A3

Peter Doughty

FMX 211

9 October, 2018

The Modern-Day Recording Studio

​Technology has been accelerating drastically over the past 30 years. Just as we spoke about in class, an iPhone has 100 times the processing power that it took for the rocket ship to get to the moon. Now imagine the processing power of a modern-day laptop. It must be at least 500 times the processing power of an iPhone! Modern-day computers are capable of so much more than anyone could have imagined 30 years ago. For example, nowadays it is easier than ever to record a song within the confines of your own home.

​Rewind back to the late ‘80s/ early ‘90s, and you would see that sound recording simply wasn’t what it is today. It wasn’t enough to be talented musically to be heard, you also had to find a way to record your music. The normal thing to do in this period was to record a demo on a tape. There was a scene in 50 Cent’s movie, “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” where 50 was recording a demo on a tape using magnetic tape recording. He was also holding a microphone and rapping into that and recording at the same time the beat played. At this time, this was considered to be pretty modern stuff, it could’ve cost 50 about $100-$150 for this setup. Once the demo was recorded, it would be taken to record labels, radio stations, etc. to try to get it heard, or even better, to score a record deal with one of the big labels. This process of recording a demo on a tape was sort of a rough draftway to get some content in the hands of the big names.

​Fast forward back to present day, and it’s now possible to eliminate the “demo” process all together. Although there is a huge learning curve, anyone can record and mix music from their computer in the comfort of their own home. For example, I have been writing, recording, and mixing my own music for about 4 years now. When I started, I was using GarageBand, which comes with every Apple computer. I quickly realized how rudimentary this application was and completely forgot about using as soon as I discovered Logic Pro X. Logic is also made by Apple, so it was an easy switch to make, however, the two programs are incomparable. The main difference is the plugins that come with Logic. These plugins, such as the compressor, noise gate, and deEsser, are things that weren’t available to me on GarageBand. These are all essential plugins, specifically on vocal tracks, which is what I mainly record and mix. Since I started recording and mixing my own music, I have made about 60 full length songs. I wouldn’t have been able to come close to this number if I didn’t have access to the technology that we have today. I am a perfectionist when it comes to music, so each song can take me anywhere from 3 hours to a couple weeks. When looking back on the amount of time I spent working on music, I realized that it would have cost thousands of dollars to record in a professional recording studio.

​When you look at old pictures from the ‘80s of recording studios, it is absolutely mind blowing to think that everything nowadays can be done off a single computer. The digital plugins I mentioned before were, at one point, physical plugins that were big metal boxes. These boxes ranged in size, but it wasn’t unnecessary to see a plugin the size of a refrigerator. To even start to grasp the concept of how literally hundreds of plugins fit inside a small laptop computer is baffling. I’m not too sure what the future holds for recording studios, or even simply the act of recording, but I have some ideas. For starters, given that a traditional recording studio from the ‘80s can now fit into a laptop, what is to say that modern-day studios won’t become outnumbered shortly? Or in other words, everything will be able to be done from even a phone screen. Imagine an entire recording studio with every known plugin on a phone. That would either have to be a very big phone, or happen another 30 years from now. I have loved the journey along the way, and look forward to new ways to record music soon!

Works Cited

“CAS.” Classic Album Sundays, 22 May 2018, classicalbumsundays.com/how-has-the-recording-studio-affected-the-ways-in-which-music-is-created/

Fox, Christopher. “The Art of Noise: How Music Recording Has Changed over the Decades.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 16 May 2014, www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/16/music-recording-science-museum-christopher-fox

“History of Sound Recording.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 9 Oct. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sound_recording#The_magnetic_era_(1945_to_1976)

“How Evolving Tech Has Changed Music Production.” TechCo, 25 Jan. 2016, tech.co/music-production-evolution-2016-01

“The Modern Day Recording Studio.” Silicon Beats, 21 May 2018, www.siliconbeats.com/the_modern_day_recording_studio/