Slashdot Mirror
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
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rJames.org - illustration
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :) )
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
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rJames.org - illustration
How did one unknown hacker get his operating system onto the walls of computer shops? I know there's a big difference between music and Linux, but the same basic principles could still apply.
If one newsgroup message was enough to start off Linux, maybe something similar could start off the next generation of music...
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
- 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
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.
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.
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
At the moment, it depends what style of music you're interested in. Primarily synth/sample based music (particularly dance music) can, and often is, created to commercial quality at home - although not quite a normal home PC ... it usually requires more than the normal consumer-market soundcard, and a well-specified PC... music software is one of the few fields which genuinely requires fast processors. The reason, of course, is that samplers and synths (excluding analogue) are themselves dedicated digital computers - reproducing the same work in software on a PC is not much different, provided your PC can handle it. If you listen to techno/house music, it's often not possible to tell wether a tune was recorded in a home or professional studio.
The situation is diferent for recording live instruments though, for two reasons:
1.Since the sound depends on the accoustic qualities of the recording environment professional studios still have a significant advantage, in being able to afford properly accoustically designed and treated rooms.
2.Recording live instruments requires analogue equipment - in this case there is usually a clear relationship between the cost of the equipment and the quality of the sound (the article mentioned using cheap microphones - complete nonsense, at least for the present - cheap mics sound very cheap)
Neither of these factors can easily be fixed in software (although a skilled producer can certainly work around them to a certain extent). Although interesting accoustic/live band music has been made in home studios, it is extremely difficult to get the polished sound of a professional studio, and unfortunately this is often required by radio stations, without which it's extremely difficult to reach a wider audience.
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