Starcina-Blogs – Starcina Music Group

Starcinamusicgroup@gmail.com

For 2nd Blog about ‘Outdated Technology’ scroll to end of BLOG-1 below

Studio Consultant’s blog: I’m writing
this rather long ‘opinion’ blog in the winter of 2020. It concerns the way that
music recording/production has gone the last 25+ years with the seeming
‘insanity’ of Digital Recording with computers, app’s & ‘plug-in’s’..

To me, I see some mostly younger
generations that are lost.. having been brainwashed by the liberal way of
thinking. “EVERYTHING you DO is good… NO MATTER WHAT”.. ( Now I want to make a note here. A family member of mine relayed to me that ‘some people could take this ‘opinion blog’ negatively.’ It was also pointed out that ‘some people deem words in Large ( upper ) Case CAPITAL letters as ‘shouting’.. ) It is NOT. Way before the advent of the internet ( and texting via phones – a pretty recent thing in so far as ‘history’ of writing is concerned ) to Capitalize a written word or words was simply showing EMPHASIS! Do we talk in a monotone??? No.. If one say’s the word WOW!! That’s how one say’s it- with dynamics and emphasis!! My comments about ‘smart-phones’ is my opinion. Don’t have one.. don’t want one-period. Yes, I can actually get through my day without one.. Just like we all used to. Now as far as my statement about ( some ) of the younger generation being ‘lost’ as this blog starts out- let me explain.. I do NOT expect a lot of young people to understand this initially. They’ve been largely brought up- in the ‘digital age’.. You see…. for many, many hundreds of years, in schools.. in families.. in sports.. in- well most everything.. there was ‘competition’. There are always some people who are ‘exceptional’ and excel. In the last couple of decades.. what I refer to as the ‘liberal way of thinking’ and their ‘belief’ that ‘everything you DO is good… NO MATTER WHAT’ is a statement, of ‘fallacy’ ( look it up)

And what I was alluding to ( in everything, but especially music ).. such a statement or belief that ‘everything anyone does is good’ is simply NOT TRUE! As a very experienced person in most everything music, it’s my JOB to not let you do ‘anything’ and (lie) to you and say ‘yeah… sounds GREAT!’ If it’s out of tune, off timing.. out of key or a host of other ‘defects’… what good is it doing you, the Artist or Group by my not asking you do it correctly… or dare I say it.. RIGHT?? You might get ONE chance at ‘getting a big break’ and I ( we here at the Studio ) WANT you to BE your best-period! Now, with that said.. the original ‘opinion blog’ continues below…

I remember in the early-mid 90’s when almost nobody had cellphones. And those that did ( I did in the late 90’s ) had to pay very high dollars and had pretty big clunky phones or if you could afford the super ‘miniaturized’ flip phones, the cost would be in the thousands. Now? A whole younger generation- actually TWO generations ( plus a lot of MY generation ‘baby boomers’ ) can’t get through an hour without totally relying on that ‘smart’ phone ( which as those who know me well hear me refer to as ‘DUMB phones’ ) I see people at the supermarket who can no longer be bothered to memorize a small list of needed supplies or actually WRITE one, stumbling along blindly up & down the aisles ( because they’re MISSING the items by having 90% of their attention in their phone screens. ) Just today on the national news was a story about how all the ‘faces in the screens’ done- especially by children ( who are often given ‘dumb phones’ as young as preschool! ) are having ‘issues’ with their sight etc. I see people with earbuds in their ears and faces buried in the screens oblivious to traffic dangers as they blindly cross a busy street. A young married guy told me recently, how he caught his 7 yr. Old daughter asking ALEXA the answer to a math problem for her math homework. He told her ‘No…no… YOU have to figure it out for yourself or you won’t know HOW to’… Do you get where I’m going here? DUMB phones. They’re making people become lazy, or uninformed and I’ve seen major news stories on shows like 60 minutes detailing how people’s attention spans are becoming much shorter because they have SO much info available at their finger tips.. they get bored ( sometimes in a few seconds ) then move onto the next info before they’ve even completed absorbing the CURRENT info! Get where I’m going here??

(Another Note: Below, as explanation.. I mostly blame MY generation for ‘messing everything up’ so if your gonna get offended.. at least be a ‘Baby Boomer’..) The blog now continues…)

The Digital Music Age: I started to realize we ‘baby-boomers’ were doing a large dis-service to our children… about the mid-80’s. Unlike our generation of musicians, who would spend hours ‘figuring out’ how a song or particular riff was played.. often playing the song ( vinyl record or tape cassette ) over & over again. And cozying up to that great musician in some local band & working up the courage to say, ‘Hey… would you SHOW me how you do that?’…the younger generation ( our kids ) weren’t being ‘handed down info’ by us as we became the generation of having fun, partying and/or being way too materialistic. What am I saying here? We stopped teaching them that a ‘69’ Camaro, or a 63 split window coup Vette… were really cool muscle cars. That bands like The Beatles, Styx, Kansas & many dozens of others were ‘fantastically talented’.. The daycare thing started & so many children were simply in their early formative years, left to the auspices of daycare workers to keep them ‘occupied’ but with no real grounding or ‘teaching’ or anything. Then? One or the other parent would swing by on the way home and pick the kid(s) up- just to bring them home, plop them in front of a television or video game to keep them ‘occupied’ so we could unwind and get supper ready. In short, families stopped DOING things together. And THIS was the ‘X-Generation’. The ‘millennials’ and
subsequent Gen-’Z’?? My God.. Guess where I’m going here??

