“The problem, again, seems to be that the folks at the movie studios (just like those at the record labels) only like to count the big hits as successes — rather than the smaller projects that actually make money and make up the majority of the actual market. It’s the same sort of thinking that makes movie studio people insist that we need to explain to them how they can keep making $200 million movies. That’s the wrong question. The question is how do you make profitable movies. The technology has advanced such that it’s cheaper and cheaper to make movies (which is why we have more of them). But notice that the studios never focus on ways to make movies in a more economical way, but how can they keep spending.”

This has been a huge problem in the music industry as well.

A skilled person can make really good recordings for dirt cheap. You can set yourself up with a netbook based studio that the Beatles would have envied for about 600 dollars. A few hundred more could get you some decent monitors, and another couple hundred more would allow you to do a perfectly acceptable DIY room treatment. You can start with Naiant microphones, which are insanely good and only cost between 40 and 80 dollars apiece, add a couple of Chinese condenser microphones and a couple of sm57s and you’re in business.

So for about 3000 to 4000 dollars, we’re talking about a recording studio that has infinite tracks, hundreds of automatable effects, samplers beyond the dreams of the people who payed 20,000 dollars for a Fairlight in the early eighties, virtual instruments like the famous Crystal…the possibilities are quite overwhelming.

But instead of using such humble but powerful studios, instead of experimenting, testing and analyzing the recording process to see if it’s costs could be pared down, the industry spends assloads of money in Hollywood and NY studios that charge thousands of dollars a day for studio rental, with thousands more for the personnel, and 300 dollars for every 15 minutes worth of that 2 inch analog tape that you just have to use. And then there are the drum techs and rented drums, the rented vintage amps and guitars…

Seriously, anyone who is unfamiliar with this stuff should google the Mixerman diaries. The waste that takes place in the music industry is staggering. The ‘spare no expense, just deliver a huge hit’ mentality was born in a world where the resources necessary to make recordings were scarce, expensive, complex to operate, and difficult to maintain. It came from the way the Beatles made records: fuck around all day until you find something that sounds cool. It never really made sense as a strategy, but you sure couldn’t complain about the results from a business standpoint: the Beatles made lots and lots of money.

But the fact of the matter is that the Beatles would have gone apeshit over the freeware tools that 15 year old kids bitch about these days. The possibilities opened up by these tools are endless. Things like:

multiple automation lanes (essentially, a bunch of invisible hands you can set to change the levels and settings on virtual instruments and effects in real time),

audio with absolutely no surface noise and over 100 db of dynamic range,

having as many tracks as you could ever imagine using,

non destructive, click and drag audio editing and manipulation, on an intuitive graphic interface that has the color scheme of your choice.

One could go on and on. But this kind of thinking is antithetical to the ethos of the industry. Paring down costs, an absolutely essential business practice that is a matter of course in most businesses, makes no sense to them. ‘Big Records are recorded in Big Studios for Big Money! Any idiot knows that!’ is the common wisdom.

But the absolute triumph of the mp3 on the popular market proves that most people really just are not obsessed with sound quality the way audio professionals are. They care about the song and the performance and they demand that the recording conveys the song and the performance. The number of people who will know or care whether the drums in a song were processed with a free compressor plugin on the one hand, or a 40 year old Fairchild limiter on the other, are vanishingly small. And yet, those 40 year old limiters can fetch over 10,000 dollars on the open market, because, that’s right, that’s the limiter that the Beatles used, and there are people in the industry who believe that it has some kind of magic pixie dust that will help them sell records.

But all the listening public cares about is that the drum part, however recorded, makes them shake their collective ass spontaneously when they hear it. And that has absolutely nothing to do with the technology used to record the drums.