Then and Now Moment (AKA My Gear Is Too Good!)

I've been considering how the landscape of home recording has changed and evolved over the past 20 years, and we have come a long way. We now have more recording power and flexibility in our home studios than the top professional studios had available back then. Back then, the enemy was signal degradation and tape hiss. Now we actually have folks working hard to build effects to add in "better" artificial tape hiss to too-perfect recordings.

Yes, we have come a long way. How many tracks can you record at home? I routinely use 30 or 40 individual tracks in REAPER. The capacity is only limited by the power of your machine and how much horsepower each VST or VSTi or audio track need to process, and I've never dogged out my machine while doing real work.

But something feels different when I record and build songs in my studio. It has taken me a couple of years to put my finger on it, but I think I know now.

This is something that I feel made me stronger in the late 80s/early 90s. I had less power then. I had a LOT of systemic constraints. This forced me to get to the meat of what the music was trying to do, rather than allowing a lot of fluff to drift in and change my focus.

Fewer Channels
When you have fewer channels, you have to think more about how to accomplish the desired effect. My old studio was based on an Amiga 500. The Amiga had 2 left channels and 2 right channels. All 8-bit audio. That's it. Anything else had to be driven from outboard MIDI gear. I added a Yamaha RY-30 Drum Machine to take care of the bottom end (16-bit sounds!), but everything else was through the Amiga. 2 Left, 2 Right. And it worked. I made songs that sounded a hell of a lot bigger than you would expect. Occasionally, I would share a channel, but for the most part I kept it straightforward. Four instruments, usually 2 being a stereo-paired lead line that mirrored each other (with a slight offset so you added a spatial element/echo to the sound.)

Samples, Not Instruments
Another big difference between then and now is Virtual Instruments. VSTs, one of the most popular formats for Virtual Instruments, weren't released to the public until 1996. Prior to that you either had hardware instruments (i.e. real stuff), or you used audio samples. It seems to me that creating samples is a dying art. I don't mean just recording a bit from another artist and using it. I mean taking a raw sound into an audio editor, twisting it, rearranging it, and making it something fresh and new that has NEVER been heard before. Then load it into your music program and do something with it.

Back in the old days I had a portable tape recorder (you remember cassettes, don't you?) that I would wander around recording random sounds with it. Then I would sample those sounds into the computer and see what I had actually captured. When I sound "jumped out" at me, I put it through the meatgrinder to make it even more unusual, more me.

I think many of us have fallen into the trap of "needing" Virtual Instruments for just about everything. It can be useful, or it can be a crutch. The sounds made by a VST are the same sounds everyone else with that VST has to use. It's a shared experience. Sure, you can morph the sound by adding more VST effects onto the basic instrument. And more VSTs.

Personally, I prefer to find a basic sound from a Virtual Instrument, record it, and then bring it into Audacity and corrupt it into something that is wholly mine. I can (almost) guarantee than nobody has ever taken the same source sound through the same "audio meatgrinder" I use. Since it is an organic, seat-of-the-pants creation, I would be hard pressed to duplicate a sound that I made previously.

Final Thoughts
As old Uncle Ben used to say, "With great power comes great responsibility." We don't need to be responsible, do we? So try a little experiment on your next project. Try to limit yourself to a set number of tracks. 4 or 8 tracks - the classic tape capacities. Can you get the song you're after if you can ONLY use 4 tracks? I'm willing to bet you can get a stronger song in that 4 or 8 track space. You might just surprise yourself at how much "waste" there is in your recordings.

Before the haters bring it: Don't get me wrong, I love (free) VSTs. They give us the options that we never really had in a small home studio before. I couldn't afford to buy another keyboard to get that ONE new sound I was looking for. You made due with what you had. Now we have so many options to choose from, we often get caught in the "chasing the perfect presets" in our VSTs, instead of chasing the perfect song. If you can't find it, make it.

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Why Loops Won't Make You Famous

In today's world of DIY music, there are more people than ever creating their own music, thanks primarily to inexpensive, easily obtained music programs. Many of these programs are based on the idea of loops. For those who are new to the scene, loops are canned, individual snippets of music that are trimmed so they can be played in a loop indefinitely.

There are quite a number of very successful consumer-grade packages that offer impressive quantities of loops, like Sony ACID, and M-Audio's Session. It's easy to load a few loops, stack them up, and make a decent sounding song.

There are a few problems with loops, as I see it. First, you are basically remixing someone else's creativity. Granted, most loops aren't terribly creative. But even so, any music you make with purchased loops will not be your own music. There are occasions where a few sampled loops of really strong beats or riffs do make it into the popular musical vocabulary (James Brown's famous "Funky Drummer" beat a good example of a loop that has been used in thousands of songs). But the key there is that the successful songs that use such elements are not completely made of other people's work.

Before the era of ready-made loop libraries, we had people trying basically the same thing, to horrible consequences. A prime example of looping gone bad is Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby". It was a big hit -- until people realized he had completely ripped off the intro riff to the Queen & David Bowie classic "Under Pressure" and looped it through his entire song. That was the first major nail (and lawsuit) in his thankfully short-lived career. Could he have lasted longer with something truly original? Maybe, if it was good. (Okay, I highly doubt it.)

Imagine this scenario: You finish your first album and get some interest from a record label. Some astute audiophile at the label recognizes every sound in your songs (except, possibly vocals) are bundled with ACID or another popular loop software. I'm willing to bet that will be a deal breaker. Why? Record labels want creativity, not re-mixers.

I strongly believe that the use of canned loops is not creating music. It is the musical equivalent of making scenes out of clip art and considering yourself an original artist. Nope. You are doing image layout, not creation. You shouldn't expect to be hired as an original artist for clever use of clip art. Loop tools and loop libraries are first and foremost musical toys.

Now I'm sure some loop users are upset and think I'm way off base. Don't get me wrong, loops have their place. If you create your OWN loops and use them in your music, that is a completely different animal. In that case, you are creating your own building blocks and making something wholly original from your own snippets. If you want your drum pattern to go on for an extended period of time, it's a great time saver to loop it (you really should introduce variations into any repeated pattern to give a more human feel to it, but it's your choice). Again, I'll stress that is YOUR drum pattern, not one you pulled out of a box.

Music is about creativity, not cut-and-paste. Please, give yourself some credit and put yourself into your music. Your work will be stronger in the long run if you avoid the musical crutches that are all too available. You will know the difference. Your audience will know the difference, too.

Originality shines like a beacon in our current musically saturated world. Let's let the world know what we sound like.

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