For many, many decades… music was made by people actually knowing HOW to play one or more instruments. Their was a glut of REAL talent that one can see and hear going back many decades. The Recording process was an evolution that started with the invention of sound recording by Thomas Edison in the late 1870’s and went through many ‘metamorphosis’s’ for the next 100 years. The tape recorder originated in the 1930’s in Germany and that changed the recording process from actually happening with the cutting of grooves in a disc of varying materials.. to magnetic particles embedded in the tape. By the 1950’s and 60’s, tape recorders ( reel to reels ) were becoming highly advanced. The recording process became much higher quality and also created the ability to do some very labor intensive ‘editing’ or ‘splicing’ of tape.. But note.. This did not fundamentally change the talent pool nor did it make people ‘lazy’ in any way shape or form. In fact.. people found ways to better utilize their own inherent talent. Then.. by the early 80’s & throughout the 90’s, the digital revolution in the Music Industry took off. ‘Pro Tools’ or ‘in the box’ ( computer ) recording became more and more accepted. While there were ( and are ) still plenty of Pro Recording Studio’s utilizing large format consoles, the ‘modular format’ was by the 2000’s becoming more and more the norm for reasons such as, upkeep and maintenance. It was plain hard to find people qualified to fix the large format Consoles when they broke down. And some great Consoles were very finicky. And there were far less ‘self taught’ and schooled by mentor engineers, who were trained electronically or mechanically to fix them. And the expense to pay a qualified tech could be enormous. Another anomaly was that the manufacturers were more often than not- after a few years run on some Console’s and other peripheral equipment- would just stop supporting them, so even getting parts could be tough! But then… more & more… the ‘digital age’ became in essence ‘out of control’..

( Another Note before continuing ) By way of explanation, what I am saying ( below ) is that if you DON’T actually play the piano… or guitar or whatever.. Simply using a computer software program to ‘put notes’ here & there then add a sound does NOT sound ( to someone who actually knows how to play ).. RIGHT! Why?? Because the ‘technique is wrong, placement and timing is incorrect & a host of other things. ) So, we continue…

