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Burning The Candle At Both Ends
The Fanfan sends us this: "A very interesting article in today's New York Times on how home studios are breaking the stronghold of recording companies on music production. Nowadays, anyone with some talent, a PC and a couple of peripherals and good mikes can produce music which would have required spending weeks in an expensive professional recording studio five years ago. Only recording companies could pay those expenses. So, the same way Napster and the Net at large have already seriously eroded their monopoly on distribution, are home studios the other (unsung) heroes of the war against BMG, EMI, Sony and altars?" This fits in well with the article we just posted.
I read the article without any great reservations -- I knew it was a fluff piece, but I didn't realise it was cotton candy. When I came to the part when the author stated that people would soon be recording music on a pro level with "little plastic microphones", I dropped my cup of water because I was laughing (well, snorting) so loud.
I used to work for Altec Lansing in their R&D center, here in Israel. We worked some on some directional microphone tech which is very cool. They sell it now in the InteliMic package. Even with this great mic, there is still residual sound, distortion, hollowness, etc.
I'm sorry to break this to you, man, but there is no way in hell that some "little plastic microphone" will ever hit the level of quality microphone. And then there is the studio environment (you know, of course, that your home is not really as quiet as you would think), the professional mixers, etc.
Me thinks that this is just another ad revenue piece that panders to the drooling masses that have (well, sort of thankfully) found a target in the RIAA.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
Thery're not, agreed. But then, Les was recording onto 8-track analog tape and was going to be bouncing many times...I doubt if he recorded lead vocals there, just extra little vocal bits.
You can get a deader sounding room, but not a good room. And dead sound doesn't make the room actually quieter. The acoustic treatment doesn't have to be expensive, but making the walls thick is. There's a reason people building recording studios use isolated stud construction, construct floating slab floors...and it's not just to spend money.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
"That does not give you the mass necessary to actually block outside sounds. Much of the new home studio equipment is 24bit/96khz with a dynamic range. What you propose might work fine for recording a punk band that is not using the lower end of the dynamic range possible."
You are right. If you are in the middle of a big noisy city, it won't do the trick for keeping outside sounds out. I live out in the country and there aren't any outside sounds to block. The styrofoam and carpet is to make it possible to get decent sound when recording drums. I should have been more specific.
Very well stated!
"The band gets cues off of each other when they are playing live. When you separate them out, the body-language cues are gone, the band looses the "vibe" and "energy" they get when they are playing live"
That is the reason for recording the reference track. If they can't play without the others, let them all listen on headphones and play along with the recorded reference track. Turn off the inputs for everyone except the one you are recording.
They've been wonderful at marketing. Have you looked at the charts lately? Sales are concentrating on a relatively small number of heavily promoted groups. Note that one producer is responsible for two or three of the best selling acts in the business today.
I don't think the net is going to change the mass-market as much as people think it is. What it is going to do is allow the rest of the world access to more targeted channels; in other words, MTV will still promote Christina Aguilera and Eminem-- but there will be many more alternatives to MTV. Even though sales of the kinds of music I listen to will never approach those of Britney Spears, I will at least be able to hear those bands with a much higher signal-to-noise ratio.
I think those people who imagine that this is going to destroy the record industry are badly mistaken. It will allow artists more choice, it will allow customers to avoid the crap (and record companies will eventually get in on this) but it isn't going to end their domination (unless, possibly, they get wiped out by their mishandling of copyright issues.)
Pretty much everyone said that you can't get a home recording to sound as good as a professional recording.
Imagine this scenerio: a lot of people are angry at the music industry because they're a bunch of greedy people who profit off some artists' hard work. Most artists have trouble even breaking even after the expense of producing an album. Now I don't know about anyone else here, but I'd rather pay the artist directly for a home recording that sounds pretty good than pay the greedy recording industry for a version that sounds really good. I'm not talking about buying crap, either, I'm talking about buying truly artistic work, even if it sounds kind of hollow.
If enough people would actually start doing this, artists will actually *profit* from their work, which would make it possible for them to get better equipment and produce better sounding music. So quit supporting the stupid music industry. They take your money and use it to pass legislation to take away our rights to fair use. Support the artists who deserve to be supported.
-NGH
"The tomorrow of Windows is the yesterday of UNIX."
Working as a UNIX admin does not guarantee competency.
Being a great musician has nothing to do with what equipment you use.
There have always been and and always will be those with talent and those without. Great musicians will make great music regardless of what tools are available to them. The difference is, now all the great musicians who couldn't shell out $50+ (at minimum) an hour to get into a studio can now afford to make great music at all, instead of fucking around on a $50 guitar and never showing how good they are to anyone but their friends and family, and never sharing their talent with anyone.
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
There's no excuse for lossy compression these days, when CD audio can be losslessly compressed at a ratio of 2:1 and hard drives are less than three dollars a gig.
Which creates huge problems if you want to send CD audio from one place to another. You have to either pay through the nose for bandwidth (even 2:1 compressed it's 700 kilobits per second, and 56K dialup is still the fastest access available in many areas), or burn the audio onto CD and send it through snail mail. Streaming is out of the question unless you're Hollywood and can afford the infrastructure to every home in the target market.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The one advantage the "big boys" have, that no home studio run by an amateur will EVER duplicate (on the first, second, third, or even tenth album), is experience at mixing. You can't just balance all the levels and call it done - getting the tonal characteristics, the details, the effects, etc. all in there only comes with lots of time.
BTW, if you want to hear our band's attempts, I've got an MP3 sampler here (about 4 mb). Great tunes, but average mix - all in all a good example of what an amateur will usually produce, even in a decent studio.
* Split Infinity Music
* ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Actually, this is totally wrong. Price out some of the lower end Digidesign or MOTU cards/racks, then tell me how far that amount would have gotten you 25 years ago (adjusted for inflation, of course). The big difference is that your home recorded music can end up on CD sounding good rather than a self released cassette. Remember those?
Since, the "near death" of Apple a couple years ago, most major third party hardware and software is available for both Windows and Mac OS, with the same functionality. And yes, you do need third party hardware, even on the Mac. To name a few of the major players: Steinberg, Emagic, Opcode, Sonic Foundry, etc.
A short history on music production and distribution:
blah, blah, blah
This amusingly myopic regurgitation of dated rock critic wisdom is so terrible that I'll bring up only the worst points of it and then point you to some good resources so you can get a better handle on things.
The major problem with your "history" is that it neglects to mention black people until Public Enemy and NWA. Don't forget that the black community has played a major role in the invention of every American music, from jazz to rap to techno. Furthermore, they've had their own distribution channels in the past, and still do today.
While perhaps making for convenient comparisons to Britney, et al. , your explanation of the differences between AM/FM and 33/45 are grossly exagerated and, in some cases, incorrect. A lot of this has to do with the fact that you forgot black people, whose music is often more appropriately presented in a singles format.
Perhaps you best check out these places:
All Music
The Mechanic's Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes and CDs
Home Recording at About.com
those are some seriously good points, but I'm afraid you're just towing the party line here, mick. I want to point you to some of the best sounding albums ever put to wax, namely
White Light / White Heat (velvet underground)
Piper at the Gates of Dawn (the Pink Floyd)
Damaged (Black Flag)
Loveless (My Bloody Valentine)
the overarching point being that it isn't the recording space, gear or even engineering that brought those records together, rather it was inspiration, showmanship and a vision of what makes an album a great album.
With the exception of Loveless and to an extent, Piper, no studio is needed or wanted for the true masterpiece. Not a single $90,000 compressor was used on any of these albums. no $2M 'desk' (your parlance) was required to complete WL/WH, it was recorded in an abandoned church with a greasy 2 track. sure, they may have had 220v ribbon mikes, but those weren't ridiculously vauntedly overvalued by a mob of hoodwinked guitar-center junkies. It was all just old crappy gear being used by people who'd transcended the status quo of the music industry.
And now, with my Pod and my Tascam MD 8track, my cluster of smc '57 and a nice stretch of hardwood floors, I can attain better sounds than they got on Rubber Soul. all it takes is a little imagination and a a bit of tweeking in sound forge...
::I will not moderate my opinions for your stinking karma
I have to disagree about the current importance of MP3s. I will admit that their popularity is increasing, but they still don't garner nearly the attention and market share that recordings from the major labels do. Look at the upcoming Grammy awards. How many non-major-label artists are likely to win anything? Granted, the Grammys are a product of the recording industry, but do you see an MP3 awards show getting the press and television coverage the Grammys are? Of course not. Like it or not, the major labels still command a lion's share of the music scene. If you believe for one minute that most people in this country aren't being influenced by the mass media in their music-buying decisions, then go to your local shopping mall and ask each person who passes you how many MP3s they downloaded this week and what non-major label albums that prompted them to buy. I guarantee you that a significant number of folks won't even know what an MP3 is. After you get right down to it, you're going to find that only a small minority are not relying on the mass media when making their buying decisions. Don't forget that the majority of Americans aren't even connected to the Internet. And as for my statement about getting exposure through independent record stores, I didn't say this was a sure-fire way to succeed, but a vast majority of bands never get much farther than their garages anyway. And there most certainly are independent record stores in smaller cities. They usually crop up in college towns, places where alternative music thrives.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Compression doesn't always mean producing the same or lower quality at a lower bitrate. It can also be used to produce *higher* quality at the *same* bitrate.
For whatever given bitrate you're willing to deal with, it _always_ makes sense to perform lossy compression. A good compression system running at 700kb/s (1/2 CD audio's bitrate) could have quality far superior to CD.
Just to throw in an example of this... Three Doors Down (you know, the guys who sing that "Kryponite" song) were total unknowns down in Mississippi(?) before steps 1-6 happened. The only difference is that instead of distributing through a Napster or a Gnutella, they got signed.
Right away, the music companies started to screw them out of their profits. I wish I remembered where I read it, there was a great interview with/article about the band where they talked about how they'd all immediately started putting a big chunk of their money in 401Ks, blue-chip investments, and attempting not to let the music company sucker the dough back into their own pockets.
I happen to like Three Doors Down, and think they have a good sound. It's a damn shame that the time they used to spend playing in local joints to make cash, they now have to spend defending what should be their profits against the people who have already taken so much ca$h for the dubious privelege of putting them on the top 40.
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
Well the issue here is not distribution ( i'll cover that part below) but creation.
Currently only the very big music studio's with very high quality engineer's are getting bookings for there time. Alot of studios are very worried and some have gone for sale in the past 4 months.
Anybody with about 12K can create a music studio in there home that would replicate a quality music studio. there they can master a good demo ( we get alot of demos for our show and some are very very good )
As for distibution, that's were the labels come in. Everyone has to have a distribution deal if they even want to have a chance. Discovering an artist is still a Label thing . that's why they pay a finders fee ( up to 20K ) for those that are willing to gather demos, listen to them, weed out the garbage and present to them the final fee that make it.
Our team has a different approach to this.
We have ton's of demos that we listen to every day. we weed out the basic crap. after that we tell all the lables about our finds ( we tell the artist to post there music at a web site for the label to download them. after that it's up to the label to contact the Musicians. All we ask for in return is access to their artist to place on our show. We find that by staying totaly nuetral that the labels give us more respect and better quality interviews.
ONEPOINT
spambait e-mail
my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop music news
please help me make it better
if you see me, smile and say hello.
ya, every time I have ever been in a 'recording' studio, it didn't have any 'limousine' service( or if it did, it was our van!). The janitor is usually the guy behind the mixer, the snacks are whatever we brought with us. Last recording studio I was at, had a frickin' bullet hole going through the back door!
