LAB COATS AND CIGARETTES
In the late 1990s the home recording revolution was on full send. For those of us deeply invested (the more palatable term for “highly leveraged”) in commercial recording studios, this wasn’t as exhilarating as it was for others. It was particularly uncomfortable for those us who were concerned with keeping the “engineer” in “recording engineer.” We were recapping our consoles, aligning our tape recorders, testing our tubes, and burnishing our patchbays. We had scopes, analyzers, tone generators, and meters galore. Our actual job was to record beautiful music but accomplishing this required a vastly larger set of technical skills - all to support our very limited number of analog channels, tracks, processing, and so forth.
Suddenly, every musician in their mom’s basement could drop a sound card into their computer and realize huge track counts of fully flexible, non-linear digital recording. In their view they could build a million dollar studio for 250 bucks. My cohorts and I did not like this revolution. Some of us dug our heels in, mocking this new crew. How could they possibly make a decent musical recording? Even if their equipment were sonically capable, these novices had no real measure of what good sound even was. They didn’t know if their inputs were balanced, unbalanced, or off-balance. They simply plugged things in and clicked the record icon with their mouse.
I WAS CALLING MYSELF A WHAT?
But wait: Was I actually labeling myself a “recording engineer”? I had never taken a professional recording course. I hadn’t completed - or even sat in on - a single engineering course of any kind. For crying out loud, I didn’t even own a lab coat. The real recording engineers roamed the earth in the 1930s and 1940s. They largely built from scratch the equipment they were recording with and never worked without a lab coat on their back and a cigarette in their lips. These honest to goodness engineers had to experience the first recording revolution as it descended upon them. In the 60’s this threat walked in with long hair, jeans and leather vests. These kids didn’t know how to build the equipment they were working on. They allowed preamps to distort, tape to saturate, and compressors to pump, while the real engineers watched in horror. But they had fresh musical ideas. They disregarded standards, and figured out how to make great sounding music on the equipment in front of them.
By the early 80’s I was trying to do the exact same thing. I would beg, borrow, and barter for recording equipment or studio time. I never wanted an engineer’s help in my personal revolution - I was going to figure this stuff out myself. I explored, attempted, failed, discovered, and improved. Around 10,000 hours later I was making recordings worth listening to.
This brings us all the way back to the digital home recording revolution of the late 90’s. Who was I to criticize these kids putting cheap sound cards into their computers then considering themselves my equal? Musicians had been recycling this revolution for decades. Having recently earned my stripes I mistakenly thought that progress was supposed to stop and hold - just for me.
THATS SOME MARGINALLY INTERESTING HISTORY. IS THERE A POINT?
It’s pretty easy to be ignorant about revolutions going on that could swallow us up. It’s easy to say: “I’ve got this figured out, I’ve made my place, I provide my value, and I’m all set”. But things move very quickly these days. It doesn’t take long until we become a target for others waiting to leapfrog us - leaving us standing there with our lab coats and cigarettes.
Revolutions will come. They can rain on your parade or you can jump into them and launch forward. I just about got swallowed up in that recording revolution. I pushed back for a few years, but I eventually found a place to jump in. These musicians who were recording tracks in their bedrooms began to drop off hard drives at my studio to mix. Yes, I complained about how bad their hi-hats or acoustic guitar sounded, but the productions were brilliant and creative. I began to adapt some of their tricks with my own productions. The revolution became much more than a means for musicians to record music at home. It completely shuffled the sound of music, ushering in new musical styles that would have never otherwise surfaced.
DON’T GET TOO COMFORTABLE
I started my current company for these very same reasons. The space was crying out for revolution. The dominant players had gotten overly comfortable. They had stopped listening or innovating. It eroded their positions when a reimagined solution jumped in. It took a few years for one of them to hop into the revolution, another fell victim and didn’t survive at all. Newcomers jumped in as they always do. The space looks completely different today than it did only a few years ago.
So I’ve been both the recipient and the initiator of revolutions. Neither role is ideal. As an initiator you don’t really know that you are starting a revolution, and you surely don’t know if it’s going to take. On the other hand it feels a lot better than getting caught off guard and leapfrogged as the recipient. That did not feel so great when it happened to me in the 90’s. But every negative experience has a positive side. It taught me that I need to always to listen, continue to innovate, and not get too comfortable.