By 1990, so many people were able to afford pretty cheap ‘home’ or semi-pro ‘project systems’ that many people who weren’t particularly talented as a musician or singer- were now fancying themselves as ‘Producers, Engineers…even Record Labels’ and in came the ‘hip-hop/rap’ genre and the entire music industry, which had already been beat up badly by the advent of the internet and the ‘fragmentation’ of radio was over-run with TOO much talent and yes- too much NON-talent. It got to the point where it was hard to listen to the radio because of all the poor quality of music, and poor and repetitive recording techniques and nothing sounding ‘real’ because people were now ‘playing’ (virtual) not real instruments, simply manipulating sound and technique without any actual knowledge of real ‘reality’ in technique ( among other things ) and pumping it all out there to the extent that there was SO much music- and yes.. so much POOR music that the masses couldn’t tell what was REAL talent or what was not. Many people were in essence.. ‘dumbed down” or weened off true talent for something.. well.. much lesser. To put it simply? You can PLAY the darned drums or guitar or bass or keyboard or sing really well, or you can play/sing poorly ( if at all ) but to someone who actually can play well- there IS a ‘discernible’ difference. Seemingly a thousand new ‘plug-in’s & app’s’ are available weekly. That’s tens of thousands or more- each year! I came to realize that even people who were older, from my generation who had long music careers were going ‘bonkers’ over-editing everything, over-effecting everything and over-manipulating everything to the extent I was shaking my head. What happened to REAL talent? The ability to simply plug an actual instrument into an input, get your basic anchor E.Q., effect, compression ( and/or ) and record a ‘finished’ completed track? Then pre-mix, do a mix-down and master and voila! Have a finished REAL product that was what was originally intended- or changed subtly so as to always be recognizable of the players original intent? As a songwriter, lyricist and multi-instrumentalist, I have always had a gift of just coming up with an idea and making it come to reality-fast. And simply. Once a track is recorded ( say a rhythm guitar track ).. I come up with the sound I need, tweek it a little and record it. Boom! A 3 minute 45 second song now has a rhythm guitar ‘anchor’ track to work around. All the other tracks, be it 5, 10 or whatever number.. come just as easy & as simply. Those initial ‘finished’ tracks ( because I record them as ‘finished’ tracks ) are the solid core of a song which in some cases I might have another musician or two come in to record THEIR tracks. Twenty to thirty five minutes perhaps- of actual recording and those ‘raw’ tracks which I treated from their inception as ‘finished-master’ tracks… are ready for a mix-down which may come out fine the first time, or maybe 2 or 3 or even 4 mix-downs and then a master mix created. Wow! I killed a whole hour in the creation of a ‘finished’ product and if it was very complex? Ninety minutes! No ‘mouse, no app’s, no plug-in’s, no manipulating screens and overlapping screens and sounds and this, that & the other thing until the original intent is SO far removed from just that.. the ‘original’ sound it’s not even funny! Just LISTEN to music recorded over past decades. I, nor anyone I know is heard to say, ‘Well, THAT would’ve sounded WAY better- if it had been ‘better quality’. In the summer of 2019, I was at a large music store chain. At one point, I was explaining to one of the kazillion’s of young people ( an employee at a national music chain ) many of who for some years now have gone to music schools or universities… HOW my work-flow in the Studio … WORKED. During the first few minutes, while I spoke.. his eye’s became more glassy and his expression ‘dispassionate’ or void of any emotion or any semblance of ‘affirmative understanding’ that I trailed off.. He simply stated, ‘I never HEARD of anything like that’… I looked at him and said, You know WHY? It’s because they pump kazillion’s of people like yourself out of these schools- teaching you all the same ( the collective… think ‘BORG’ ) and they act like ALL that was done BEFORE ( for many generations ) doesn’t exist!’ He just shrugged. No comprehension… no interest… no wanting to know… nothing. The VOID, I call it. I am NOT the only person ( from any generation ) who feels this way or see’s what going on.. I could cite many well known Artists who have also stated such in recent years. We HAVE to get back to what’s ‘real’…. The ROOTS of a song.. a sound… and KEEP it as it was intended… perhaps with a little ‘tweeking’ if necessary. Look.. we ARE a Digital Recording Studio. We ARE high-tech. But… we do NOT need a software program to make up for any ‘short-coming’ in our abilities or our confidence as such. ALL instrument/vocal inputs are analog ( yes.. some really GREAT ‘Digital Consoles actually come with some ‘analog inputs too!) and we utilize a minimum of effects, E.Q.’s compression and what have you (internally ) and we mix, master & archive to the digital domain ( what real sense is it to use a p.c. that stores on it’s hard disc MANY types of files, & often over-compresses disk space & frankly, can CRASH losing all your data over a DEDICATED hard disk audio recorder?? ) By example, our ‘dedicated’ Hard Disk Recorder’ fires up and is ready to work in 11 seconds! It shuts down and saves all data in 13 seconds-flat! It has removable hard-drives that can be exchanged in seconds and has dual hard drives that one can go back and forth between! Try that with your p.c.! Heck, we even have a really nice e-drum set that instantly changes sounds at a touch of a button or two that NOBODY could tell wasn’t an acoustic set ( our drummer is a super pro who has played for over 5 decades- and LOVES the set despite having many acoustic sets ) and which eliminates the nightmare of multiple microphones, phase problems and even the recording of a room’s sound (vocally or instrumentally ). Digital is GREAT… if used for SOME things and used to hopefully a ‘minimum’ so as to not lose ones identity- be you a solo artist or a group. If my very experienced opinion offends anyone- w/apologies.. Enough said.

Note: Steve has been a musician for over 50 years, a songwriter/arranger, lyricist & multi-instrumentalist for 40+ years and is a retired Producer/Engineer listed in the major-recording music industry throughout the 90’s. He now acts as as a private consultant.

OUTDATED TECHNOLOGY & the many ‘misconceptions’ by people!

I’m writing this 2nd BLOG in March of 2021 and it concerns people’s perceptions of an often used term, ‘OUTDATED TECHNOLOGY’

Recently, a musician from our Studio was trying to do a particular set-up on a very nice portable DAW ( Digital Audio Workstation ) by phone with the Founder of the Studio. At some point, the musicians son got involved, despite the fact he had no experience on this particular DAW which is a spectacular mixer/editor/hard disk recorder and can do things that are nearly impossible to do with previously made (or in fact currently made) equipment. His son, who’d been listening, simply was better able to ‘follow the directions’ being given to his Father over the phone. At one pint, the son exclaimed, ‘This is old technology‘ which I hear way too often and is usually made the majority of the time by people who have no concept of ‘true technologies’ but rather are constantly swept up in the extreme marketing of ‘words’ and ‘shock value’.. I remember the ‘Bit Technology’ arguments of the early-mid 90’s in the Major Recording Music Industry. What’s better everyone would ask?? 2-bits, 8-bits.. 16-bits’s, etc! At the same time, SONY had rushed out their ‘DAT’ technology- and many were jumping on the veritable bandwagon to archive their masters to this miniature Digital Audio Tape cassettes. I held off… Sure enough, within a year, Studio’s started to discover that that often their archived ‘Master’ of a client was blank, had chunks of data MISSING or just wouldn’t play. It was due to several reasons but one in particular, the ‘over-compression’ of data and susceptibility to various negative factors in the vicinity, including such innocuous things as temperature etc. Sony admitted they’d ‘rushed the technology out’ and many Studio’s who’d jumped on their bandwagon were in trouble ( with their clients )