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
yer damn right dude!
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Having Photoshop on your computer does not make you a great artist.
Installing Red Hat does not make you a unix expert.
Being able to do high-quality sound recordings with your PC does not make you a great musician.
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
Last night a friend of mine played my his latest mix he arranged using Acid. (Sweet, sweet program). It sounded just like a studio recording, and was incredible quality. He did this in a day on him home PC. So for a grand or so, anyone can get the music down. Of course it still takes talent to make the music.
I make beats and rhymes. Coming down the pipe to you soon. Here's the distribution model I'm planning; let me know what you think.
I'm producing all my stuff on a Win2000 Pro box with the standard stuff, ReBirth, Cubase, Sound Forge, Acid, bla bla, f'ing bla. All the tunes are saved on a Linux box with 80 gigs, 128MB RAM, and a 633 Celery over SAMBA. I'll be encoding to ogg and mp3. This ass spanking newborn box is connected to my 1mbit dsl line. My hacker gang on-line collaborates to point the desired domain to the desired dymamic IP. I'll serve up the mp3s using Apache from a very simple and basic web page. In other words, I will be my distributor. I'll market myself on-line and in the clubs in the Bay Area where I live.
If this is the dawn of a new era for artists, I'll see soon. Later y'all.
-Natedawg the Frisco Disco Donkey Kong Babeeee!
Hey, sorry if I put your post in the wrong light - it just happened to trigger a pent up rant.
"NO artist has made several hundred thousand dollars from publishing their music on mp3.com."
Please take a look at this group under MP3.com earnings. $188,533.19
How does the sound of something recorded on a portastudio compare to something recorded on a professional 2" tape machine?
It can sound damned close - and good enough anyway. Definitely comparable. Check out this guy's stuff if you realy want to know. It was recorded on a four track cassette with SM57's. Springsteen cut his album "Nebraska" on a four track cassette and he was already an established star. The quality was good enough.
The revolution did begin with 4 track cassettes. Is it the sonic equal of 2" tape? No, but close enough. Quality vs price in audio gear approaches an asymptote - once you spend a modest amount of $$$, additional money spent results in only a relatively small increase in quality.
Imagine two news groups, one dedicated to announcing new up and coming OSes; one dedicated to up and coming bands.
:)
I'm guessing the one announcing new bands would have a fairly significatant amount of traffic
People rely on radio stations (for better or for worse) to filter out the "crap" for them. The only way I see a completey opened up music market working is if people rely on their music entusiast buddies to filter out the "crap" again for them; but on a micro level of sorts.
For alot of us getting ahold of some music that doesn't completely suck is all we're looking for. Sure, sometimes it's nice to have something to listen to that completely blows your hair back and all; but _finding_ that among all the music simply takes a long time.
Yeah.. that was probably a pointless post.
Justin Buist
Of course I don't feel the same way about music, that's why I posted a message on Slashdot to say so. My point was not that we need the crappy music the music industry provides. It was that it will be much harder to replace the big budget movie industry than it will be to replace the music industry. Although it would be cute to see your Quake mod, it wouldn't go very far towards replacing what I get out of movies.
It takes a fairly small investment to produce music that rivals anything the music industry produces. I think it will be a long time before the same can be said for movies. So if I felt morally obligated to boycott products associated with the RIAA and MPAA, or if I were witness to these bloated industries collapsing, I'd probably miss the MPAA more. Their product, crappy as it usually is, is not yet reproducible on a shoestring budget.
Hilarious!
Mike van Lammeren
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
...not to mention all the unwatermarked MP3 players around. Be sure and buy yours before they impliment some crazy protection scheme on digital music players. I already got my portable and car MP3 players, and my computer powers my stereo, so I'm ready. Do your worst RIAA, it'll only alienate your customers, and give hackers something to work on (i.e. reverse engineering protection schemes). They are going to have to face the fact that they have lost control of media distribution, and work with the system by distributing their content themselves for free with advertising, or as a paid service without. If they continue to fight the internet and its new media distribution methods, they will only lose out, and make the artists they control pay by denying them this ever-increasing market, as well as have to pay all the legal fees involved in fighting this war. They are going to have to seriously rethink their distribution of content, and the incredibly profitable and unrealistic days of music on CDs are over. No longer will people be paying $14.99 for an album, or leaving their homes to get it. CDs will either disappear, or be drastically reduced in price ($5-$8 would be acceptable). It will be fun to see them crash and burn as they try to take on the internet; and truly underground stars are born naturally and gain enough prominence to go on national, possibly world tours. This will mark a turning point, where alternate media distribution has reached a critical mass to warrant commercial backing in a serious way. I'd say 3-4 years before enough americans on broadband connections and are net-aware enough to seek alternate media sources, ignoring the classic ones. For global internet stars, we probably will have to wait a bit longer as the internet is integrated into their society. Some countries in Northern Europe (Sweden, Norway) and a few Asian islands (Japan, Hong Kong) are about as connected as the USA, if not more so. Others will catch up. The main advantage of the internet is its global nature, allowing everyone to participate (theoretically), no matter their location. The New Media companies will be able to target much larger audiences, with much better feedback on what people are watching, how long before they zap sites, and much more information providing much more useful marketing data. Access to a site might require a registration, giving some basic info about yourself, and put a cookie in your browser tracking your activity, that they can later use for demographic studies, and targeted content, much better than current TV techniques. The internet way of doing things on the distribution side will really help everyone involved. The only people hurt are ones trying to preseve the old way, which is already dead. On the content creation side, this fits right in with internet distribution as now there is much more freedom, and someone can create content, both audio and video, on their own personal computers, and then distribute this on the internet. Due to this, we will be seeing much more creative and interesting content that we never would have experienced through any other medium. The people are now in control of the medium, as opposed to a small group of businessmen and lawyers. If artists want to protect their revenue stream, already known artists can use their exposure to sell their work directly on the internet, while lesser known artists can use sites like mp3.com and others, as well as streaming audio internet radio stations to gain prominence. The RIAA is either going to embrace the internet, or lose all their artists in the long run.
I, personally, have not bought a CD in about 4 years (since I got my CD burner). Thanks to the internet, I am discovering music I never would have found in a record store, and making CDs to fit my taste much better than any record company executive could. I know that as more people get into this way of getting music, the record companies are going to crash and burn. Yay for free music (free as in speech, NOT beer).
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Sonic Foundry is 1000% committed to Windoze...when you consider their founders originally worked at MICROS~1 and their most important work there was the multimedia architecture for Windows95, you know there is no way in hell they'll port to Linux, or MacOS for that matter.
BTW, I've recorded some loops for ACID at home and they've sounded pretty cool.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- All your estrogen are belong to us!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Think Brittany Spears and nSync.
Ick. I'd love to smear their brains all over the pavement.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
OK, making music is one thing. How about distribution? How is an unknown artist going to get his new home made CD on the shelves of HMV or Wal Mart?
Sounds like producing anything of real quality at home is still in the future. More interesting to me is how musicians will use the technology to create whole new forms of music.
For the specific examples you give, I think it's unlikely - wouldn't making a cheap mic with a predictable enough distortion for software to remove it transparently sort of mean making the mic with it's distortion engineered to high tolerances (with the corresponding high costs)? The problem is that the 'feel' of a sound is an extremely subtle thing and once you've lost information from the signal, how can you put it back? As to active soundproofing ...um. Maybe, but it sounds expensive (both for extra mics, and the processing power required), and time-consuming and difficult to set up. It's only useful if the ordinary 'only as technical as I need to be' musician can understand how to do it.
There is however, some hope for software improving the sound from microphones. The effects board in Roland's VS-series hard disk recorders, for example, have a 'mic simulator' effect - it uses a physical modelling algorithm to attempt to simulate the sound of more expensive mics, from a cheaper mic or line input. It does, to my ears, make a noticeable improvement to the sound - but I don't think it would fool an experienced recording engineer. Software can and will be used to improve the quality of home recordings, but it's always a case of fixing badly recorded signals, which is usually a poor substitute for using high-end equipment in the first place. I certainly wouldn't rule out software becoming advanced enough to make this difference neglible in the future, but I think it's some way off yet.
This is a very naive, yet elitist point of view. Do you really think that the success of a song hinges upon the subtle differences between "professional" mixes & mastering and what can be accomplished by a self producing musician with good ears? Do you think people are going to be singing along with a catchy tune and then stop to ponder whether the snare needs a narrow band cut at 5K? Or if a second pass of compression on the bass would have made it sturdier?
And your point about having to do some sort of apprenticeship is just plain wrong too. It is no different than any other aspect of creating music. You can learn it (and invent it) on your own. Just like they way you learn to play guitar - in your bedroom with a bunch of reference recordings. Do you think that audio engineers are the only people who have good ears? Do you think it isn't possible for people to change mic placements and tweak knobs until they like the sounds? And if someone is bent on having instruction, there are plenty of resources on the net with people like you dispensing valuable advice based on experience.
Amatuer production is easily good enough if you are serious about working. And besides, it's the songs that really matter, not the glitter and gloss of production. That's one thing that we should have learned from the 80's. No amount of mixing and tweaking will save a crappy song. And on the other hand, a great song will shine through no matter what the level of production.
Alternatively, artists can band together. (Heck, isn't that how United Artists started?) Check out Todd Rundgren's PatronNet. Some will be musicians that major labels have dumped or given a raw deal (is that redundant?); go look at the November Project page. Once the momentum develops, media like MTV will notice or get left behind...(as if they play much music these days anyway).
Duh!
Can you say 'yard sale'?
I have a buddy with an impressive self-studio with real high-quality gear, put together entirely with yard-sale stuff!
Alot of H/K, Altec Lansing, boom / directional / cardioid mics - the whole shootin' match, replete with 4 track mini-studio!
I doubt he's spent over $1000 on all of it... (in fact, he's often sold a guitar or two at a significant profit!)
But, yer right - a $12 PC 'boom mic' isn't ever going to sound like anything but tin and plastic..
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The article mentions that perhaps the industry's move to implement watermarking will allow independent artists to distribute music using that technology. I don't quite see that happening, as I feel the RIAA will want to keep that technology to themselves.
What I think will happen, and should happen, is that musical artists should throw out their creations for free all over the Internet and elsewhere. Make themselves heard. I think their real compensation in the future will come from charging for live interaction.
Most of the music I listen to comes from local independent musicians who give away their CD's. But they are so good, it's worth every dollar to go see them at pubs and concert halls around town. It helps generate human contact and you spend time hanging out with your friends drinking beer and listening to good music. And this isn't just your back garage punk band...that isn't my mainstay of music nowadays (of course I still listen to it). These bands range from rock to ska to electronic DJ's to Jazz fusion and even classical. There is nothing quite as fun as being only 5 feet away from a good band...maybe even having a beer with them afterwards.
I'm sure touring is hard on bands, but most of my musician friends love it. They get to travel around, meet new people and do what they love doing. It helps inspire a better sense of community. Some of the extra good local bands here now have some followings in other states too. If I get a bands CD for free over the Internet, hear how good they are and hear rave reviews of their local concerts...I would travel across state to see them.
I don't know if their popularity will ever quite soar to where someone is shelling out $150 a ticket (yuk...U2!) to sit far away from the musicians in a large stadium. Rather impersonal. But I think those type of concerts will die out as well, once the RIAA loses its grip some more and stops the endless promoting of no-talen bands like N-sync and the like. Once they start losing their marketing grip, newer generations wont be so brainwashed into believing the tripe they promote today.
