Slashdot Mirror
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?"
...Kraftwerk's lastest album was made on a laptop.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
... I can say that things are getting smaller, cheaper, lighter and faster. Duh. Of course.
... say it after me kids ... OVER!
... in their big haughty studios.
:)
The days when a pro recording needed a 24-channel mixing desk, ProTools TDM hardware, a quiet room and a team of engineers are
With my tiBook and a Firewire Audio interface, I can record any band, anywhere in the world, produce their tracks live at the gig, and by the end of it have some polished material ready for distribution.
The whole "pro studio" machine is well and truly facing the same reality that "computer rooms" once faced from the PC onslaught.
Most of the reasoning for big-studio budgets these days is just dick-waving. Fact is, you can do with a $2000 collection of gear what most 'pros' would've charged $15,000 to do 'for cheap'
Amen, I say. There are far too many good artists out there (every single human can write a song) and its high time a lot of them were heard. The current 'music industry' is too elitist.
RIP, Pro Tools. Long live CoreAudio!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It seems that slowly, the power that these large organisations had over what can be accomplished is moving into the hands of the average user. We are seeing the revolution of this not only in music, but also in the recently accounced Fanimatrix
A wonderous use of special effects were used in this, which were simply created by an end user, without a multi-million dollar video editing studio. It seems this end user power is also moving to the music industry. Is it possible that big recording studios and Hollywood will not wield the same amount of power in the future as to what they wield today?
What other platform is there? (Just kidding!)
Seriously... In many cases most or all of the same sofware is available for Wintel notebooks. Reason, Cubase and a host of editing suites and plug-ins are out there for PC's. I have a Mac and my colleauge has a PC. We both run Reason 2 and collaborate across the Canada/US border (Toronto/NYC). We've yet to run into any compatability issues.
A small midi controller, like the Midiman Oxygen-8, works on both platforms as it has a USB interface and drivers for both.
Hope this helps.
cheers.
Fruity Loops is a good starting point because it teaches the basics of step sequencing (beat-box style programming) and lets people start making good tracks right out of the box.
Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge and Acid are also good programs for loop recording arranging -- the best I've seen in the low-end home user market.
Reason is the ultimate in soft-synth sound generation. I don't know a single producer who uses software who doesn't love Reason. It's pricey, but worth it.
There is also a lot of good high-end music production software out there, many of it with great MIDI controllers like the Oxygen 8 or the Ozone. I use a combination of direct-recording hardware tools (a nice, high-end sound card, Line 6 direct recording equipment) to hook up my instruments (guitars, synths, beatboxes, etc) and a combination of Sound Forge and Reason to generate my loops. I can then arrange and mix them in Acid or Fruityloops. Fruityloops serves as my backup generator for certain drum and bass parts, but overall, my setup is pretty stripped down.
But if you really want professional studio quality digital recording, MIDI sequencing and mixing, get ProTools. It's like God.
IAALS.
Actually, professional recording studios still cost quite a bit to build. Isolation booths with different kinds of hardwoods for different timbres, extremely high end consoles, seperate mixers for each musician in the grandroom for their own monitor mix, etc... all adds up. If I were to show up for session work in somebody's garage, I would expect garage quality, and be pleasantly surprised by anything better (which is what this article eludes to). But if I were to pay $85+/hr for a studio, and $85+/hr for an engineer, I would expect an extremely professional studio with all the trimmings. Just expereince talking...
That being said, there is still no reason for the high price of CD's these days, but this article isn't justification to lower them.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Despite the funny moderation, that's actually exactly the same thing that I was thinking about when I read this headline. As the fixed costs of creating music decreases, more and more people will able to jump into the bandwagon, saturating the market. It's great for people who just want to make and distribute songs for fun, but for musicians who want to make money, they're going to have a harder time selling music since there are so many other alternatives out there. As with Usenet or web hosting in the past, the signal to noise ratio is just going to grow.
Looks like it's time to get Google to do musician rankings for us so we can concentrate on little-known, talented songs that other people only blog about. ;-) Something like Amazon's referrals and similarities system would be great.
It's a pretty good time to be a music creator
Except that, back in the days of the $20K consoles, music creators were known as "composers" and focused on rad concepts like composition and melody. Like a creative writer who spends too much time selecting the "right" word processor and focusing on page layout, I can't help but wonder whether some "music creators" (and their listeners) would be better served if they concentrated more on the muse of music and less on the toolset of the recording engineer.
