Slashdot Mirror
Cheap Audio Production
OneInEveryCrowd writes "Rolling Stone reports that four out of five new albums are now produced by a program called Pro Tools (or similar packages) that costs $495 for the home version or $15,000 for the pro version. The article describes a fairly amazing savings in time and effort compared to the older ways of producing an album. I realize that a talented producer can cost a lot of money and some bands drink a lot of beer, but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"
why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?
I suspect its because 99% of the cost of producing commercially successful records is not (and never has been) studio related. Sure, studio time costs a fair bit, but never anything like the amount of money that is typically spent on publicity, production, promotion, distribution, and stuff like that.
because there is no competition!
It it were a truly open market, then these increases in efficiency would be passed on to the consumer as lower prices. However, since the recording industry has done everything possible to insure that there is little or no competition, it just results in higher profits.
This is the danger inherent in monopolies and oligopolies.
"...but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"
Pro Tools might knock a few tens-of-thousands off the cost of producing an album, but the real cost is the producer himself. Good producers can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a big album. In short, it doesn't matter what tools Puff Daddy uses to produce an album, all that matters is that Puff Daddy produced it.
ProTools doesn't run itself, not even in the $15,000 version. If too much music is coming out that's over-compressed, sterile, and voice-tuned to hell, then it's the fault of the person sitting at the console -- not the tool.
Almost every time I hear a professional soloist or well-organized group play live music, I can buy a CD from them of their music. Recently I encountered a very good guitar/tambourine player in a restaurant. He didn't have a CD, so I referred my friendly local CD producer to him.
Music production is moving from the expensive studio to the musician's garage. I don't use Pro Tools, and I don't have a sound studio, but I can make a simple demo CD for a music group by mikeing their rehearsal hall for about $500. That's $250 for me and $250 to stamp the CDs commercially. My friendly local CD producer charges more but gets better results. If all you want is a demo or a CD to sell at your gigs you don't need a $100,000 producer.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
What's more, the article talks as though the studio is now obsolete -- as though the mixing decks and equipment were the only importnat part of the studio. One of the major reasons for going to a studio at all is the sound. No matter how good your mic is, if you record it in a square room you get standing waves and all kinds of acoustic crap, making it sound like you did your recording in a bathroom; furthermore, if you're not isolated, you pick up the ventilation system, the whir of the computer fans, and trucks (or ghetto blasters) driving by outside. There's only so much Pro Tools can do to compensate for a crappy input (I know, I've tried).
Studios put a lot of work into making a room tha has good acoustic qualities and is isolated from all nasty bits of noise; designing, building, and maintaining such a room is still an expensive venture, and still necessary for a decent recording.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Nonsense...
... tape recorders (no live music!) ... soundproof studios (where's the ambience?) ... electric guitars (all the sound is effects) .. microphones (they color the sound!) ... but you'd be wrong .. Pro tools like any other music tech has opened up a lot of possibilities, and popular music aside, I love to hear the things people can do when they start to push the boundaries of those possibilities.
Over-compression is a problem with many recordings, sure, that's not because of Pro Tools. Many amateurs over-compress too, and they have been since they figured out how.
"Voice-tuning" is usually done by a product made by Antares and has nothing to do with Pro Tools. It's available for every other recording software too, and is available as an external box. Auto-Tune is actually used on many recordings these days to clean up the singing. Again, this is the fault of the people using Pro Tools, and has nothing to do with Pro Tools. Pro Tools doesn't do this out of the box (at least, last I used it).
In fact all your complaints have nothing to do with Pro Tools. Popular music was faddish and homogeneous long before Pro Tools.
PT is a great program and turns any machine into a flexible multi-track recorder. It reminds me a lot of Photoshop in that it has a good interface, it helps you get your work done, it opens up huge new possibilities, and certain features of it are cliched and over-used by a lot of folks (are we sick of drop-shadows yet? over-sharpened photos? "funky borders"?)
There's nothing "evil" about PT. It doesn't "do" anything unless someone pushes the buttons and slides the sliders.
You could argue that any music tech is bad
"$495 for the home version or $15,000 for the pro version.
why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"
Because that's one program. Install it on your Alienware PC and you'll still create terrible sounding crap.
Now pay rent on a building. Properly set it up for acoustics. Add perfectly matched, pro level monitors. Add some seriously expensive sound cards that can work with multiple sources and no lag. Add a set of mics at a couple of grand a pop. Add a mixing desk that connects to pro-tools so you can actually make smooth fine controls. Add a decent guitar/amp (about $5k), now multiply by about five for all the variations used on a typical album. Add a drum kit and a lot of heads (Dave Grohl reportedly got through a set of heads per track when recording Nevermind). Add pro-grade cabling so your sound doesn't get muddied up. Add a PC capable of dealing with it all, fast SCSI drives and all.
Those are just the bits and pieces I can think of, just being an amateur guitarist who never records but does spend too much time in guitar shops. I'd imagine there's a hell of a lot more.
All of a sudden, the $495 seems insignificant. Even the $15,000 for the pro version.
Yes, you can record music with pro-tools and a typical home PC. A lot of people do. And it sounds fairly good compared to recordings of say the 1950s.
Just because one aspect gets a bit cheaper, doesn't mean the process gets cheaper. It just means that the capabilities get higher. I remember paying $200 for 4mb of ram, $3,000 for a 16mhz 286. Now I can get a hundred times that power for about $250 yet I still buy $3,000 PCs. How can that be?