I'm not annoyed at Yoshiki's current production ethos, I'm upset.
See, I'm a musician and a producer and I love orchestral music. As much as I love X Japan's songs, a real draw for me towards Yoshiki's music on the whole was his unwavering commitment to his art. He never cut corners in production, ever. His drums always sounded crisp and well mixed, his piano was always recorded to perfection and he never slacked on attention to detail regarding orchestral sections in that he would always have real string musicians record parts for him. In an age when synthesisers were all the rage and the majority of bands cut corners on production costs by using cheap and cheesy string synth swells as opposed to real orchestral musicians Yoshiki would always be an exception, and he'd do it in style - by working with musicians such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra for Art of Life and Eternal Melody.
Even when Yoshiki had a low recording budget, such as when recording Blue Blood, he still elected to put money into his art and have real orchestrated sections.
Now it’s 2010, Yoshiki owns his own studio and is sitting on a fortune from a successful music career and record label business venture.
It bemuses me as to why he refuses to record his own drums and piano now, and uses rubbish sounding, non realistic synths which sound both amateur and tacky. Is it because Yoshiki is too lazy to even record his own parts now? Is he deluded enough to think it sounds superior stylistically? Or is that he simply doesn’t care anymore, and has lost his interest in actually producing something which sounds good but instead just wants to release some shitty half-arsed, minimum effort job onto the world which the devoted many will blindly part with their cash to purchase in order to fuel his superficial Hollywood lifestyle for another 10 years.
In this day and age with software such as East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Platinum and The Vienna Samples library available it is now possible to re-create almost flawless orchestral sections without having to use real musicians (many film composers use them), so he could go ahead and use these synths and few would realise that he is actually doing so. But instead he chooses to use awful cheap sounding string patches, which could probably be bettered by free-ware which is kicking around on the internet. Even worse still, with a violinist on-board in Sugizo he could very easily have him play a violin part multiple times and build up a perfect sounding violin section in the studio relatively quickly, but again he chooses not to.
I’m still hoping that all of the stuff we have heard are just production demos, I really am. If Yoshiki releases X Japan’s new album in the state of the stuff we have heard so far, I’m seriously considering refusing to either buy or listen to it, simply for want of preserving my current views and opinions on X Japan’s music and existing back catalogue.
