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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
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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
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 :) )
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