Analog to digital: The Revolution of Music Making

2009-01-15T03:54:00.000-08:00

Analog to Digital : The Revolution of Music Making

Not long ago to make a recorded track was a close to impossible thing to achieve for a teen, more or less anyone working in another industry. The sheer magnitude of information and equipment involved in setting up a studio was too great to many. As for the few privileged, it took a minimum of ten thousand dollars to get a home studio set up and it was more of an investment than a hobby. Setting up one started from interior remodeling to the correct appliances of cords. The twist is, even if you managed to set up a home studio, you would have to spend at least three months filling the learning curve. Hence, unless you majored in audio engineering, it would take years to know the system inside out. Today, we regard this recording method as the analog method where the majority of the studio are huge, bulky, and pricey equipment.

Aside from the issue of setting up a home studio, in order to produce an instrumental or a track of an array of sounds, the actual instruments had to be present. To put this into perspective, to record and "produce" a violin sound, there had to be a violinist. To record a drum loop, a drummer and a drum set had to be there. For solo artists without a record label, this was a big problem both financially and music-wise. They would often times pay an instrumentalist to play certain parts.

Today, a three hundred dollar MPC would cut the need of a drum set. Samples or percussional sound sets are stored in the device and by pressing the velocity sensitive pads, the stored sound is triggered. Professional MPC users can make full beats with this machine, a turntable, and LP's used to extract samples. Think about it - alot of the famous hip hop producers use the mpc and MPC to produce beats. To name a few, pete rock, 9th wonder, and just blaze.
A drum set to a MPC, from analog to this form of producing is a big difference.

Following the same concept, a midi keyboard such as this one takes care of the need of a full scale orchestra when paired up with the adequate programs. In other words, all the analog and instruments are compressed digitally into a few equipment and programs.

The next big issue are record labels. Previously, the only way one could effectively distribute and produce his/her music was through a record label. Forget the cost of setting up a studio and knowing how to operate one. To make a few thousand copies would top the cost of setting up a studio. Furthermore, without the aid of a record label, one could not even promote his/her music outside the perimeter of friends and local community. Essentially, it was impossible to earn decent money even if a person went through all the trouble to get to that point.

Thanks to photoshop and the internet, virtually anyone can make a CD jewel and distribute it with minimal money backing. No longer is there a need for a major record label. No longer is there a need for company sponsorships. There are sites such as tune core offering songs to be featured on itunes and CD stores willing to take in CDs of unsigned artists. On the left is an album cover created with the aid adobe photoshop CS3. As you can see, the quality is no different from any other album cover. Such technological conveniences facilitate a lot of aspects of this domain.

This then leads us to today, the era of digital recording where virtually anyone, anywhere can be an emcee, producer, agent, and an audio engineer. The transition of times are evidently seen in our world today. Teens and adults alike are adopting music as a serious hobby. The notion of making ones own music is not a distant dream to the average person anymore. With about a lot of determination, patience, and some money, anyone can be "like the artist" on T.V. ( Minus the TV part)

Because of the facilitation of this domain, many people are starting to regard digital studios as "less" authentic. However easy music making may sound today, never forget that a lot of perseverance is required in obtaining the necessary knowledge. Almost all self-sustained artists have gone through months of trial and error periods in order to be able to produce actual tracks. Imagine first setting up a home studio with months of preparation and you open up a program as shown. "..?" 당황 존나 하겠지.. 나도 한 네달 걸렸는데!

But it's good to revert to the old style once in a while.

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Analog to digital: The Revolution of Music Making

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