Wrong relationship on a lot of musicians

MusicBrainz
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For this entry:

I entered a lot of musicians’ instruments under “instrument arranger” instead of “instruments”.

Is there a quick way to fix this?

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Done. Also, a question about all the “guest” you added. Does it specifically lists them as “guest” in the booklet? If not, please don’t check that. If they are just session musicians that aren’t a member of the band, then they aren’t guest. That is really meant for when the source specifically states guests, i.e. concerts, etc.

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Second question. Are these credits listed specifically on each recording? It seems odd that bass & double bass are on every recording. We shouldn’t add relationships to recordings that are release level in the booklets only unless you know those instruments are on every recording, especially the non-member performers, like clavinet, flute & sitar.

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@jerry1970, according to the edit notes, it was done with the following userscript (click Raw to install):

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Yeah, I forgot to say that. I used the script when possible and had to manually change the ones that weren’t on the instrument list.

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You already fixed it! Thanks so much!

The word “guest” is not used in this case but the band members are separated from the guests. To me that sounds like the intention of the band is that those are the guest musicians. They are invited to play on the record. I’ve seen several discussions here on different things (titles, subtitles, spelling of names and words, etc.), and the intention of the artist was always the important one, not how a graphical or layout artist interpreted the intention.

I have a huge amount of albums with listings like this, not specifying who is playing what instrument on which song, also for guests. How should we enter those then?

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You cannot infer intention on “guest”, IMO. Please don’t use guests as a substitution for featured artist, or session musicians or any other relationships unless it says guests in the booklet. I did that when I started for a while as well until I was also corrected about it. Unfortunately, you must just duplicate the release credits on each release on a release level when they don’t specify per recording. There are scripts available where you can copy release level credits to help speed that up. If it only credits them in the booklet as playing on the release, but doesn’t specify which recording, it should be entered as a release level relationship.

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Oh, I’ve been adding musicians for some years now and this is the first time I hear about this. On release level feels a bit wrong. In many cases the whole band should be on release level as well then, right?

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Technically, yes. But it’s okay to have relationships on recordings if you can just show in the edit notes that they are correct. For example, if it’s a Taylor Swift album and there are no instruments, we can assume she’s lead vocals on all recordings, even if the booklet doesn’t specify it is. It’s usually safe to add the instruments on each recording of a band’s recordings when members only sing or play only one instrument, etc. But yes, when a booklet says an artist plays piano, organ & keyboards, you shouldn’t just add all 3 instrument relationships on every recording of the album. You can also cite other sources that might have personnel for recordings. Very popular on older albums where recording info is known, i.e. The Beatles or old jazz records, etc. where there are sites dedicated to this info.

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It’s explained there:
https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Relationships

It’s quite usual, you may already have seen such releases.

Imagine a track where there is no piano but someone has set piano relationship.
This would be a bit wrong. :wink:

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I’ve seen only one or two releases with musicians at release level, and so many with musicians at recording level. That’s why it has become a habit for me.

I did remove vocalists on instrumental songs and once a drummer on an acoustic ballad or something, but otherwise it was way too much trouble to find out if the keyboard player did or did not add a few piano notes on each of the songs, for example.

I think in 90% of modern albums, all musicians should be at release level, as I rarely see specifications on who played what on which song. Are those release credits copied when adding a new release of an album? If not, they would need to be added every time and I don’t think I would feel inclined to add musicians to releases anymore.

I understand what you’re saying but I am also trying to find a balance and where the task is asking too much of my time.

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There is another userscript by same author @loujin to copy release relationships:

I’ve just tested it for the first time, it seems to work great!

There is also a very complex ticket asking for a feature that could allow setting relationships on a track set level.
Because these are some other problematic situations, like multi-album releases or like when the booklet credits are only for the main album tracks, and not for the bonus tracks, for which we may have specific credits (recording dates, musicians, etc.).

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Yeah, I’m fixing 3000+ of these right now. Don’t even remember who did it because they deleted their account.

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