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The Incredible Shrinking Recording Studio
what_the_frell writes "Wired has an interesting article on the increased use of laptops as a replacement for a recording studio. The article touches on how music schools are requiring the purchase of a Powerbook and software for this very reason, and also highlights artists like Steve Vai who are moving over to the more portable platform. Does this mean I can finally record that rock opera I've always dreamed about?"
This is just more proof of the reducing costs of producing professional quality audio, and more evidence of price fixing and extortion of the major record labels.
Does this mean I can finally record that rock opera I've always dreamed about?
I mean music has been going downhill a bit lately (or I'm getting old).... BUT this is a dread scenario of open publishing, file sharing and the end of labels. Sure there are some good points, but will they be weighed down by the bad ?
Think on it this way.... this will allow the musical equivalent of an AOLer to blast music at us. Some things shouldn't be open to all, or at least they shouldn't be able to subject people to such torture without lots of filtering. Steve Vai doing something.... good and cool.... your average Slashdotter.... yeeeh gags... there is probably a reason that highschool band never took off.
Dude... most people suck.
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Eliminating the need for expensive equipment, combined with an online music distribution and micropayment model would pretty much kill the need for expensive contracts with the music industry.
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Are you a musician? The Music industry is one of those "creative" industries that still tend to favor Mac's. This is changing slowly (I think PC's now account for almost 50% of musicians PC's)
But there's PC software/hardware too. Just check the back of music magazines and ask around at music stores (the ones that sell instruments, not record shops) for useful information. Just be careful because there's a lot of "junk" out there too.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
From the article, [Mike] Caffrey said "People are paying for my skills and expertise, and get the studio as part of the package."
Just having access to the hardware and software isn't going to do it. How many new "van Goghs" do we have since the advent of Photoshop?
(Of course, the next part of the story is promotions ...)
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
Oppenheimer said this:
... its just that they have to evolve into better and better musical *instruments* and not just computers-in-boxes-with-knobs-on. Software guys don't ever get a chance to know what its like to be held and played, heh heh ...
"It used to be that hardware synths sold like crazy, but those guys would kill to make decent sales on hardware synths today. The sales of hardware aren't what they used to be, and they're not going to come back. It adds up to big trouble for hardware manufacturers."
I take issue with this (but then, I would, consider where I work), and here is why:
There is *NO* profit in software synthesis.
There is not a single mainstream producer of software synthesizers who currently has drawn profit from sales of those synths.
The reason: cracks.
It is a very, very, very tough business to be in, when 90% of your primary users are simply stealing your product, not buying it.
Soft-synths is one market that may benefit from the whole "Trusted Computing" initiative, but in my opinion - being a hardware synth developer - the only truly "trusted computing" platform is one I built myself.
Hardware synthesizers will *still* be around, and there will still be a huge market for them (we do okay, thanks very much)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Please tell me this is some kind of black humor or give us some links.
Here's a link, although it relates more to the NMPA/Harry Fox (sheet music publishers) than to the RIAA (record labels):
A Chilling Effect on Music
It's quite long, but here's the gist: 1. It's unlawful to publish and record music that isn't original. 2. It's likely for a songwriter to come up with a song that isn't original merely by accident.
And here's a short story by Spider Robinson that speculates on the eventual outcome of infringing-by-accident laws and copyright term extensions: "Melancholy Elephants".
Will I retire or break 10K?
It is true that many of the steps of music production can be performed on increasingly small and portable platforms ( BT, who was mentioned in the article uses Logic with Digidesign TDM hardware incidentally). Much of the editing and mixing can be accomplished in this fashon. This is especially true if the type of music you are creating is fundamentally electronic. However, when you need to record musicians you still need analog gear: Microphones, mic-preamps, compressors, a good room to record them in. Just to name a few of the things. Computer based recording has driven down the price of some parts of the recording chain while raising quality.
Until human musicians that play acoustic instruments are eliminated entirely, the need for analog gear and recording studios will remain.
Also, when you hire a producer or recording engineer you are paying mostly for their time and expertise, not their mountain of cool gear. Top mixers do their work on in wildly different enviornments ( SSL9K Pimped out room -vs- laptop ) but they charge you for the finished product.
Don't get me wrong -- this is revolutionary for small-time operators and independent artists. But it's a lot like innovations in self-publishing in the book industry. Lowering the barriers to entry for the most part means a lot more mediocre material will get into ciruclation.
having have made 5 albums by recording into my video camera, running that into the vcr, that into the tv card, and doing a sound capture, I can tell you that home-based recording will never take the place of studio recording, simply because the hardware isn't up to par. Not necessarily the mixing boards and such, but the microphones and locations. Modern setups may not be as ghetto as mine, but recording into a PC microphone isn't the same as recording into a 1000 dollar one used by a studio. And soundproofing a room is still necessary, since you don't want to pick up car engines or noises from the people above you. Studios still have the upper hand on high-end production.
