Fall in love with music technology
Can you remember what made you want to be a producer, songwriter, mix engineer or remixer? Or recall the fuel that set your imagination on fire enough to consider making music a significant part of most of the days of your life? Of course, the inspiration for all of us will have been different but for most, walking into a recording studio, or seeing photos of the famous studios where our favourite records were made will have contributed significantly to our inspiration. And, of course, part of that comes down to the musicianship which will have been nurtured and developed in order to make those tracks.
But another part will have been the gear available to take the performances of those musicians, capture them through classic microphones, record them through choice preamps and channel strips, dynamically process them with vintage compressors, adjust their tone with EQ and place them in spaces using reverb and delay units whose control sets have stood the test of time. And here we reach the crux of the matter. Is it possible to make great-sounding music just with computers and software?
Absolutely. Long gone are the days when outboard gear and mixing desks were the entry price for being able to make recorded music. But does computer technology feel the same to use if you’re trying to make the best music you can? Well, plenty of people reading this will never have had the chance to directly compare what it’s like to take a laptop production into a studio awash with the racks of gear mentioned above. But for those who have, the answer will surely be ‘no, it doesn’t feel the same at all’. And the many reasons for this are going to be explored throughout this article. But in simple terms, there’s a key reason why those classic racks of gear catch our attention. All of those vintage boxes, with all of their hand-picked components and their rich history in the recording process have reached the positions they hold precisely because they were designed and built exclusively for a recording purpose.
A computer is a device which crunches ones and zeros and it does that whether you make music, send emails or make spreadsheets. Whereas an 1176 is a dynamics compressor which is of no use if you want to send an email or keep a spreadsheet, but which is capable of making a wonderful-sounding, significant difference to the sounds you record. Yes, your plugin compressor might do a great job and, of course, it’s much more convenient to use it, as its settings are saved into your project, recalled perfectly and it doesn’t require routing to be integrated into your recording setup. But convenience has never been the most important consideration if you want to make a great record, which is why vintage consoles and racks of outboard continue to spark the imagination in all of us.
There’s a key reason why those classic racks of gear catch our attention