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Burning The Candle At Both Ends

Posted by michael on from the home-office-deduction dept.

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.

2 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Studion Quality work by Lonesmurf · · Score: 5

    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
  2. My effort by Sludge · · Score: 5
    I've always been a computer enthusiast, and for the last seven or so years I've also been a guitar player. I became interested in the idea of recording myself with my computer some time after I started jamming and I wanted to find counter melodies to lines I was writing without needing another human being around. I started experimenting with CakeWalk and some lame audio recorders, trying tricks out like throwing my mic in the soundhole of my hollowbody acoustic guitar.

    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 :) )