The Red Light Changes People

Watch someone play brilliantly, completely unselfconsciously, in a rehearsal room for an hour. Then turn the recording light on.

I’ve felt it myself so I know it’s real. Like the God of all Music is sitting in judgement.

Something happens to a huge number of otherwise capable musicians the instant a performance becomes permanent. The shoulders come up half an inch. The playing gets tighter, more careful, more correct, and somehow, despite being technically more accurate, noticeably worse. Ask them afterwards and they'll usually say some version of the same thing. They just started thinking about it.

And that's the whole problem, right there, in one sentence. Thinking about it.

Everything that made the rehearsal version good was happening below the level of conscious thought, the hands doing what they'd been trained to do without commentary running alongside. The flow.

It’s the reason live performances are usually better, because anything you took a chance on and didn’t work out just as you’d hoped is gone. In the past….

The red light switches on the commentary of the music critic in your head.

Suddenly there's an audience, even if it's an audience of nobody, one that exists only in the knowledge that this take is going to be listened to later and judged, possibly forever. And the second a performer starts performing for that imagined judgement instead of the music in front of them, you can hear the difference immediately.

The strange part is that this has almost nothing to do with actual ability. I've watched technically weaker players sail through a take because they weren't sophisticated enough to be self conscious about it, (or in a couple of instances, genuinely didn’t care, I grew up in the ’70s when Punk was born), and I've watched genuinely brilliant musicians tie themselves in knots the second they knew it counted. Confidence under observation turns out to be its own separate skill, almost unrelated to the one everyone spends years practising.

Good producers know this, which is why a lot of the best ones spend more energy managing the room than managing the sound. Getting someone to forget the light is on is usually worth more than anything you can do afterwards with a compressor and a fuck ton of plug-ins.