So in conclusion, I think these super-cheap home studios will lead to more free music for all. This will generate musicians who truly focus on their music and promote themselves through the community...not some faceless, money-grabbing corporation.
- not your normal AC
it isn't so much that home studios are breaking the hold of the recording companies, its that the recording companies are becoming home studios.
Most of the name producers I know, have home studios as powerful as the ones they have at work. They may not have acoustic chambers or other stuff, but they got enough to record a rawk act.
I've got a pretty rudimentary studio right now...a several keyboards, a few computers a few racks and stuff, and its more powerful than the studios I had paid $50 an hour for in the late 80s. Hell, my Powerbook alone is more powerful than most of these places.
The shift has already started. People record most of their tracks at home, then only go into the studio when they need either a producer or equipment they don't have. I don't have good vocal mics, or a vocal booth, the few folks I've recorded at my place end up tracking everything but the vocals at my place. Hell with the new Antaries Mic Modeller and some noise reduction software, I could stick the singer infront of an expensive reference mic in my walk in closet and most folks wouldn't know the difference.
If ya are interested in home studios, take a stroll on down to Sonikmatter.com and read through our forums. Several in our community are well known producer types as well as a few name musicians (heh...you'll have to read for a while before ya figure any of them out though). We are all working on integrating studio technology into the home and we don't care if yer using PCs Macs Be Linux or even Ataris (lots of our european audience are still using old Atari STs I believe...)
clif
--
I wrote/recorded my own music on a home studio, mp3s of some of them are available at mp3music.kritek.com.
The notion of relying on a big record company is absurd to me, but then I'm not trying to make a living playing music anymore, I write/record/release my material for the PEOPLE, not the corporations. I know there are people that enjoy freely available music, and my music in particular, so have at it.
Young band makes it on the local scene.
They cut a CD, because it is fairly easy, and nowadays everyone is doing it.
They go nowhere.
Record company comes along, and offers to make them rock stars, if they will sign over all copyright for 10 years and guarantee 7 new CDs, with an opt out for the recording company if the band crashes and burns. This is the dilemma. The band either joins the market forces and potentially becomes rich, or tries to make it on their own, and dies poor.
Access to recording studios has been costly, but never a limiting factor. Recording studios PROMOTE artists with ways and means beyond that of any garage band.
And we all KNOW good marketing and sales beats a good product every time. Look at Iomega and Syquest. CP/M and DOS. Heck, look at ANY Microsoft product.
Napster is nice for making the bands closer to their fans, but AIRTIME and PROMOTION with lots of CASH will continue to make bands.
"
I never said you couldn't make good art at home. I just said it'll never sound as good as the big boys.
"
I strongly contend that home stuff can sound better that the big boys.
Recording live gigs to 2 track DAT + bundle of SM57s + SM58s + a few condensors + Soundcraft Live4 mixer gives a good result.
The big boys when recording a live gig compress the final output to buggery - just to make it sound better on cheap reproduction equipment.
I don't care about cheap equipment - I have expensive equipment so I end up with a more natural sounding live recording than any 'professional' live recording I've ever bought because I've not had reams of compression and EQ added to the final mix to beef out the sound.
Admittedly this is in the semi-pro level, the equipment is owned by College for the student gigs and has a much larger budget than I could manage plus the advantage of soudn engineers that have done a variety of venues and different bands rather than recording their own stuff, but it is still possible to get some excellent results.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Vitaminic is not too bad. I've had much more sucesss (as in downloads) from there than both Mp3.com and iuma put together, with virtually no promotion.
This may be a bit excessive. It may be that previously the room was way too echoey and that these measures really are needed. However most people fall into the trap (as you might have done) of completely killing the reverb in the room.
This usually ends up producing really flat recordings which sound really quite odd. You then spend time putting back the reverb electronically which is costly and time consuming.
I might be wrong. This is not to be taken as hard criticism, it's just that I've seen this so often.
Decent microphones are fairly affordable. I don't mean the $50 budget mics, but the Shure SM58 and 58b series of mics go for under $200, and are the same microphones used both on the road and in the studio by a large number of bands.
The SM58 is NOT a recording microphone! They're brilliant live and I have and use a number of them myself. The SM58 is reliable and robust, it won't spring any surprises on you. To quote a TV ad from the UK..."It does exactly what it says on the tin"
I teach community courses on stage work and PA principles - you have no idea of the number of (talented) artists who are completely clue deficient when it comes to picking up and using a microphone - I always use an SM58 as it "looks like the microphones on TV" but I wouldn't want to use it in the studio.
My £0.02 worth.
Ian
You can get a better notion of what mikes are currently preferred for home recording by going over to alt.music.4-track (which despite its name is about home recording of all kinds). It appears that various small and large diaphragm condenser mikes are preferred for most purposes, with vintage mikes such as the SM-57 relegated to those times when you want a vintage sound. Microphones like the Marshal MXL-2001 and the Oktava MC-012 are a bit more expensive than an SM-57 (going for around $200-$300 rather than under $100 like an SM-57), but considering that a band can spend $15,000 for a 3-day recording session at a "real" recording studio, that's hardly a major expense.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Thanks! This gives me a lot to think about. Here's how I'd attack the problems you raise, though as I say I'm no expert and this could be nonsense.
On cheap mics. Bear in mind that you help the software out with calibration: play the mic a tuning fork and let the software figure out the parameters of the distortion compensation. Sure, tolerances will have to be higher than those of the cheapest mics to remove pure random noise (eg thermal noise), but software could still improve the mics.
On active soundproofing. First, renting a soundproof room is really expensive and inconvenient for lots of musicians who'd rather record in their bedroom. So it doesn't have to be all that good or all that cheap before people will use it. Second, I'm hoping that we can make mikes cheaper! Third, I'm assuming that processing power is basically free, since it halves in price every eighteen months. Fourth, in theory the software might be able to do its own setup; set the mikes up, leave the room for 20 minutes, and the software uses the noise it's supposed to be cancelling to figure out the relative positions of the microphones and the cancellation parameters.
The difference doesn't have to be negligible. The quality might be worse. As we move away from the world of big budget record company bonanzas, we'll see more people sacrificing quality for savings in money and convenience.
--
Xenu loves you!
The big problems are
Marketing: Somebody at home can't market with the reach of a large corporation. Oh, sometimes something comes out of somebody's basement and then suddenly it's everywhere. But being everywhere only happens after the big boys get involved and the original artist has lost control of the marketing.
Experience: Just because somebody has a quality home studio doesn't mean they will no how use it. Professional recording studios are staffed by experienced sound engineers who really know their stuff. No amount of easy to use software will overcome this.
Talent: This could lead to a lot of crap being passed around. Just look at mp3.com. There is a lot of good stuff there, but there much more bad stuff. Separating the wheat from the chaff leads us back to the importance of marketing.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
It really doesn't matter how good / clean the music sounds. I still listen to one chance to capute, live recordings from Phish and enjoy the music. There is some professionalism in the recordings, but the defects in the recording are just as familar to me as the music. I don't think Roger Nichols, Ed Cherney, and George Massenburg were at Big Cypress during the Millennium. They may have years of experience using their ears, but what _I_ enjoy is what matters. Joe...
You can compensate for many problems with microphones and acoustics using signal processing. It's kind of like modems can compensate for many problems with telephone lines and still give you very high data rates. Cheap sensors with smart processing is the future of audio and video.
But that's not what I'm getting at. My point is that with lossy compression, it's possible to have a smaller or equal size file with the whole song in *better* than CD quality if you compress it down from a high quality source. (say, the original 96KHz/24bit studio file)
There are plenty of boneheads who have "pro" grade studios but don't know how to use them. Yeah its great that you have that 2 inch/24 track/Struder but if you can't put a signal chain together it doesn't matter.... having a 1176 limiter and fancy ass mic pres, and neuman a studio genius makes not...
In short it's the talent/ear not the equipment. There are people with home studios who do amazing things... there are other's who's production quality will be eternally lame no matter what home gear gadget they get...
I do find it encouraging that the price points have dropped and the software is so extensive that if you had enough free time and skills you could make a masterpiece (acoustic treatments/music talent not withstanding)
*shrug*
ymmv
e.
www.randomdrivel.com -- All that is NOT fit to link to
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
"the overarching point being that it isn't the recording space, gear or even engineering that brought those records together, rather it was inspiration, showmanship and a vision of what makes an album a great album."
Also try Michelle Shocked's "Texas Campfire Tapes" -- recorded on a minidisc at a campfire, Gomez's "Bring it On" -- recorded in the band's garage (and IMHO far better than the next album, Liquid Skin, recorded at Abbey Road).
In the realms of Electronica, of course, it's even easier to get a professional sound on a shoestring. All those early Orbital albums... yum.
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If you are making what I would classify as "parasitic" music ie. DJ stuff, some techno, some hip-hop you can pick up some software for a few hundred bucks and maybe one decent mic and you are set
As opposed to, say, "parasitic" music like Elvis Presley, or most early rock & roll, or Robert Johnson's producers, all of which ripped off earlier blues styles and musicians wholesale without credit or compensation?
(Now go download some symbiotic music to listen to).
The home recording revolution has already arrived depending on the style of music you are making. If you are making what I would classify as "parasitic" music ie. DJ stuff, some techno, some hip-hop you can pick up some software for a few hundred bucks and maybe one decent mic and you are set. This is mostly because these styles rely on the production value of material that was already created in high quality expensive studios. If you want a general purpose home studio you are still going to wind up paying somewhere around 20K for all the little bells and whistles you need. While digital gear can do an excellent job replacing a vast array of analog gear, it still does not reduce the need for high quality analog pre amps, microphones, *GOOD* digital to analog converters, reference speakers, and a whole slew of other things, not to mention a few rooms to stick all the stuff in and have it sound good. Im currently constructing a studio in my basement and I would estimate that the construction costs are around 50% higher than what they would be if I was just putting in a "rec room" or something like that.
I have to agree with the dissenters. There simply must be a law of diminishing returns involved with audio equipment. Add to that, people do listen to music in cars and other not quite accoustically neutral environments, and I conclude that, to a very real extent, people don't much care about the quality as you would define it.
Exhibit b is how people will easily cut down the bitrate to carry more songs around.
Anyway, if people can only produce demo-quality stuff at home, or the local cheap recording place, so what... Music has become something of a commodity and in doing so it moved further from people's lives. I know I value the music that friends have made and given me far more than any of the commodity music I have.
I guess my point is, listening to music is not about sound quality. Only if it gets in the way, do most people ever notice.
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Some are. Remember ca. 1998, there was a heavily MTV-rotated synthpop dittie called "Your Woman" by the band White Town. WT was one guy working out of his bedroom studio.
The rest - well, not all of us make the kind of commercial music that a major major lable wants. The stuff I write? Probably wouldn't sell to the MTV crowd. But I know plenty of people making interesting music and are having it released on interesting small labels.
I've been putting together my home studio for about 5 years now, bit by bit. I think the most expensive part was the computer thats the core of the system. While I may not have the special gear and training to do a professional master of many of my tracks, so far most of what I've been able to rpodcue on a veritable shoestring has been club-and-radio friendly.
Technology may be no substitiute for talent, but the playing field is starting to level a bit - those with the talent can afford the tech to realize it.
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Talking about the Napster revolution is a moot issue.