I went to school in the mid 80’s for personal computer ( among other things) in the day when a 1088 processor was considered FAST! I had a p.c. long before most as many homes and businesses didn’t get into the ‘computer age’ until the 90’s! I remember in the 90’s though, that companied like ‘DELL” would come out monthly with their ‘newest, FASTEST computer and people would literally be trading there fairly new computer in- for the ‘latest’ model! At some point, the processing speeds became SO fast.. that I’d say to acquaintances while I clapped my hands together as fast as I could- then REPEAT the clap 2 or 3 times & ask, ‘WHICH one is FASTER?’ Unless I purposely slowed down one of the motions.. it was impossible to tell! To musicians in particular, I ask you.. Is a 59′ Les Paul or a 61′ Les Paul SG ‘OLD’ technology?? Ridiculous right?? Better made and better sounding than MOST modern electric guitars, no?? As I alluded to in the first blog above, we live in a ‘rush it out ( the newest technology-every week ) while the markets viable but ‘throw it away if it breaks’ era these days!

And so… I thought, WHY would the musicians son refer to this 10 to 12 year old fantastic piece of equipment, which literally replaces the equivalent of a hundred grand of equipment (for a mere grand or so at that time ) and which a legendary Producer/Engineer/songwriter-performer had given his stamp of approval too ( which still stands ).. ‘OLD technology??’ Was it because of some ‘knobs’ or ‘buttons’ or the small 4″ view screen built in? It’s a piece of equipment that combines analog or digital inputs, a ‘hard-disc’ dedicated high capacity recorder, a mixer, the ability to do a digital ‘mix-down’ then a digital ‘Master’ and pump out the file to most anything! Including a CD drive! Notice how it’s impossible to find a CD player in new vehicles these days?? They want you to use a USB stick or SD-card which are SO tiny and damageable & LOSEABLE, unlike the CD which is robust and easy to find and ’16-bit’ CD quality recorded to this medium sounds great!

I thought, ‘it’s probably because of his ‘Smart Phone’ ( yep- back to that ) because he can touch his screen to do most things?? I have found that Digital mixers or other audio equipment with ‘touch-screen’ technology get pretty ‘mucked up’ pretty fast and are generally FAR more limiting because you have MUCH less space to insert virtual ‘touch-screen’ buttons where as our Digital Console in the Studio ( like that older piece of equipment his Dad was using ) has a LOT of ‘work area’s’ on it’s Control Service utilizing not only buttons ( for the TRUE physical touch ) but knobs etc, out of which one gets hundreds of parameters ( all Digital ) but being chosen instantaneously by the depression of a button or the turning of a knob. And? It’s WAY faster than using a mouse on a computer screen to navigate, open up various windows ( search the often ‘too small’ icons’ and start clicking things on! )

Lastly, our Main Console can do virtually anything. It can mate to virtually anything. It can do things ( too many to list here ) such as give THREE separate Monitor mixes utilizing ‘small & large’ monitors plus a Studio ‘Cue Mix’ ( Monitors controlled completely separately from the Control area Monitors)… It is a ‘soft insert’ Console which means the unlimited Routing and other connections/adjustments’ are done in mere seconds ( utilizing manual ‘buttons’ and knobs’ to MANY parameters! I saw, on Youtube a short while back- where somebody who ran ‘sound’ for his Church got a used Console ( like ours ) who DIDN’T know what he was doing ( I’ve read the ‘Manuals’ several times and took many MONTHS to ‘get to know’ the Console ( which he kept referring to as ‘a board’ ) who while on one hand said ‘the board is fanTAStic’ yet called it ‘old technology’.. There are forums on-line where this particular Console has seemingly confounded many people ( virtually everyone including experienced ‘sound engineers’ ) simply because it it a weird thing with most people here in America.. They just do NOT have the patience to READ THE MANUAL… ( I don’t get it! ) Any complex digital audio equipment has ‘Protocols’ that must be learned and adhered to or one is making settings ( in the digital realm ) that they don’t understand- and that often have negative consequences… OLD technology?? I’d call it ‘TRIED, TRUE, TESTED and DEPENDABLE! Enough said…

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