THE HOME STUDIO

Boy have we come a long way.  I'm old enough now to remember when there were only 3 tracks to record on - left, center, and right - and consoles were all tube!  Studio rates were anywhere from $75 to $150 an hour, which would be like 4 or 5 hundred an hour in today's economy!

Then came the technology; delay units with no moving parts, reverbs in a box instead of a giant steel plate in a box (EMT) or a dedicated live chamber with a speaker and a microphone....4 track, 8 track, 16 track - those giant behemoths of machines weighing nearly half a ton.  Only the filthiest of the rich could afford to have gear like that in their house, to record whenever they felt like.  The rest of us saved our gig money for half a year just go to a professional studio to record three songs. The Tascam 3340 may have been the groundbreaker for multi-track home recording.  It was an unbearably noisy machine, but it allowed us to overdub!  Such was the beginning of the home studio revolution and the one-man band.  Instead of getting together with everybody to flesh out parts, we could now play all of the parts ourselves.  The bold and brave would push the 3340 to the limit with track bouncing and comping until the noise and distortion were unbearable. Then came the ADAT, the one single piece of gear that probably put more studios out of business than any other in history.  Now we could record 8 tracks of pristine digital on to a VHS cassette, and bounce until the cows came home with no noise or degradation.  And if you had the bread, you bought more ADAT's and a sync box.  24, 36, 48 tracks of digital....all in your bedroom!  Get a sequencer and drum machine, and who the hell needs a band anymore?  Lock yourself in your room and make a whole freakin' album by yourself!  For every musician, the home studio was a dream now within reach.

For years, I made a decent living out of a 10 X 11 bedroom home studio, producing jingles, doing back vocals for people, even announcing radio spots.  I could record at anytime of day or night in my underwear if I wanted to.  The technology just got better and better.

Now there's no tape machines, no tape, no console, no racks of crap and patchcords.  One simple audio interface and an I-MAC, and I am producing stuff every bit as good sonically as a million dollar studio would have 10 years ago.

BUT...

I start to think about the last time I actually went to a studio to do a session with other living breathing talented human beings....and I cannot remember for the life of me how long ago that was.  I'm thinking of one of my favorite lyric lines from Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi"; ..."you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone....".  While sitting in the studio with another guitar player, bass player, keyboard player, drummer some 20+ years ago, I never dreamed that one day this would all be gone - how much I would miss it - and that I'd one day be sitting home doing all this by myself.  Nowadays, my 'drummer' always keeps absolute perfect time with a kit that always sounds perfect.  I can play my bass part 90 different ways without worrying about the studio bill.  Of course, I have to find the time to decide which of the 90 different bass parts to use.  I can do my solo two bars at a time and bounce them into a seamless perfect performance....after I decide which of 1200 bars on 16 different tracks to comp.  And vocals....yes!  I will have all the time (and tracks) I need to get the perfect lead vocal.  A little 'pitchy'?....not to worry.  Mr. Autotune is right here in my mighty list of plugins. And when it's all finished, I can sit back and listen to my masterpiece....all done by me....wow!

So go ahead...listen and enjoy....before reality finally smacks you upside the head.  And that is when you realize that you and everyone else are going to hear your masterpiece the only way it will ever be heard, and that you will never be able to actually get up on a stage and perform it live.  Unless of course you have tons of money to pay all the musicians you want and need to replicate your every note - to rehearse for hours on end until you have a roomful of clones of yourself who can get up on stage and duplicate your masterpiece live as perfectly as you recorded it. 

And you will never know what might have evolved from a collective effort by allowing the chemistry and magic of a group to breath life into your songs.  You won't know what brilliant lick or groove or idea might have sprung forth from one of the other players on your recording that might have made your song that much better.

Those other musicians?  Sure, they're around. 

You know dozens of 'em....all talented mofo's who you know could do everything you need them to do; play every note you played yourself.....IF they weren't all busy doing their masterpieces in their little home studios.

And then like you, they will wind up paying thousands of dollars to any one of a hundred different CD replicators out there to have their masterpiece forever chronicled on a little plastic disc that will one day contribute to the elevation of some real estate somewhere on earth, commonly known as 'landfill'.

I would suppose that the only good thing that has come from the proliferation of home studios is the ability of the truly talented songwriter/composer to make his work presentable in the best possible fashion.  Gone are the days when you could walk into a record company with a simple piano or guitar/vocal demo.  They want to hear a finished master, ready for the radio...something they don't have to invest a single cent of production money into.  Gone are the days of the $15,000 budgets to produce jingles.  Gone are the days of the big professional studios...at least as I knew them.  But the saddest of all I fear may be end of days for bands that were once truly creative as a whole and wrote albums from start to finish together instead of each member showing up to the session with a song demo where everyone else's part was predetermined. 

On the lighter brighter side, composer/producers in their own home studios can now bring work to completion quickly and within the ridiculous budgets mandated by ad agencies and television music departments.  Me?  I can still make enough to buy groceries for a week by cranking out a complete package of radio spots once or twice a month. 

The cream will always rise to the top....and in our world, I suppose it will continue to do so in the "bottle" known as the home studio.