:-)
There has not been a chart hit so far that came purely from MP3, without the help of the industry.
Give me just one counter example. Where are all those indepentend artists making a buck off MP3 music?
When I'm on Napster, people keep downloading the mass market music from my hard disk. I've stopped offering it now and only offer my own group's music. Guess what - nobody cares about it.
Oh, and while you're at it, buy my group's album. Thank you.
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You may like my a cappella music
Technology is spit-roasting the music industry - the internet at one end - the home studio at the other. This is good because the free market is the enemy of great art and pimps the lowest common denominator for greater volumes. So screw 'em.
/. demographic.
Is speech free if no-one can hear you? Access to the means of production of cultural material has always been contested and acknowledged as an index of power on the one hand, and freedom on the other. That's why sales of books and newspapers aren't taxed in the UK. (CDs are - I think).
On sound quality - you risk having to listen to poorer quality mixes, but on the plus side you'll be able to ask the artist to post a mix with the vocal a little louder in some sections. Maybe you'll just download the master and fix it yourself. It's not like she's making any money out of it anyway.
You'll have a dialogue with many artists. You'll be able to ask them what they mean by this line and that line. You'll be able to explain what 'ironic' means.
Artists will talk back (but they might be telling you to fsck off). Their music will slowly (very slowly) become a part of a richer dialogue with the public and switch back to being a cultural form for duplex communication.
Piracy is unstoppable because at the most basic level, the music has to go through an analogue stage (to get to your loudspeakers, for example) and can then be re-digitised. It's a pain in the ass, but you only have to do it once to make a piece of work available to millions.
Musicians nowadays expect to become wealthy if they become successful. This may change, and with it the kind of people who get involved in recording and their motivations for recording.
Margins will fall. Ironically, as more and more becomes possible with sound, less and less will be feasible.
We'll look back on an era that began with Elvis and ended with Eminem and kind of miss it. But not much.
This could all be bullshit. I just think that the cultural impact of the record industry dying is a lot more interesting than what kind of microphone bimbo X whimpers into - non? Even for the
Post further predictions as replies. I'd be interested to hear where people think music might go...
People believe that overproduced overhyped drivel sounds good because they've been culturally acclimated into believing so. When the majority of music is once again home produced, as it was prior to the invention of the record, it is unlikely that the overproduced sound will survive. People will once again become accustomed to listening to real music, warts and all, rather than the sterile edifices to perfection that characterise big-studio productions.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Maybe Slashdot is growing up. I can see where possibly this site is now a 'partner' with the NY Times and referrer data will be collected, etc.
That's what the 'partner' co-site is for, ya know.
Almost necessarily, the technology that makes it easy for dedicated artists to produce music cheaply also makes it difficult to protect that music from being redistributed illicitly. I would personally welcome this in music. I don't think the big music money-grubbing machine is contributing much to the quality of music. At risk of losing some talented people who happen to be in it for the money, it would be nice to make room for talented people whose work gets smothered by the big studio releases.
But what about movies? Short of large computer generated casts and scenery, it's hard to imagine certain types of movies being produced cheaply. Although graphics are getting better, it seems like a certainty that widespread sharing of DVD-quality video will precede the point at which someone could produce, say, The Sound of Music on weekends at home. So how much longer will there be an incentive to produce $50million blockbusters? Although I enjoy low-budget independent films as much as the next guy, and I have a serious issue with blockbusters, I think there's good reason for concern that certain types of movies will no longer be produced by anyone.
The truth of the matter is, however, that many of us have a degree of musical talent, and that music is a social activity, not a 'consumer product.' This is cool stuff and really part of the 'new media revolution' as opposed to couch potatos passing the same dreck back and forth that none of them produced (i.e. 'top fourty' stuff traded on napster)
Everybody can make music. Not everybody can make music that lots of people will want to listen to, but plenty more than are currently publicised can and should be. I'm bidding on a contra-bass clarinet on eBay right now, for example. I wanna be the bass player in a band.
first off, I'd like to point at this article on salon by Courtney Love about the money an artist makes. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/ index.html
Now, if an artist or group foots the bill themselves and manages to get 2 bucks a CD while touring, are they gonna make more or less than a record deal if they handle all the promotion? How many CD's do they need to sell to turn a profit? IF they use Napster as a promotional tool, and give away some music they could easily recoup their investment and make some money by selling off a website. Once more musicians realise that self promotion can net them more dollars in the end, I suspect a lot of artists will ignore the big labels. College and Internet Radio are excellent promotional tools. To make money as an artist with a recording contract, you need to sell millions of copies. To do it without, you only need to sell thousands.
Perhaps, but my point was that they won't be doing it with sub par equipment. They still need a quiet (preferably sound-proofed) place to record, and good microphones. What the author was, I think, trying to say was that the PC is going to soon be replacing the mixer and studio setup. Since the PC is multi purpose, it is cheaper and takes up less space. I'm amazed he got an entire article out of that.
That's a copout if I ever heard one. The fact is that it takes talent and elbow grease no matter where you are or what setup you are using. I somehow think that it is invariably obvious that when a team of professionals and a studio is replaced with some people (experienced or otherwise) and a PC, there is going to be extra work and lower quality. (Don't quote me on that lower-quality thing. With the advent of pop-smear bands and the crap that pollutes out airwaves, it wouldn't surprise me if my little brother (13) could make a hit on that level.)
Rami
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rJames.org - illustration
Just listen to the high quality of this mp3. Can you believe this is self produced? Its amazing what you can do with computers these days. I envision that the corporate entity of music that we know today will eventually be replaced with a culture built off of self expression rather than making money. For a couple more of this artist's mp3's check here and here.
Breaking the distribution modes breaks the marketing monopoly. I am an optimist, I guess, but I think that if the good stuff is out there, it will get promoted. I think that the Media Moguls do have an impact, but less than is usually believed.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
While I aggree with a lot of people who are posting saying that good production will not make a bad album good, and that many great albums were produced without the top of the line gear that's in studios today, I think there is something they are missing. There is _fantastic_ music being made today, with phenominal production work, you just might not be hearing it.
Listen to Fila Brazillia stuff. Listen to Ninja Tune artists. Listen to Deltron 3030. Listen to Handsome Boy Modelling School. This is not only good music, but really well produced music. The fact is that you in a home studio may be really talented, but you won't get me to listen to your stuff, because it doesn't sound as nice as people who use studios and are also super talented.
I think a key example here is MC Paul Barman. I've got some of his mp3s that he independantly produced (I'm assuming, if anyone knows different please tell me) before he teamed up with Prince Paul, and quite honestly, while his lyrical flow is good, and some of the songs are catchy, the productions makes the songs sound like absolute shit. When compared with the production on It's Very Stimulating, where Prince Paul did the music, there is no comparison.
I consider production skills to be just another facet of being talented musically. And when you have access to the best tools, you'll be able to do better than those without. For a bunch of geeks who spend our time searching out the best in computers and video cards because they're the latest, the fact that any of us can discount the large advantage people with studio quality production tools have is IMO absurd.
i will also clarify my stance that this is in no way meant to say "you'll never make a good song without a professional studio". but you'll never be able to match production values for the time with a home computer. there'll always be advances, and the best will always be used by professionals first. producting isn't everything. but it is important.
That's not it at all. The point is that record companies can attack fair use all they like, but at the end of the day (if this article is correct), they aren't gonna have anyone making music for them. Then they're out of business.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
One thing that audio elitists need to realize is that a "wannabee engineer" doesn't have to be the best. He just has to be good enough, and it's getting cheaper and cheaper to achieve a good-enough sound at home. There comes a point at which it is no longer worth going to the pros -- not because they won't do a better job, but because the difference in quality isn't great enough to justify the ridiculous cost. And not to burst any bubbles, but the role of the engineer is always, always secondary to the material you're recording. I'd much rather listen to a Zappa bootleg than the latest overproduced dreck from some boy-band.
and only you and your little clique of wannabes will ever hear it. And your music will fade into obscurity along with the other millions and millions of other kids who do beats and rhymes, and have a few thousand bucks.
Not to be mean - I'm not saying your music isn't any good - but for you and your kind, it will serve as sort of a tribal glue, the original purpose of music. It will be your "local" subculture.
Unless you're totally great, like virtuoso great, like Stevie Ray Vaughn great.
Then, and only then, will you gain noteriety, and achieve mass-market success, and take advantages of economies of scale so you can get rich.
Unfortunately, there will always be a market for crap from the record companies, so for people willing to go that route, you still have a chance to sell your souls.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It is possible that, doing all these things, especially _charging_ most musicians for timely service and hosting, mp3.com will not roll over and die, and I suppose there's some merit to that. But they are already doing the things that so outrage slashdotters when they happen to, for instance, domain names, and I don't think they deserve any more artists. Do business with them if you want, but read your contract because it does matter, and consider giving your music hosting to a smaller, better competitor like besonic.com or ampcast.com.
that's really just such an excellent analogy that I can't even begin to explain why.
There's tons of guys out there making "badass texas chili" and there are tons of big restaurant chains serving crappy bland "badass texas chili".
We all know, when we have a summer neighborhood barbequeue, who's really the best.
But when it's "date night", we go to that restaurant and fork over our $20.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Exactly.
Blair Witch Project cost what, $60k to make?
And $10 million in marketing.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If I'm looking for a new band to listen to, I sure as hell ain't gonna turn on a radio. Get rid of the tunnel vision. Most people find out about music via the radio and MTV, not the Internet. It'd be nice if it weren't so, but it is. Did Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys get noticed because of MP3.com? No, they got noticed because of a marketing effort by their labels to make sure that MTV and every Top-40 radio station on the planet got copies of their material. And to address the idea that some have put forward stating that you can take a CD down to your local station and have a good chance of getting airplay, that may have been true 30 years ago, but it isn't true now. Many stations aren't even programmed locally anymore. They pay companies like Broadcast Programming to send them playlists every few weeks. These lists can be downloaded directly into a station's computer, which then plays the songs off a music library stored in CD changers or on hard disks. All the D.J. has to do is fill in the gaps between songs. Some stations are even automating that. A D.J. will come into the studio and look at the playlist, then record what he's supposed to say in between, then merge it all together in the computer. Presto! Instant radio show, and if it's done really well, the listeners won't even know it isn't live. So do you really think that you can have much hope of getting an unknown artist played on stations like that? Every song on these stations is researched using focus groups and other techniques to ensure that it meets some consultant's concept of what ought and ought not be played. And you know what? This works beautifully for the major labels and their cookie-cutter artists. If you want to have a shot at airplay, the best place to turn is college radio. Many of these stations are very interested in playing quality material from local bands. You won't get the same audience as you would on commercial radio, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. And in fact there are some enlightened commercial stations out there. WZEW comes to mind as one. I also think that any new artist looking for a way to sell CDs shouldn't pass up local record stores. Many of these stores carry a wide selection of independent labels and unknown artists, and there's a good chance that the owners are true music lovers who will give new artists a chance. They might even play the CD on their in-store music system, guaranteeing that people will hear it. Going this route isn't going to make a band an overnight success around the world, but you have to start somewhere. And this approach could help good radio stations and good local record stores get the music they need to thrive. And that's definitely a worthy endeavor. As much good music as there is on the Net, it doesn't substitute for spending a laid-back afternoon browsing a local independent record store, IMHO.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
4.
