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?"

Comments

ProTools is a large reason modern music sucks

[Faggot]

ProTools, while of course being immensely powerful and featureful, is responsible for many pervasive problems with modern music:

• over-compression of everything (ever notice how most modern music is the same volume all the time?)
  
• voice-tuning (as debuted by Cher on "Love After Life"). able to make a crappy singer perfectly on-key, and since it's matured a little it's much harder to notice
  
• lifelessness resulting from using the "best" parts of a recording session (a riff here, a drum fill there, a bassline there) to collage together a song. the resultant music is (surprise!) devoid of the life which comes from musicians interacting with each other
  
• the same effects make it into modern songs at the same time. unoriginal overuse of ProTools plugins

it's depressing how such a featureful tool is used mainly for evil.

Re:ProTools is a large reason modern music sucks

[Mr_Dyqik]

I'm sure similar things happened when Les Paul invented multitracking.

I think that it now needs different qualities in a producer to get good results with Pro Tools than it did to record with old style big desks etc., although the techniques haven't changed that much. Pro Tools essentially simulates using a very big and expensive studio in software, so you can do everything that very expensive studios have been doing for years. It does automate some of these things though, so that there is a temptation to over use some things.

Just using Pro Tools doesn't mean that recordings suffer from the afflictions that you've listed (listen to Martin Grech's "Open Heart Zoo" for a recording which certainly isn't over-compressed, and was recorded on Pro Tools, with just two instrumentalists).

Pro Tools is allowing my brother to record almost an entire album, where he plays almost all of the instruments (not the drums, but only because he has a drummer available, he can play drums), for the cost of a computer and the software/hardware, in his bedroom, and get a better sound than most people managed in the 1980's (from a technical point of view, I'm not diss'ing the 80's sound).

Re:ProTools is a large reason modern music sucks

[onepoint]

Amazing, you post the best response about issues using PT.

People don't realize that the best music comes from band interaction. the WHO who's music will live for a long time.. there band had a huge interaction amoung each other. same for Rush, Metalica and other very popular bands that feed off each other while creating music.

but to the topic, the money is fronted to the band, the band then is required to produce the tracks. how they produce the tracks is not related to the lable, if anything they should be able to produce more tracks for the album because studio time will be less and the artist keeps more of the advance.

Re:Why? Hmmm.... let me think

[PacketCollision]

Despite the natural reaction to such a thread (I mean who doesn't want to bash the recording industry?) the fact of the matter is that studios are still very expensive. Add to Protools (which, in the configurations I've worked with, could easily cost over $30,000) all the other gear, and a studio can easily cost in the 100s of thousands to build. A good recording engineer isn't cheap either, nor is a good mixdown engineer. The best mixdown engineers cost several hundred an hour. All the design for the cover, etc. isn't free either, nor is mastering, nor are musicicans, for that matter. That, and as the parent post stated, there are many costs that aren't related to the production.

All but the most popular albums don't even make much money (for the artests at least), where they make their money is off radio-play, which goes to the artists, not the label. But even this isn't free - you need a publicist to get your work out.

All in all, the buisness isn't as easy as sitting down in front of a computer with some software. There is a complex set of variables, and making the statement that with the advent of ProTools, albums should cost less is a gross oversimplification.