The other night I was having a discussion with my friend. We were talking about how far along home recording technology has come; with the tremendous advances made in the technology, and the effects compression has on all recorded music, it’s very difficult to distinguish a well produced home recording from a studio recording.
The whole thing brought back a memory from when I was in college. As a broke college student I didn’t have very much money for a good stereo. One summer, I decided to work three jobs and save up to assemble a pretty good component set.
I killed myself for three months straight, buying each component when I had enough money. By the end of the summer I had put together a Kenwood component system, buying a receiver, a CD player, a tape deck, and some pretty nice box speakers. Looking back, I’m actually pretty impressed.
A friend of mine worked for a very large record label at the time (one of the very largest labels). He worked in the recording studios, and managed to record his demo there in the off hours. He was pretty lucky getting to record in a multimillion dollar studio, and I have to say that the recording sounded pretty damn good.
One night he and another friend came over and we listened to his demo on my new stereo. After listening to a few tracks, he made the comment, “It doesn’t sound as good on the speakers. You’ve got to hear it on the studio speakers.”
(I’ll clean up my response for mixed company)
“You have a boombox, you [unorthodox biscuit-eater]!!! Of course it sounds better on $100,000 studio monitors, ya [taco merchant], they’re $100,000 studio monitors!!! What the [Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary] do you think people are going to listen to this [fine audio recording] on?”
Folks, audio recordings come along way. It’s now possible to make high-quality recordings in your home using affordable equipment, with a little know-how and some elbow grease. If done right, you would need an oscilloscope to tell the difference. Some people are critical of home recordings, because they’ve tried to record on their own equipment and were hypersensitive of the results. Yet the same recording played for anyone else would sound amazing to them and would be hard to peg as a home recording.
I could go to RadioShack right now and pick up equipment that is more advanced than anything the Beatles used when they recorded all of their classic tracks. It’s amazing the difference 30 to 40 years could make.
The original distortion pedal wasn’t a pedal at all; it was a broken speaker cone that vibrated when a chord was played through it. The original flange was also not a pedal; it was an engineer, rhythmically pressing his thumb down on the flange of a reel to reel tape as it recorded – hence the term flange.
The point here is, good music is good music, it doesn’t matter how it’s recorded. Sure a lousy recording won’t do it justice, but a trip to the Apple store, and some time with a how-to book can keep you from making a lousy recording. I’ve heard home recordings that sounded like they were recorded in a high-quality studio, and I’ve heard studio recordings that sounded like they were recorded in a bus station bathroom.
You can save yourself some money, and learn how to make your music sound good and be in the studio anytime you like… just don’t be afraid of home recording.
As an interesting aside, that same friend from before recorded a song using GarageBand in a bedroom and ranked high on the play charts of a prominent internet radio station next to some well-known major-label acts. Food for thought.