Rolling Stone published a similiar article where Butch Vig of Garbage shows the reporter how easy it is to build a studio and create music. Hopefully this will lower the requirements for a new act. Before they were at the mercy of large studios most of which were owned by the record companies. Not only do most acts get small royalties (as little as 4%), they were also charged for studio time. Some acts like TLC went bankrupt despite selling millions of records because of the high studio costs. That's why most artists who get a little foothold open their own studios.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You are absolutely correct. There will (probably) never be a replacement for a finely tuned commercial recording facility. The amount of work and art that goes into the design, construction and operating of a world class recording studio does indeed pay off in the final product. I mean, sing vocals into a Neumann U47 versus a Shure 58... yeah, there's a BIG difference. Use a classic Neve console versus a Mackie or a "virtual" console. There's a big difference in the sound.
These things cost huge amounts of money. Hell, I just priced a Neumann U47... $5,000. For one mic! A good 48 channel Neve... $500k and up.
Yeah, home recording is great, and there have been home recordings I have heard that rival many the output of many commercial studios I have heard, but to think that your laptop will suplant something like a Record Plant, um, probably won't happen.
sad robot making broken music
The biggest hurdle to getting your music listened to by the general public was that "HISSSSSSS", that background noise and sibilance which was the mark of the un-professional. Despite the inde "low fi" artistes, crispness in sound is something that is valued the world over- from style to style. Even your beloved "composers" preferred to have their compositions played by good musicians on world class instruments.
Now-a-days, I can quickly knock off some stuff, burn to a cd, and throw it in my car. And it sounds like my other cd's. Thats a huge plus. I'm not worrying about recording generation loss. I'm just worrying if the vocals are in tune.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I may answer if it can be of any help...
... just not the same. I use digitals one to, but I prefer a combination of both then only a digital one.
;)
I am nowhere near a professional sound engineer, I am a programmer and I had been playing the cello for over 15 years so lately, I wanted to try to mix both my taste for music and my taste for computers...
What I bought is an Audiophile 2496, it is a very good sound card (use the ice1712 chip), does 24 bit recording / at 96khz which in my case is quite overkill.
I also bought an external mixer, a Behringer ub1204-pro. It is a fairly inexpensive mixing console but it is quite a good one for my purpose, for the price, it is unbeatable. The reason I got an external mixing console is because while you can use a digital one, there is nothing like moving real buttons, it's faster, it's
Now, because my cello pickup is using a piezo pickup, which have a very high impedance, I also needed a very good DI-Box/Preamp, but this is not needed depending on what your son is playing. Also, some person just prefer to mic their amp (use a microphone to record the output of the amplifier).
For about 800$ CAN I bought the cables, the DI box, the mixing console and the sound card, remove 280$ of that if you do not need a DI box (it was an expensive one, almost as much as the sound card AND the console together, but with those, you really got what you pay for).
On the software side, I use Jack and Ardour, with Hydrogen for my drum needs (it is a drum synth).
Well, I am not the best one to talk about all this stuff as I am only fooling around with this stuff. One good place to learn about this "hobby" however is to read all of Tweakz tutorial on www.studio-central.com . He explain EVERYTHING you need to know, about soundcard, mixers, everything. It is totally windows-centric, but the audio hardware part is pretty platform neutral (except the audio card, but a cheap Audiphile is quite good, tcheck the Alsa website to see what is supported) linux-soung.org is very informative for the software part, if you would want to run on Linux. For my part, I run on linux but I could not care less. It is only because I have no Windows installation. Software on windows are quite good but I have been able to get much lower latency on my linux box then on windows. Jack and Ardour works very well together also but Ardour is not very well documented yet... Things will get better on the software side I'm sure. I also had much less problem recording thru the audiophile with alsa then on windows using the maudio (the company's) drivers, don
Anyway, I was just giving you my experiences, the best thing you can do is to make your own! The best advice I can give you is to take a month or two to research what you are buying. This kind of hardware is getting cheaper but it is still quite an investment to do so you better be knowledgeable about it then to be disapointed. Be an informed customer
Hope this helps a bit, sorry about the formatting or any spellling errors, I do not have much time to proofread my post this morning...
Ciao!
I'd rather be sailing...
How many new "van Goghs" do we have since the advent of Photoshop?
;)
An awful lot of them, if you ask me... try checking out www.deviantart.com some time, and that's just an example.
Replace Photoshop in your post with 3DSMax, Maya, Lightwave or anything else of the sort, and 3D artist forums like www.deathfall.com, www.cgtalk.com or www.forum3d.kom-net.pl become excellent examples of this as well.
Pick the wheat from the chaff and you'll find there's so many people with so much talent on those communities, it's astonishing.
Think of how much of that talent would be lost if it wasn't for the technology...
A word of warning, though: exploring links to the artist's galleries or recommended sites is a very good way to lose your sense of time and find out you just spent an entire day just doing that.
...two of the premier jazz guitarists of our day, have each recently released solo albums (solo in the sense that they play all instruments) that were recorded in their home studios. In Metheny's case, the studio is in a small room in his home, lined with books. There's no reason you or I can't do the same.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
I set up a small recording system (to small and insignificant to call it a studio) with my laptop and Nuendo. I tried recording some stuff and really, I didn't like using it, I was much more comfortable with my old 4track tape recorder and 6 channel mixer than a mouse and computer.
I guess you use what you're comfortable with and screw what's "cool" to use.
A friend of mine actually did record a rock opera himself using a Powerbook, Apple's Soundtrack, his guitar and a cheap microphone. It was very odd, given that he played several parts all by himself, but the end result was very interesting. The CDs he sold have more than paid for the laptop.
Of course, he's got a very wacky sense of humour that really kept the thing interesting. But hey, it's plausible I guess.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Musicians have been using laptops for a variety of purposes for years now. Daniel Myer, otherwise known as German artist Haujobb, uses laptops live and in the studio. In fact, it's all he brings on tour, and relies on local acts and promoters for the rest of his stage gear. Tom Shear of Assemblage23 has a Powerbook Ti and a G3 at home, which he used to produce his last several albums, and a pletheora of remixes. Supposedly Kevin Cey of Skinny Puppy fame is working on new stuff entirely on a laptop.
My whole equipment list is here: http://www.staticengine.com/studio.html And that's toned down from the hardware monstrosity it used to be. The bottom list of equipment is all hardware I've sold since getting softsynths, Sonar 2.2, and Reason 2.5. More and more music production occurs entirely in the digital environment, because it just sounds cleaner and crisper. All those cables used to add noise. Now, it's just the CPU pressing bits. And that 2.4GHz P4 1GB RAM system that's my main music computer is VASTLY overpowered - I wrote, recorded, and mixed down a 40 track song entirely in Reason 2.5 (with imported vocal lines from the singer) and the CPU never once peaked above 30%.
The bottom line is that software and fast PCs have made the days of lusting over large analog (or even overpriced digital, D8B anyone?) consoles a thing of the past. Sure, you may still need a mixer to route some signals and use outboard effects processors (the MOTU line of zero latency audio I/O boxes can even eliminate this need), but aside from having a good recording environment and a modicum of talent, there's very little barrier to entry for anyone with $2k lying around to become a professional sounding musician.
There's always the other side of the coin...
: //www.mellotron.com/by_walter_e.htm
http://tinytelephone.com/html/tapeop.html
http
Maybe not such a great development?
Depends on what side of the mixing desk you're on...
Another FL Studio user here, I've been using it for about 3 years now, and it is most excellent. I've tried other sequencers (Cubase, Reason, Logic etc), and nothing else gives me quite the control and the intuitiveness of FL Studio. z3ta+ is BAD ASS, btw. I also recommend DiscoDSP Discovery, and Native Instruments Reaktor. Also, check out http://www.sectionz.com.
Take a dollar, divide it by 100, take two and call me in the morning.
Well, I'm not totally analog...no more vinyl...but, do need to get a turntable for the old stuff I do have. I play CD's...and CD's I rip to FLAC on my computer through my Zen SET tube amp...and am currently building a tube pre-amp...to try to bring some warmth back to the music..and so far that works.
But, I think I was speaking maybe more in terms of things I hear, but, I can't explain...in that some old recordings, that must have be analog...that today even on CD's...they sound more 'real' than new music on CD's..and I wonder if maybe the all digital recording process does this?
I know this is a highly personal thing with each listener..but, just my perceptions of late. I think the part about bands not playing together as much has a lot to do with it too?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........