That's an interesting point;
I know it's kind of late to get a response to this thread, but with the advent of USB, I wonder if someone could hack together a driver to simultaneously run two mice - then a person could run more than one control simultaneously, switch to others while modulating one - a peice of software that could support that might become the next sound mixing killer app!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I sorta pride myself on being a recording "old hand" so to speak. I've got a total of about 15 studio-sessions under my belt.
I've tried recording both at an experienced friend's with a PC, and in the studio (40oz Sound in Ann Arbor, Mi.)
Both have more than satisfactory results... In fact, in some cases, the completely digital sound of the PC surpases the analog recording of the studio (they do have digital recording also). But, not only is it the machinery *doing* the recording, it's the environment and method of doing it.
You can't expect to get the same sound out of a drum set in your basement, as opposed to a real enclosed studio room. You *could* spend a decent amount of money, and build your own sound room, but in that case, wouldn't it be easier to just go to the studio?
A perfect example would be the recordings of Steve Albini. He purposely used regular empty rooms of houses to get a boomy sound out of the instruments. When used in the right context, it can be done--but only if you're *going* for that type of sound. Otherwise it's extremely difficult, if not impossible to get your instruments sounding their best outside a real sound room.
At any rate, you also have the benefit of having a sound tech at the studio to help you out with your laydown. More often that not, they generally have a better "ear" for recording sound than the average joe-guitar player. Not that it's completely necessary, but sound techs know what sounds good on tape (or HDD for that matter). Even though I've been doing it for a while, I still would take the sound tech's opinion over mine in regards to recording an instrument.
-brain
I disagree. I think that experience is helpful, but many "professional" producers are using extremely different equipment and tools than the "amateur" artists/producers. If you're sitting in front of 3 million knobs, dials, and sliders, it doesn't mean that your level of expertise is any greater than my expertise with a 16-channel sound board, a synth, a drum machine, a guitar, and CakeWalk.
Why don't you check out our band's music and tell me whether or not we know any tricks (using our equipment!) that can make our music sound just as good as "professionally" produced music?
UNIX: Find it, fsck it, forget it.
Apparently The Hunz has changed his site since I leeched all his music,but you can still check it out here.
My URL went sour. Sorry. You can check out The Hunz here.
Recently I've taken to visiting MP3.com a lot and truly it is an excellent place to find lots of unsigned, small, basement artists works. While I have yet to venture into any section including vocals (which is usually where the difference between professionals and amateurs comes SHINING THROUGH. Even if you have a good singer, which is rare, a good vocal producer does amazing things), and I have stuck almost primarily to techno, I've found some amazing stuff. The irony is that while most of the people on Slashdot are always yapping their mouth without the interaction of their brains, and defending Napster as this great new medium for garage bands (which is pure bullshit), MP3.com (and many others) has been there all along ACTUALLY doing something for the little guy. Hell I'm seeing some of these no namers with MP3.com earnings over $100K so it's good to see that they are being rewarded for what they do.
Of course I would like to find some good review sites for this stuff as while I've found some good stuff, I've found a boatload of completely unoriginal, amateur, juvenile rip-off ware. That's the one detriment to an open forum : When any wank can put something together there isn't that critical wall that has to be overcome (preceeding the replies : Yes I realize there are Backdoor Boys and Britney Spears out there, however they too (along with their cadre of cohorts) had to go over the wall related to the genre they deal in), it can mean endless searching by us end users which is annoying.
About the only thing with all-accoustic recording @home (even if you have great resonance in the room being used) is that it can still have difficulties in the mixdown -- instruments will tend to cross over from one mic to the next ("Drum microphones record everything" -- R.Fripp)...you can't get that isolation that modern studios do with plexglass and separated instruments where each is recording their own in a near sound-proof room, listening to the others on headphones...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
But look further: The article makes the point that this technology will pose a threat to the Media Moguls when coupled to Net-based distribution systems. To my eye, there seem to be three major areas where the RIAA, traditionally, has held the cards:
- Production
- Marketing
- Distribution
These new systems remove the first. Naptser, MP3s, etc., remove the last. As for the middle: they've never been as good at this as they've claimed, and the Net provides a new medium that, by all accounts, they fail to understand.The RIAA is being out-evolved, and good riddance.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
thanks for brightning up my morning, that was rather funny.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
I learnt pretty fast that recording maybe twelve seconds of music and looping it is a serious bitch with the hardware I had in that day, never mind multitracking a song for production. Back then, I had a SoundBlaster Pro, 16 megabytes of RAM and a p75.
Two years later I was at a friend's house clicking icons when I found out he had Cooledit Pro installed. I hadn't ever seen anything like this before. Although it was buggy and the filters were painfully slow, there was enough tech there to throw together a song.
Pretty soon after that, I hooked up with modplug (a win32 freeware mod editor) and I tracked this song. Modplug was used to do all of the background music and computer generated notes, and real guitars were layered overtop with the aforementioned multitracking software.
This was recorded on a celeron 300 w/ 128 megs of RAM, no SCSI hardware, a $50 guitar and a SB Awe32. I was learning how to use the software, and it took me about a month's worth of time that I had to steal off my friend's machine.
One of the biggest losses is the full duplex recording mode of the Awe32. The recording quality goes right out the window when you start playback. I ended up having to use noise reduction filters, which also sacrificed my overall audio quality.
I recorded all guitar tracks dry because my setup was so poor. Any overdrive/distortion you hear is the result of post-production. I hear you're supposed to do it this way so you can add or remove effects, but most pro musicians get to hear themselves playing overdriven guitar while recording dry to get themselves into the mood. :)
All in all, my hardware wasn't enough to produce a quality track, and it wasn't able to be done in a timely fashion. Nowadays, I've gotten out of highschool, and I have some more spending money. I've picked up an Ibanez RG Series guitar and an RP2000 effects modeling unit, as well as a k7-750 w/ 256 megs of ram and a SBLive (which does full duplex a lot nicer). I'm gonna give it another shot, after the CTF paks are released. (See homepage URL :) )
They're fighting for their lifes now, so of course they fight dirty. You would too. In the long run (10-20 years) they don't have a chance.
I'd like to reply to this before the masses latch hold and drag it down. You are so right, it hurts. What the music labels have are huge networked stations on radio, tv, and the web. MTV has an enormous impact on society and those that worship it (MTV). It is a religion for today's youth; what they say goes. There is no thought involved. No conscious choice. They say, "buy!!" and we say, "how many copies?"
Breaking into a market like that is simply not possible, especially with the price of admission. Last I heard, most of those 3-6 minute videos cost between $100K and $1M. I don't care how many PCs you have, that ain't gonna get you a spot on MTVs top ten list.
Also: the web is a big argument when things like this come up. While the web is a great place to store and distribute, it does not (yet, and I believe never will) have a huge and significant impact on the mass purchases done by any given demographic (ok, maybe geeks.. but I digress).
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
While the RIAA/MPAA lobby for more draconian content protection laws daily, the reality is that more and more people continue to opt out of mainstream content consumption. Most of my friends are into underground music, favor independent or foreign films, watch little to no television, read independent news media sources and ignore radio outside of college, pirate or public stations. Further, more and more of us are becoming our own audio/video/radio/print content producers.
Perhaps we should let Hollwood spend all of their money running concertina wire and digging trenches around copyright. They are less and less the ones making content anybody gives a shit about. Sure, the've got some promotional/synergistic inertia left from the glory days of Big Media, but that advantage is eroding fast. Who really cares anymore if you own a TV network, radio stations and a chain of newspapers? I can do all that and more in my basement for $2,500.
Disney got skewered on the internet because they couldn't monopolize an infinitely expandable virtual space where it was all too easy for people to route around their banal corporate pap.
Go RIAA! Go MPAA! Spend yourselves into the ground protecting the music and movies we'll all be making and watching without you!
Night
There's more to making high quality music than just having some software on a PC. Don't expect PCs to just come along and completely replace professional sound studios. It takes a special talent that you can't just pick up a book and teach yourself to aquire the right "ear" for professional quality recording.
....Not to mention the huge expenses these guys put into the sound rooms. (i.e. Special walls & sound insulating materials)
I've got a lot of respect for these guys, and the talent they possess, but I don't fear many of them losing their jobs to this phenomenon.
I listen to Les Paul all the time-
And you contradict yourself. You first say that an expensive room is necessary. then you say that Les had mics over the kitchen sink. I really doubt that kitchen sinks are conducive to good acoustics.
My answer is, you can put anachoic tile and foam anywhere and get a good room, but if you just try mics in different locations in your house, you'd be surprised at how good some creative locations can sound!
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
One of my favorite pro technologies inde bands has built their own recording studio.
Check their site out
http://www.astroman.com/zeroreturn/index.html
To give you a little background I spent a few years doing college radio at WITR. We always had bands ask if they could use our studio's to get a little recording time in. Like computers, the main thing I noticed was that much of the specialized audio equipment kept getting cheaper and better. In my last few years I noticed many of the bands we worked with often had equipment on par if not better than ours, This is a good trend... This was also the period (1992-1997) when we switched all of our production from the 4 track to the computer... It was very easy to do and we ended up with doing more higher quality internal production. (And yes I know many 4 track wizarsds that would argue you can never get better than true analog production)
Ask yourself how many bands started out in the garage...
How many bands recorded there first release at a local college station?
How many bands could really do a first release on a personal computer with a couple hundred dolars worth of sound gear?
How many bands could sell CD's burned with a CD-R on personal computer at shows?
I have lost count of the number of people I know/have known that have personal studios setup in basements,garages and barns.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
There are 'promotion' companies that set the playlist for radio stations.. Your right.
The radio station play it, and it's a hit. Other stations ask for the song does not happen
their gig might give you some idea of how to structure something similar. they're not truly successful yet, but they do have a small devoted following.
oh, sure, that's the way it is RIGHT NOW.
But remember back when only large corporations and universities had access to computing power? The mainframe days. There were very very few, very talented computer programmers out there.
Then came the PC.
Then came the Internet.
Now we have zillions of sckript kiddies, and VB programers (and HTML "programmers") - and a truly HUGE number of reasonably competent professional C++ programmers, who's careers have been built entirely on consumer-level equipment, or equipment within reach of a dedicated consumer. And the number of people who are very very good at this stuff is still HUGE compared with 3 decades ago.
Right now, every squirt with mommy's mastercard is out getting home studios and a PC. In 30 years, there will be THOUSANDS of people with talent, skill and experience, and they'll make a great living doing their thing. But there won't be a chokehold on talent anymore like there is today. These few guys work with a few record companies. Who will the thousands of tomorrow work for?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You're certainly welcome to believe that. :-)
The compress it to make it LOUD. Nothing more.
Well my mastering engineer compresses based on the type of material it is. Which is what all good mastering engineers should do. Obviously you don't squeeze jazz like you squeeze rock.
And EQ is used to only when required. No beefing out allowed. :-)
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
I don't know about you, but I don't have access to many 96kHz masters. The highest quality available to me is 16bit/44kHz. I choose to losslessly compress and keep that same quality. I do use the mp3 format for my rio and laptop and streaming, though. It would be nice if the rio firmware supported vorbis...
--
OK, I am admittedly an amateur sound tech, with a semi-pro setup here. I have an awesome mixer that was bought used from a small *real* studio, without which, I am sure my recordings would not be nearly as good. I have a few rather cheap mics and some mid-grade compressors, EQ's, effects processors and lots of assorted live sound reinforcement stuff (I do both live and recorded sound engineering). I record through the mixing board onto hard disk, then burn to CD once I tweak it.
:-)
;-)
Now I agree that the equipment I have will probably not ever have the dynamics of a lot of the major studio recordings, and no, I don't get to mix it down to death, BUT..... Most of the bands I work with are local bands with some degree of talent, and they don't walk into my soundproofed outbuilding expecting to make a record that sounds like "Dark Side of the Moon", most of them just want to cut a demo that is halfway decent. Given the choice between recording on a cassette deck or recording in a rinky-dink home studio and getting decent sounding, nice looking CD's, most small budget bands would choose the latter if it were affordable enough, and now it IS affordable enough.
I don't see why we are comparing home studios to pro studios. Most of the people doing home recordings aren't striving to be as good as a pro studio, they are simply trying to do better than a cassette deck and a radio shack microphone (which is what the band I am currently working with was trying to use until they realized they could do *much* better.) And to me, that's what the home recording technology we have today is all about, just having the ability to do it a *LOT* better than the "old" way. I don't promise my bands a pro-quality recording experience, and they don't expect one. I do promise them an affordable method of recording that is superior to the *old* affordable methods, and they are usually satisfied with the results. I can't make a bad guitar player sound like a good one, but I can record his bad guitar playing quite accurately
bikergeekgal
PS, I cringe at having to say this, but "acoustic" is not spelled "accoustic". Sorry, I'm an anal-retentive spelling nazi and I can only hide that part of my nature for so long
Amen, I couldn't agree more. That's really what it's about.
My pet peeve has always been about the people on here who've never even been near a great recording studio telling me that they get can make a world class recording with their computer and Sound Forge. I've been around enough to know that it just ain't gonna happen. :-)
Keep up the good work and keep working at sharpening your skills.
Remember, the ears are everything. Also remember that MOST (if not all) HOME STUDIOS LIE TO YOU. It's simply not possible to have a flat requency response in a room with parallel surfaces (and that means most homes).
Before you add any drastic EQ to something walk around your control room and see if the frequencies don't change a lot from places that might even be as close as one foot adjacent. If they do the offending frequencies are probably a resonance, and not actually in the mix. So don't try and remove them.
Also remember that low end accumulates near walls, and expecially in corners.
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
Theoretically, yes, we should access the higher fidelity masters and lossily compress those. But all we proles have access to is CD audio quality
--
I'm a session musician (keyboards), and not on the biz side, but here's my cynical view on what you missed-
... just having a good sounding song doesn't guarantee you any airplay at all, not in this biz.
1. You skipped the step where the record promoter spends tens of thousands to bribe radio station program directors to give a track airplay
2. Also, you skipped the role of producer. Sure, you might have a band with talent and an audio engineer who can clean up and mixdown what they record, but who's gonna creatively bridge the gap between the band's idea of what sounds good, and what the listening public/program directors want to hear?
That's what a good producer does. Relative to the number of bands out there, the pool of talented producers is small. A good producer gets lots of work, coz s/he can transform an album full of good ideas into an album people must have.
3. Also, the idea that PCs are all the recording gear you need is nice, and functionally they fulfill the role. But the quality isn't there. At the very least, you need and SPDIF sound card and outboard A/D converters, situated outside the PC's very noisy case (crosstalk), to get mic and other analog inputs onto the hard drive without interference. And most sound cards sample at most 48kHz, whereas hard drive and DAT recorders will record up to 124kHz, essential because the mixdown, esp. large multitrack mixdowns, causes a reduction in overall quality.
4. And also a really fast PC to handle multitrack. IMO, nothing beats a full realworld mixing console for quick work. Using a mouse to adjust faders/sliders onscreen would be the rw studio equivalent of tying one hand behind your back and using a chopstick to make adjustments to the console! It's just too slow.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
One of the main problems with cheap mics is the self-noise of the mic, along with an inability to capture high frequency detail. But as to your suggestion ... mic response varies with frequency, and also distance from the central axis, so rather than one tuning fork you would want a range of test tones, measured in various locations around the mic ... maybe also responses to transient signals as well. This won't improve signal to noise ratio or improve the clarity of the recording, but it can change the tonal characteristics of the mic - I believe this is more or less the way the mic simulator effect I mentioned works.
Active soundproofing - your system might be useful in removing constant sources of background noise. Unfortunately, background is usually not constant over time - it's the passing car outside, the neighbour slamming a door, the floorboard creaking only when you move - the sound of the hard drive being accessed is particularly annoying, to the extent that some companies are now starting to offer specially soundproofed drives for music use. The algorithm would have to distinguish between instrument sound and unwanted background (perhaps trying determine the origin of the sound a multiple mic setup?) ... not trivial at all.
But anyway, we're talking about the difference between a home recording sound which can, with skill and experience be pretty good, and the slick, polished sound of the pro studio, which record labels and radio stations seem to consider important. Personally, I have no idea why - I think you're absolutely right that increasing numbers of musicians will find the tradeoff of slightly worse quality/much cheaper recording acceptable. It might prevent you from becoming the next Robbie Williams ... but that's not exactly a disaster!
What the hell is "Pop-smear"?
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
There is no law or regulation that prevents it from happening, aside from the regulation that states "the record label must grease the palm of the programming director before any single gets airplay".
Many radio stations do have 5 or 10 minutes a day in which they feature local artists.
maru
"The most expensive part of a recording studio is a good sounding room...And don't even think of recording drums in most rooms."
This is not that expensive. Put 1/2" styrofoam on the walls and then cover that with carpet scraps.
Also: the web is a big argument when things like this come up. While the web is a great place to store and distribute, it does not (yet, and I believe never will) have a huge and significant impact on the mass purchases done by any given demographic (ok, maybe geeks.. but I digress).
I dont agree with this. Offspring is currently #1 in alternative on mp3.com . I don't listen to them and no "geek" that I know does. So someone is listening to them and its gotta be the same demographic that pushes them to #1 on billboard's charts.
maru
Actually, the PC can do what a Mac could do 10 years ago, what some rented analog gear could do 15 years ago, and what the punks started doing over 25 years ago.
A short history on music production and distribution:
In the mid 1970s, FM ruled the airwaves. DJs would play whatever track they wanted off of an album, unlike AM radio, which only played songs released as "singles" on 45 rpm records. This means that there were two broad classes of bands, pop groups and artists like Barry Manilow that released singles, and rock groups like Rush and Led Zeppelin that released albums. In today's terms, pop bands would be N-Sync, while rock bands would be Korn.
There were about 30 different record labels around the world, and they would select bands, pay them to make albums, then pay them a bit more if the albums did well. Bands that were destined for AM radio would be paid to record one song at a time, and would largely be forgotten afterwards. The 'real' artists behind such bands were usually the record producers. Think about The Spice Girls--any five British girls with big tits could have replaced them--it was the people who wrote the songs, recorded them, then designed a 'look' for the girls that deserve the credit.
At any rate, the tone of almost all the music was 'contentment.' From Genesis to Alice Cooper to Led Zeppelin, these people were pretty happy with life. Then came the punks.
No self-respecting velour and corduroy-wearing record rep wanted anarchists on their band line-up. These guys didn't sing--they just screamed! And they barely knew how to play their instruments! So the punk DIY ethic was born. (Do It Yourself.) Grabbing studio time wherever they could, they recorded their own songs, usually in one take, with no over-dubs, because studio time was too expensive. Anyway, it didn't matter that the recording quality sucked, because as musicians, they weren't that great. The power of the music lay in the incredible anger and rage. They would take their songs and release them the cheapest way possible--as 45 rpm singles, or sometimes, they would cram a dozen songs on a 45, but press it at 33 1/3, so they could fit around 20 short songs on it.
Small record labels were started, and they did quite well for themselves, because they didn't have high-rise offices full of coke-snorting executives to fund. The band or the small record label got to keep all the money for each record that was sold.
Which brings us to the 1980s. The big record labels were sort of freaked out that these DIY punk bands were starting to cut into their profits. It's hard to push a slick-sounding band like Trooper when The Dickies are what the kids really want to hear. So the labels started signing all the punk and ex-punk musicians they could find, and instead of letting them do their thing, they forced a much more polished sound on them, since they were still using their contented 1970s style producers. The result was New Wave, and it sucked big time. The music was overly sterile and passionless. (Compare Public Image Limited to The Sex Pistols--both had the same lead singer.) The musical format of choice was the 12" single--a full size analog disc with only one or two songs on it, and often a bunch of remixes of those songs. The real punks were all dead from heroin overdoses, and the pseudo-punk New Wave bands eventually morphed into all that dance shit that is still being played in clubs today--billed as 80s retro.
Anyway, that brings us to the late 80s and early 90s. The big labels have all consolidated into a half a dozen huge multinationals. 90% of all music heard by the masses is controlled by these few companies. FM stations have discarded their album-rock format in favour of AM-style singles. Even if there are better songs on the album, they wait until a label 'releases' a song before they play it. (This is now a largely symbolic act, since all the songs are on the same CD. The stations just wait for the go-ahead from the labels to start playing the next chosen song. They are totally in the pockets of the big labels, and in many cases, are all owned by the same huge company.)
The next generation of DIY music is coming to a boil: Rap, Industrial, various forms of Metal--bands like Skinny Puppy, Public Enemy, Metallica (yes, they were cool once,) are either releasing through small labels, or are starting their own labels. The big labels are scared, and so they attack the DIYers on three fronts:
Anyway, now its the year 2001, and what's an independent spirt to do? Troll through www.mp3.com and find stuff you like. Get yourself some audio software and make your own techno and upload it--you don't even need a microphone! Stop listening to the radio. The radio has never represented a generation's music since the Boomers. Listen to streaming mp3. If a band releases a single, but it's on some weird propriety format instead of mp3, then fuck them. Don't even download it. But if you do, convert it to mp3 and stick it in your GNUtella.
Mike van Lammeren
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
The recording studios brought this on themselves by introducing digital recording systems (such as Protools) into their studios.
As I mentioned in a previous post, audio engineering is not about acccurate sound reproduction, it's about coloring the sound so that it sounds aethetically pleasing. Prior to the advent of digital recordings, 2" analog tape machines were used to record. 2" tape machines color the sound in a particular way, tape naturally compresses the highs. Microphones such as the Neumann U87 (considered one of the best microphones in the world for over a decade) produce a particular frequency response curve that, when coupled with the natural compression and saturation characteristics of analog tape, produced a sound that audio engineers determined was aesthetically pleasing. People grew accustomed to tape's tonal characteristics.
When digital systems entered the picture, a change took place. The same microphones that sounded great on tape sounded completely different when recorded digitally. This is due to the absence of tape's natural compression and saturation characteristics. Studios could not at first determine how to resolve the issue and many of the first digitally-recorded works sounded like crap.
This is where the recording studios screwed the pooch. When record labels released those first few years of harsh-sounding digitally recorded albums, the music consumers were introduced to a new set of tonal characteristics. Harsh and over-trebled recordings became acceptable. Where in the past the warm sound of 2" analog tape was the only accepted sound, suddenly albums sounded vastly different as engineers struggled to compensate for digital's "lack of warmth" (which was caused by using microphones designed to compensate for tape's uneven frequency response). All of the sudden the bar was dropped. Songs no longer had to have this particular sound associated with a $30,000 tape machine. In just a few years, as ADAT increased in popularity, home studios were able to produce albums rivalling big studios. The gap narrows daily.
I do see multiple posters in this thread who seem to think that because a $30,000 tape machine is no longer required to make a good recording that decent quality microphones and preamps are no longer needed either. While the digital audio revolution has really made music consumers accept (or learn to live with?) a wide variety of sound quality in modern recording, the difference between an inexpensive mic (SM58, etc) and preamp (Mackie) and quality mics (Neumann TLM103) and preamps (Great River, Presonus) are still like night and day.
maru
First, I won't be that surprised if we start hearing a lot more music made with lower production values.
It would be cool, though, if software could be used to make good mikes cheaper, or to solve the soundproofing problem. Could we build directional mikes with interferometary implemented on the PC? Is there a way of making mikes cheaper that introduces a systematic distortion that could be undone after capture? Could we do "active soundproofing" with extra mikes away from the main mike, that capture information about what extraneous noise will be arriving so it can be dulled in postprocessing?
In general, the purely digital end of things improves with Moore's Law and gets cheap fast while the analogue end improves very slowly and stays expensive. If there were ways of pushing the burden over to the digital end to make the analogue end easier, that could be a route to making things cheaper.
Genuine question, is this a mistaken hope?
--
Xenu loves you!
Check the URL. I've been doing music on my PC for four years now that (IMO) sounds as good as anything in a studio. I've got as many tracks as I need, 96kHz digital recording, etc., etc. Of course, my need may not be everyone's...
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
One of the problems, atleast over here in the UK is that the recording companies are also the major record distributors, and virtually no high street shop (Woolworths, WH Smith, Our Price, Virgin, etc.) will deal with people outside of these select few companies.
While the internet revolution will undoubtedly get small-time musicians a channel to get their work out to a new audience, the traditional audience, whose only connection with the internet is via a closed set-top-box that just happens to do Email, will not be able to buy these records unless they are taken up by the big distributors.
So, the barriers to entry into the music market, which as an artist, is probably the only way to make a living at it, are still very firmly in place.
Just my 2
Someone mentioned SM57s in an earlier thread, dismissing them as 'toy' mics, colored and useless for professional use. Um. *g* apart from the fact that they're still a classic snare mic and general drumkit mic, their distinctive coloration has always been hugely popular at all levels, right up to the top: on the Division Bell Pink Floyd tour, the backing singers used SM51 condenser mics, but David Gilmour chose to sing through a SM58- described as a 'regular' SM58. Not only that- both Gary Wallis's and Nick Mason's snare drums were miked with SM57s!
It's like that all over, now. The hottest new compressor available is not a $3000 tube optoelectronic recreation of vintage compressors- it's a little 1/3 rack space unit by a little company called FMR Audio and it's named the Really Nice Compressor, or RNC- running a purely analog signal path, but digital circuitry to cascade as many as three compression staged to specify the control gain in SuperNice mode, this compressor is _the_ hot gain reduction device out there right now- and it's $199 MSRP.
Give a person one of these, a couple SM57s, impedance matching transformers and either a half-decent PC soundcard or any old Powermac, and they will be able to record an acoustic event with sound quality that is more than acceptable. They probably cannot afford _really_ good digital compression, but the RNC will easily beat any but the most top-of-the-line digital compression and feed the soundcard or powermac with the most ideal signal it could ask for, leaving little or nothing to do in the digital domain- unless you want to, of course, and then it'd provide a great launching-point for entertaining digital effects and radical sounds.
You can go the other direction as well, away from digital effects and sounds. Check "B17 Flying Fortress" or "Supermarine Spitfire" at www.besonic.com/chrisj. I happen to _like_ the big-studio sound. Some of the techniques used to get that are very clean, pure signal paths and good components inside the equipment. You can do that at home, too, and I did, including the heavy modding of my 20-bit ADAT because it sounded thin. As a result, "B17 Flying Fortress" has a bigness and spaciousness that you cannot get outside of a big studio- except, surprise! I got it in my apartment, and so can you, if you like that approach. You can have ANYTHING you want now, if you're willing to do the work, learn a lot, and push the envelope. Sometimes the guys selling the equipment aren't the most honest sources of information about what decisions you should make...
I see this as analogous to Linux itself. It is no different from saying, 'You can't have a really proper operating system unless you pay a lot of money for it and have a large company supporting it'. The truth is, such performance happens because of _reasons_: and just as a bunch of programmers can get together and cooperate working on an OS, sound engineers and audio tinkerers can get together and work on gear that will bring big-studio performance to apartments and basements. It started with the Tom Scholz 'Rockman' and the Shure SM58, is continuing with the RNC compressor, and I think the market is actually getting even _better_ what with the ability of people to find out about stuff like the RNC without having to go through a lot of industry middlemen.
You can even do _room_ treatment for super cheap, and I'm not talking about 'dead-room' stuff like putting up egg crates (useless) or covering everything with blankets (yucky dead high end, doesn't help lower room modes much). Here's what I did: stumbled across a box of furnace air filters, realised 'hey, this is a 25x16x2 cardboard box filled with fibreglass, lacking only the front and back face to make it a sort of weak bass trap!', got about $100 of foam-core art board (chosen for lightness, rigidity, and reflectiveness in the high frequencies) and made lots and lots of plain boxes, reflective at higher frequencies, moderately absorptive with resistive damping at low frequencies, and innocuous-looking- and put them up all around my studio room and miking room. The 2" spacing out from the walls did great things for flutter echo- there's a test called the 'clap test' where you clap, making the room go 'rinnng', and the difference from these cheap things is NOT subtle. I don't know or care how much better professional room treatment would be since _real_ diffusers would be hundreds of dollars for just _one_ unit smaller than the dozen I made- the point is, it's not about the money. It's about understanding the principle, the technology, and _using_ that to better your situation. And yes, you can even do proper room treatment with diffusers and real bass traps cheaply, you only have to be willing to DIY! And make more of the treatment because it'll not be fully as effective as the kilobuck stuff. No sweat...
By the way, if the guitar tones on those tracks sounded nice enough that you _want_ 'em, I'm just on the verge of dropping a big chunk of loan money on a project that will put me in the 'manufacturer' camp. I'm going to be building guitar preamps that are as good at their job as the RNC is at its- and they'll be no more expensive. I think I can really beat the crap out of the sound quality of Line 6 'POD' products, musically, at the cost of not being able to get tones quite as muddy and rumbly as the POD can. When I have prototypes built that really reflect the final product rather than (as of now) just being proof of concept for the technologies, I'll be making mp3s available that can be compared to the mp3s you can easily get of all the digital amp modelling effect devices like the POD.
Even if my tones aren't what people are madly looking for, there's going to be others out there, it'll be just a question of education. If you just go to the store and buy what they tell you, your sound will probably correlate to the amount of money you spent (including on engineering lessons, obviously!). If you use the Net and your brain and the resources of your community and are willing to work hard and DIY, you'll be able to put out sonics that compete with _anybody_ at virtually any price point. That's not going to go away, now. It's a factor of networking and accessibility of information of all types. In 2001 and beyond, _expertise_ is the key factor, because you're not confined to just what some company is willing to sell you. Ten years ago you couldn't go look at a RNC online and buy one- and they couldn't get their message to you without going through distributors who'd rather be selling Sony. Things are different now, get used to it, make use of it...
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
By letting you sample at a higher rate to being with. Duh.
" ...people do listen to music in cars and other not quite accoustically neutral environments"
I'll go you one further and say that I prefer to listen to my favorite discs on a variety of crappy playback devices in a diversity of crappy listening environments. it adds A LOT to the pleasure of an album.
why, just the other day I noticed the crazy kazoo/jaw harp sound over the top of the chorus in that Radiohead song "Optimistic" (Kid A), because the frequncy response of the device I was using was so limited. That alone is worth the price of admission, so to speak, because there had been something present in that song that had been teasing me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I was distracted from that voice when listening to it on my needlessly overpriced 5.1 system, for the sake of drums and base.
::I will not moderate my opinions for your stinking karma
- Band comes up with a good song
- Band can't go to recording studio, label doesn't want to carry them...
- Band spends a few bucks made from playing at local places to buy some tech.
- They hook up the tech to their buddy's computer and start recording
- The CD is burned, and sent to a local radio station.
- The radio station play it, and it's a hit. Other stations ask for the song
- People are really hearing it now, so they start checking it out on Napster.
Now, I know that there is some way for them to get a profit out of all this (probably concerts rather than CDs...), but for most people it's all about being heard. Why do you think we post on Slashdot anyway?You have now just witnessed the death of an industry!
The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...
SIG: HUP
Elitist, yes. Naive? I don't think so.
I don't recall saying that. This is immaterial to what I was saying. Many records that sound bad do well. Just don't ever ask me to make one. :-)
Perhaps, and you can believe this if you choose, but there are SOME things in audio engineering that require knowledge and experience. For example I know a guy who has been an "engineer" for about 10 years and STILL doesn't understand phase and constantly makes mix decisions that cause things in his mix to disappear when played in mono (for example). You can be ignorant and be happy, but that doesn't mean you're not going to shoot yourself in your foot.
Of course not. And I didn't say that. :-)
Of course. :-)
Of course, but my issue is really audio integrity and not really prodcution.
And I really wish you'd stop putting words in my mouth. :-)
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
Why don't you tell that to Beck? His 1994 debut album Mellow Gold was recorded at home on a four-track. He was a complete unknown at the time and certainly could not have afforded studio time, let alone a proper home studio. The video for the hit single Loser, as well as those for Pay No Mind and Beercan, were shot on a very low budget -- probably without direct support of any record label (certainly not $100,000 worth). I'd be surprised if the total actual expenses for recording the album and all three videos exceeded $1000. (Keep in mind that Nirvana's first album, Bleach, was recorded professionally in a studio for $600.)
Regards,
I have a home recording setup.
consists of my PC, 16 mics, four AKG, four Electro-Voice, four Shure SM58B, and two antique Electro-Voice, and two antique Shure mics, the chrome ones you always see in old movies.
The old mics have a warm sound to them that just can't be replicated with equalization and effects.
I run the mics into a Mackie 12-VLZ-PRO mixer because it has great mic preamps, and then use its outputs to go to the PC.
My PC setup consists of win98se, (and Mandrake, but where are the good digital recording apps for Linux?) a lexicon core2, which gives me 24bit 48khz with 8 inputs (4 stereo). Add Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 with plug-ins, and I've got a studio.
I then use SoundForge to make the CD from the work I've done in CakeWalk. It sounds every bit as good, and sometimes better than CDs made by the large companies that manufacture groups and music.
For all those who say recording must be done by the big companies because they hold the locks to distribution, I say there's a way to do it yourself.
Ani DiFranco has been successful distributing her own music on her own label. Online distribution methods are becoming more prevalent despite what the Big Companies/RIAA want-
Besides, if you love making music, there's nothing wrong with satisfying the urge to record without having to shell out large amounts on studio time.
It's very gratifying to be able to hand out demo cd's or make cd's for friends.
Last year, I made a cd where I played covers of my friends' favorite songs, and gave it to him for his birthday... he said it was the best present he ever got.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
I've been a bedroom-studio musician for a little under a decade, and it's been really wonderful seeing how the expanse of technology has allowed me to do things that would have been difficult or impossible to do 20 years ago without an expensive studio.
As others have mentioned in this thread, Tascam's introduction of the Portastudio in the late 70s was the REAL revolution, and that was my first really important purchase. I recorded my first full tape around 1993, using a combination of acoustic instruments, Casio CZ-1000 keyboard, Tascam 4-track, and an Atari ST as a primitive sequencer/sampler. The Atari ST, at 8mhz and 4MB of RAM, could loop beats and samples at all of 8-bit 22khz I think, but it made a GREAT MIDI sequencer - it ran Cubase, and was far more stable and reliable than anything I've used on a PC.
