What is Heartcore?

Heartcore is not a musical genre, it's a movement.  We're getting away from the over reliance on digital processing toward a natural performance-based approach.

Before the digital revolution in recording in the 90s, musicians would record by performing multiple takes until they captured the best one. Those performances would physically travel from their instrument, through the air to a microphone and then into a physical analogue machine where it was committed to a physical medium - like vinyl or tape. This is where the art of recording was born and so much of what gave it life.  Each take was a live performance with unadulterated human expression and variation - including mistakes. When we replaced these physical machines with software - we lost much of the magic and life. 

Now people record using these digital protocols that allow them to decide later which instrument they were playing for the performance, they have limitless set of digital sound libraries to choose from - from instruments they actually NEVER TOUCHED. Performances, are also edited and enhanced to a crazy degree. The vocal for example, arguably the most important instrument in rock, are now typically so processed and "perfected" through autotune, that the result has a robotic sound and feeling to it.  Sure it's cool if that's what your experimenting with, but it's definitely not a human sound at that point.

Don't get me wrong, these digital tools are amazing options and should be used like any tool in the artists' toolbox. But today they don't just add to the creative process, they have replaced it.  In 99% of releases these tools and practices are what EVERYONE uses. That's why so much music sounds alike. They are all using the same sound libraries, the same digital instruments, the same digital plugins and running the performance through the same digital processing effects. 

The end result is sterilization - the track gets divorced from any human variation or imperfection and that digitification becomes like all others that follow the same short cuts. The very things that would have given the song soul and uniqueness are simply eliminated. What we're left with, in my humble opinion, is too often soulless and incapable of eliciting emotion. I'm tired of music that doesn't feel like anything, doesn't actually say anything. If you agree then join me in supporting artists who are returning to authentic performance-based recording and let's get back to real music performed by real musicians with real emotion. That's the Heartcore movement.