a great player and a great songwriter too. Ace was definitely the lead guitar sound of Kiss and he influenced many guitarists.

 All of my favorite Kiss songs have Ace on lead. And I loved Frehley's Comet too. I also heard that Ace didn't like their later producer and was planning to quit anyway.

So yeah, although Ace was no Ed Van Halen, he was def an original and a perfect fit for Kiss. Long live the Spaceman  😉

[Rain]

2 hours ago, T Boog said:

That's a great analogy Rain. 

And yeah, Ace Frehley had already established himself as a great player and a great songwriter too. Ace was definitely the lead guitar sound of Kiss and he influenced many guitarists.

 All of my favorite Kiss songs have Ace on lead. And I loved Frehley's Comet too. I also heard that Ace didn't like their later producer and was planning to quit anyway.

So yeah, although Ace was no Ed Van Halen, he was def an original and a perfect fit for Kiss. Long live the Spaceman  😉

I totally agree.

I'm a huge fan of his. In fact, even if my own music has practically nothing to do with KISS, I have this little Spaceman plush an ex gave me  that's always around when I record guitar, to remind me of what really matters. 

 

I had the chance to play with a few guys from his bands here for KISS Night - guys who'd been on the Bad Boys tour with him and Peter in the mid 90's and his current drummer. Heard some pretty cool stories.

The last year I went, Bob Kulick was there too, and I happened to be on the rehearsal call sheet the night he came in. It was pretty awesome to watch him play All American Man live in the rehearsal studio with just 5 or 6 of us.

Las Vegas has been synonymous with KISS from the day I landed here and I got to meet and play some pretty cool cats and old heroes because of them. I even got to hang out with Peter Criss' first wife. Her book is a must-read for any KISS fan.

 

Edited May 5 by Rain

[Starship Krupa]

21 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

I guess it's different when people like me are using bits other people played and sold to be used in other people's music

I think what it comes down to (for me) is what a work is vs. what it's being presented as.

I thank T Boog for sharing just how wronged a fan can feel, even decades later, upon finding out that they had been misled about exactly whose work they were consuming. From the start of my music fandom, the genres I've been into weren't as much about the appreciation of a certain player's technical prowess as 80's metal. I didn't usually even know who played what. But now I get how if you're presenting your music as having been played by the people in your band, and their technical prowess is hyped as a way to sell records, and they become your heroes and influences, that it could feel like your trust was violated and exploited. Music is important to a lot of people, especially teenagers in their formative years who are looking for role models.

Daft Punk's "Digital Love" is one of my favorite songs of all time. When it came out, an anime fan friend of mine told me about it, that they had worked with the guy who did Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers on the video, so I found it online and checked it out. I was almost 40, had just bought my house, and I still choke up when I remember how I was emotionally transported back in time 30 years to the time when I loved The Archies, Josie and the Pussycats, The Banana Splits, etc. Also Supertramp a few years after that.

There's a video that breaks down where most of the samples they used came from, and when I first watched it, I admit I was initially a bit taken aback by just how much of the song was based on/assembled from other people's recordings.

It inspired me to take a look at my own notions about such things and to ease up. Bottom line is that they didn't sell the record as being anything else. They were a pair of friendly robots consuming what they heard and reassembling it to make their own music. That was their product, and it was/is amazing. If a song could make a middle-aged man feel like he was 8 years old again, who CARES where the individual ideas came from?

I still have ego problems about using mostly presets for all of the synths (and creative FX) I own. But I had a conversation with Lorene "Produce Aisle" about that when I was doing a remix of one of her songs and she put into perspective with a cooking analogy: do you have to grow all of your own spices in order to be an "authentic" chef? Heck, the top chefs in the most prominent restaurants don't even usually do any actual cooking.

@Rain, I hear ya about being a guitarist and feeling like using something other than my own carefully crafted guitar tone is also "cheating." I used to have my own one-person boutique stompbox company, as well as having designed a tube amp on commission that was shown at NAMM. So using "in the box" amp sims makes me feel a bit icky.

But y'know, whatever I use, in the end it will still be a tone choice I made (or in your case agreed to), and more importantly, my playing reacting in real time to what I'm hearing. And we gotta serve the songs more than we protect our own egos, right? That's what I hear, anyway.😄

Good analogy about Michelangelo. No matter whose hands crafted how much of it, if the true creative force was in charge, it's a Michelangelo, or Warhol, or Walt Disney, or Hayao Miyazaki.

I still do find it kinda weird that The Beatles had someone else do the leads on a song that George Harrison wrote about playing guitar....😏

[Old Joad]

I'm a total riff & stomp box s!ut, if it feels good and sounds good and it works, I'll use it.

Though modified for my own personal lack of taste.🤘

Edited May 6 by Old Joad

[lɐʍdlɐʍd]

https://www.whosampled.com/

[T Boog]

Well guys, looks like I've been duped once again. I've always been a HUGE fan of Mark Paul Gosselaar's guitar playing in the Zack Attack. However, I just found out that he didn't actually play the lead guitar in this song.

I'm starting to feel like my whole life has been one big f**king lie.  😔

 

[Old Joad]

I just found out The Archies weren't a real band 🙈

And they didn't write Sugar, Sugar.

 

[Amberwolf]

If we're going there, I'm gonna have to be dissapointed about Priss and the Replicants.   

 

Not that the music was great, but their offstage work was explosive.

Edited May 7 by Amberwolf