I think this article perfectly represents the sad state of popular music today:
I did a lot of the vocal edits on a plane," said BT. "I cut and pieced the vocal together. There's something like 2,000 or 3,000 edits in that three-minute song, and I did that sitting on a plane.
I think pretty much everyone knows that "bands" like nsync have no musical talent, but I think this quote proves it. Come on, the "band" can't get through a 3 minute song without thousands of edits on their vocals?!?!
For years, music students were expected to learn to play the piano as the main instrument for their education...those days are over. "People are turning to the computer as the way of learning music...
"Music" students are learning to use point and click applications instead of actually learning to play instruments. No wonder there is so much crappy non-music out there.
The real sad thing is that people are actually buying this stuff!
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So we've got the average joe recording albums in his bedroom. There is a trend towards amateurism in every field, enabled by the web and technology. Fan Films in the world of video, blogs in the world of literature, heck in the world of acting we got these reality tv shows. Soon there will be no need for professionals in the arts; we'll just find our entertainment in the flood of mediocre material and hope some of the cream rises to the top. And the best part: a lot of it will be cheap / free. Just the right kind of entertainment where nobody can get a decent job anymore since all the well-paying ones are moving to india ...
It reminds me of the joke where some guy breaks his arm, and weeks later, when the doctor removes his cast, the patient asks, "Doc, will I be able to play violin now?" The doctor comforts him by responding, "Like a virtuoso!", to which the patient says, "Great! I really stank before!!"
Not everyone with arms is a great violinist, but you have to admit that the more people with arms, the more chances there are for great violinists to exist.
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Just having access to the hardware and software isn't going to do it. How many new "van Goghs" do we have since the advent of Photoshop?
This really isn't a very valid comparison: you're quite right that having creative software on a computer doesn't make you any good at "being creative", but we're not talking about making the music, we're talking about producing professional qiuality recordings of it.
Preparing a great work of art for display was undoubtably a skilled process if done using traditional methods. Similarly I'm sure that a technician making an album in a traditional recording studio has to be very skilled, but the point is that computers and software have reached the stage where we can bypass the need for that skill, freeing the artists themselves to produce finished works of musical art.
I am always that guy who comoes on slashdot to shoot down these things. Using laptops to post audio is still the exception rather than the rule. Many people still prefer using consoles for their durability and reliability. Whether or not they sound better is subjective so I won't mention that. I suspect when they talk about creating an album they are talking about tracking and not mastering and mixing. While mixing is possible on a laptop, an external I/O box would be required to isolate the output from the potential interference of the motherboard and various other components of the laptop. Mastering still requires specialty equipment from specialty houses.
Remember, like with video tools, this is the exception and the average Joe will not get professional quality from their laptop. I look at stories like this like the recent one showing how the show Scrubs is posted entirly in Final Cut Pro... this is but one or two examples. Every non-event based show in the top twenty Nielson rating is still posted on an Avid, and most records are still mixed using consoles.
One could also make the arguement that anyone with true talent for art would already be in the field with software or not. So adding software would only decrease the barrier of entry to the talentless.
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Why did you buy 3 lynx 2's? A single lynx 2 is expandable to 12 channels (20 channels if you go down to 48k) using a Lynx ADAT (or TDIF) module and external convertors. And you don't have to worry about all those PCI slots, getting the cards to co-exist, etc.
Obstacles to serious mobile recording:
1. Sound cards. This really isn't a problem. One option is go firewire; almost every prosumer sound card manufacturer has a firewire solution. Another option is PCMCIA, RME is a popular choice in that camp. You can use the same outboard interfaces with PCMCIA that you can on a desktop.
2. Hard drive speed. Most laptop hard drives are 4200 RPM, which really isn't fast enough for serious recording or mixing. I have a desktop/rackmount DAW, and I'm running dual 7200's on RAID 0. That's about where you want to be for hard drive speed.
3. Microphone preamps. Most small interfaces don't have very good mic preamps. So you'll need to either have a mixer with better preamps, or outboard preamps.
4. Microphones. Choosing the correct mic for an application requires having good mics, and possibly a fair quantity of them.
4. Engineering skills. Are your mics placed well placed and in phase with each other? Is your gain staging good? Unless you are extremely lucky, it takes years of learning and practice to be a good audio engineer. A good engineer can do a lot with cheap equipment, but you can have great equipment and still be a crappy engineer. Of course, this in true in a home studio as well, but I had to mention it because it's the real barrier to most bands that try to record themselves.
Other than that, a laptop works just as well for recording as any other computer. And all of these issues are solvable. But really, for the same amount of money, you can build a rackmount PC that's almost as portable, and has better performance and features.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits