Lately recording forums have been seeing a wave of bulletin board surveys posted by college and university commercial recording program students looking for content for newly assigned second term papers.
The theme of the season is clearly hardware versus virtual, analog versus digital. As I write this there are three almost identical surveys floating at popular recording cyber-haunt, Gearslutz.
Leave aside, if you will — if you can — the reality that such so-called “voodoo” surveys, relying as they do on self-selected sample populations, are the antithesis of responsible social science. Forget that some college or university instructors are blithely sending their students out on a fool’s errand grounded in really bad science.
Forget all that. Let’s talk about the issues. And how I feel about them.
My emotional skin now in this game, let me say, I think the ideal is to understand what fidelity is good for — and it’s good for plenty, to my way of thinking — but to also be in a position to employ the less-than-perfect when that presents interesting alternatives or augmentations.
One thing that’s worth considering is that, at least until the current generation of designers and equipment, fidelity was typically a guiding principle — the people who designed the big iron analog tape machines that charm so many weren’t striving for “warm” and “characterful” — they were striving for fidelity.
But here’s the interesting thing: we’ve upended some facets of the paradigm and it’s that gap of failure between the goal of full fidelity and the reality of the actual machines that has become, in effect somehow inverted, an extension of the scale beyond the goal. Some might be tempted to say, like a middle school report card forgery, an extra pen mark that makes an A- an A+…
P.S… I’m hoping that last bit doesn’t end up, without attribution, in anyone’s paper… but… I’ve been around.
About TK
THE
Music Biz Outsider grew up with tape recorders and recording. He was about 3-1/2 years old for his first recorded performance (singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb") and 14 when he engineered his first musical multi-track recording of someone else's performance, but didn't begin actually
playing music until he was about 20, safely too old to get sucked into the music biz dreams of superstardom that not-always-briefly ensnared his pals.
That -- and watching other people's dreams tarnished, smashed, shredded or otherwise destroyed for four decades -- has given him a stark -- and thoroughly jaundiced -- view of the music business.
So, he learned to play a little guitar, wrote a bunch of songs, got swept up in the punk/new music thing starting in '75, was in some bands and, when he formed a band he really liked with a few pals, he started taking recording classes at a local community college with a respected commercial music program -- anything for free studio time. Pretty soon, he was caught up in a rekindled love of tape machines and gear, this time in commercial studios, where he found himself freelancing by the early 80s, after a motorcycle wreck ended his lifelong dream of being a warehouse manager. (Yeah, we're kidding.)
Even after he took a job -- a day job -- with a small electronics manufacturer, he continued moonlighting in the mostly low end studios frequented by punk rockers and other outsiders, working on demos, singles, indie records, even TV and radio spots.
But he tired of the grind, and when he started his own database consulting company, he began building up his home recording rig into a project studio which eventually had 16 tracks of digital and a bewildering jumble of MIDI boxes and keyboards, lots of cheap and some not so cheap analog gear, all nestled in a small room off a hallway in his house. For much of the 90s he worked on other people's demos, on radio feature production, and, when he wasn't too burned out, his own songs.
Seemed like a dream going in.
But after less than a decade, he found himself taking down his shingle for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the day job paid better -- but also because he had tired of the unrealistic expectations and distorted priorities that seem to drive a certain sector of the music service provision industry.
Today, he's content recording and producing just one music biz client:
himself. And he's recaptured the love of playing and making music he was often afraid he was on the verge of losing.