Computers themselves have been a big part of the tech boom for musicians, but it's also driven down the price of electronics in general. For a few hundred dollars, you can pick up a used Akai or Roland sampler with power that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars a couple of decades ago. And while I'm not sold on the ability of just a PC and software to be an all-in-one production station, it's made a BIG difference. With a fast machine and a good recording card (i.e. not a consumer-level one), it's no big deal having 24 tracks or more of high-quality digital audio. And that software DOES come in handy for editing and post-production tasks, and the advent of the CD burner means that you can cut a perfect-quality copy of your work instantly -- tape hiss is a thing of the past.
Overall, I've probably spent about $3-$5K on my studio over the past decade, not counting the computer upgrades every couple of years that I would have done anyway. From this setup, I've put out at least half a dozen self-produced tapes and CDs (ranging from electronic music to psychedelic punk) that haven't made me a living, but have gotten me a couple of club gigs and radio play on both sides of the Atlantic. I think that's pretty cool. (but don't just believe me,listen for yourself!)
I'm really glad I got into home recording before the PC explosion hit, though, because it made me go out and learn a lot of fundamental information about sound engineering that I might not have gone out and learned otherwise. It's a GOOD thing that I don't have to fool with bouncing tracks or setting up MIDI tape sync or wrestling with quite as many patch cables as I used to, but I'm glad that I know how, since it gives me a wider perspective of recording technology. Learning how to really use a 4-track will prepare you for aspects of a full-blown studio that no amount of Cakewalking ever will. And there are countless cool effects possible with a mixer and tape recorder that are well-nigh impossible to reproduce purely in the digital domain.
So by all means, computers are great - get out there and make some music with them - but don't forget that low-tech is an important part of the picture as well.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Go to the artist's web site and get the MP3s
MP3s are so late-1990s. Ogg Vorbis is the future. Vorbis already slightly better than MP3 at the same bitrate, and it still has room to grow.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Really, the only serious reason to get signed is to take advantage of the record labels' promotional machines; they will be especially helpful if you belong to a tough-looking-but-sensitive male ensemble with a library of snappy dance moves. For those bands that fall outside this category, any way of making it without the record companies' help would be a great thing.
But, as this article makes fairly clear, studio-quality productions are now within easy reach of anyone with a PC and a modicum of talent (some would say even the talent is optional). If you want cool new music from the best trackers or the best independent musicians make sure you keep those watching over your rights financially healthy.
Troll version: screw the RIAA/MPAA/Disney/Time Warner bunnies and join the EFF today!
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Exactly how is lossy compression supposed to improve audio quality?
Look at it this way. Say you only have 50 kilobits per second downstream because neither cable nor DSL is available in your area. Now would you rather give up the phone line for 20 minutes to download a (lossy) OGG at 192 kbps VBR or for an hour and a half to download the (lossless) FLAC? What would you consider a better quality representation of a song, the whole song in near-CD quality or a short snippet in CD quality?
And would you rather be able to store eight lossless PNGs or sixty high-quality JPEGs on your digital camera's flash card?
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The problem with mp3.com is that the "suits" took over. What we need is a site by artists, for artists, without the bullshit. Sort of like Keenspot is for web comics, but with mp3's instead of comics. Yeah, the artists would have to pay a few bucks a month for web hosting services to make such a thing work, but (a) that would keep the claptrap down, and (b) it would keep hucksterism from dictating site policy -- the site would be controlled by the artists, not by venture capitalists or stockholders.
Remember, he who pays the bills controls the content. mp3.com promised a free ride to artists. Well, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and whoever pays the bills gets the say. It's called the golden rule -- he who has the gold, rules.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Your band doesn't seem to exist on mp3.com.
Besides, you would never be able to tell the quality of the produced music using an MP3 since the format is so incredibly lossy.
Sometime try listening to your MP3 music with a pair of cheap Grado SR-80 headphones and see if you can stomach it.
I'm not in any party, Bill. :-) And I can assure I don't tow ANY line, and it has gotten me kicked out of many a studio. The guys with the egos upstairs often don't like to be challenged.
I never said you couldn't make good art at home. I just said it'll never sound as good as the big boys.
Well, I've never used a $90,000 compressor. Let's not get ridiculous. The Focusrite Red-3 comes in at around 3 grand. The Tube-Tech stuff sounds good too. ;-)
And the most expensive desk (industry parlance) I have worked on to date only cost $840,000 at retail. :-)
But if you truly believe you can get your stuff to sound like that at home with a computer and a few plugins, you're mistaken. I've used the expensive stuff, and I've used the inexpensive stuff, and I can assure you there are light-years of distance between them in terms of audio integrity. When I tracked on an Amek Mozart RN (Ruperet Neve) for the first time, I couldn't BELIEVE how hard you could hit the mic pre's with signal. They just WOULD NOT distort. Up until then I had never seen anything like it.
What I'm truly disappointed about is that no one challenged me by talking about the lastest Victor Wooten album (I think it's called Yin/Yang). There is the rumor floating around that he did it entirely on his Roland home harddisk porta-studio thingie.
Well don't believe the hype. I've read a lot about it in Mix Magazine and the Roland Users Group magazine, and he tracked the important stuff (drums and bass) in an expensive Nashville studio on a Neve desk using killer mics and killer converters, and them transferred those tracks to the Roland at the digital level. He only did a few overdubs on the portable thing.
Well, that was more than 30 years ago. Ancient history in terms of technology. Pick a more recent target. :-)
Let me also say that I'm not trying to criticize anyone here. I hope you all make records and become millionaires! I encourage you all to get better at your craft and go crazy trying new things. Hell I'll even some over and work for free on your project! If you hate me, show me the door! :-)
I just kinda have a pet peeve about audio. Next time you see me you can slap me because of it. :-)
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
But what about movies? Short of large computer generated casts and scenery
Which is becoming easier and easier. I could see a Quake 3 mod allowing players on a LAN to act instead of killing one another. Sure, Q3A's graphics are cartoonlike, but look how good Toy Story did (forget for a moment that it was backed by Di$ney) with its cartoon graphics. Now all you need is to know how to voice act and model your sets and virtual actors. Oh, and you need a VGA to DV converter and a video card on the "camera" computer capable of handling 1600x1200 (movie quality is approx. 1600x1000 after the top and bottom are cropped off to form the letterbox).
Although I enjoy low-budget independent films as much as the next guy, and I have a serious issue with blockbusters, I think there's good reason for concern that certain types of movies will no longer be produced by anyone.
Do you feel the same way about music, or do you really want Christina, Britney, *NSUCK, and Backstreet Boys to fill the airwaves? The content that can't stand up on its own and leans on its marketing is not the true content.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
This will take out the basic production costs, but not necessarily marketing/promotional costs which are always high. And to be completely frank, a lot of these musicians aren't the greatest recording engineers
I think a better approach is to look at how much more of a grassroots audience you can hit. One of my favorite bands is Guided by Voices, who made a living releasing 4-track recordings for a lot of years. But if they play a show, they pack the house - Over the last few years, they've upgraded, but they're still letting lo-fi stuff out the door occasionally.
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
I do agree, though, that the better equipment is more consistent and easier to work with. But it's no longer a night and day contrast. It's more of a 5 minutes before sundown and 3 minutes before sudown contrast, where there is a noticable difference, but only shades, not a complete "this is crap". An Oktava can sound quite good, good enough that without another mike to compare it against, a pro couldn't tell that it was a $300 mike, but put it head-to-head against a $3,000 microphone and you'll be able to hear the difference. But without that direct comparison point, most people can't tell it's a $300 mike.
But yeah, I agree that people who think they're going to record good-sounding stuff with a $50 mike are deluded. The afore-mentioned Oktava is the lowest-cost mike that sounds reasonably good for digital recording. But it's no longer a case where you MUST have a $3,000 mike to sound good. There's now a lot of good mikes in the $200-$500 range that sound quite good, to the point where most people can't tell the difference unless they happen to have a $3,000 mike handy to directly compare against.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Why do you think the big artists and labels hire guys like Roger Nichols, Ed Cherney, and George Massenburg? (if you want to see some serious gear check out HIS stuff!) They hire them because their ears have DECADES of experience.
Home engineers using modern, inexpensive, good-sounding digital tools simply don't have the experience. And getting the good experience isn't simply a matter of working in your home studio a lot. It's a question of working as a 2nd engineer to a guy with a ton of experience. Somethings are learned in a book, others are learned by working with a master, and both a required to be good.
Home engineers also don't have reliable accoustic spaces. How do you know what you have on tape if the environment your recording in and listening in has resonances at several frequencies? You don't.
For example, I didn't know what my home listening environment (ie my computer/stereo room) truly sounded like until I finally got to mix a record in a real accoustically neutral control room in NY City, on a world class desk and a great pair of studio monitors. Getting the project home in my computer room with all of those parallel walls was a shocker... suddenly it didn't sound the same. :-) And forget about the car.... :-)
The bottom line is this. It still takes money and experience to build these good accoustic spaces and to make a TRULY wonderful record. Yes, the mic-pre's in the Mackie Digital 8-Buss sound OK, but they don't sound like a Neve 1073, an Amek 9098i, or a GML 8304, and that's for sure.
I am all for home-based digital recording studios (I've got one myself), but as long as the people running them don't have the knowledge and experience required, all they're going to produce is a decent demo-quality project.
I would however encourage all of you to continue what you're doing. Continue writing and recording your music and strive to make it great. Because who knows, maybe it is. :-)
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
That does not give you the mass necessary to actually block outside sounds. Much of the new home studio equipment is 24bit/96khz with a dynamic range. What you propose might work fine for recording a punk band that is not using the lower end of the dynamic range possible. But if an artist plans to have quiet bits, where for instance there is nothing but a single acoustic guitar string being plucked...then styrofoam just isn't going to cut it. You need isolated stud construction with multiple layers of sheetrock to block outside sound, and the deadness of a bunch of '70s era carpet-covered walls just isn't going to make that string sing. You need diffusion.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
A lot of successful artists eventually built their own studios, but they usually couldn't afford it until they were successful. That was too late, as they had already signed a contract that gave the record company the ownership of the actual recordings, a right they gave up to get that first recording session. Now, they can create the recordings right from the start, and lease the master to the record company.
I hate to quote Karl Marx, who was a doofus in most respects, but he was right about the "workers controlling the means of production". Lots of artists (Frank Zappa for instance) have had to fight to regain ownership of their own work. The really offensive part is that standard record company contracts require the costs of the recording to come out of the artist's share of the royalties...and then the company owns the recording.
The main problem, scarcely touched on in the article, is that while the equipment is cheap, architecture is still expensive. The most expensive part of a recording studio is a good sounding room. A great, inexpensive large-diaphram condenser mic won't do you any good for recording vocals if people can hear a passing bus in the background, or if your voice sounds flat from mediocre acoustics. And don't even think of recording drums in most rooms.
Sampling works fine if that's your kind of music, but it doesn't work for all genres. But most of the artists I know are working this way now...even the ones who have traditionally worked in huge, expensive studios. The inventor of multi-tracking, Les Paul was also the father of the home studio. He had microphone lines all over the house to be able to record anywhere...he even had a mic hanging over the sink in case he needed a quick vocal overdub while his wife Mary Ford was cooking dinner.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb