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A Tale of Two Cities
In the den of his parents’ Toronto home, Rob Hellever is following his dream. Any given night the 23-year-old business management student and guitarist can be found jamming with his buddies and recording the sounds on his simple ‘desktop studio’. In another time and place, a few hours of recording in a downtown studio with an engineer to man the boards could cost a couple of thousand dollars. These days, there's no fancy studio and no engineer - all the recording Rob does — and any extra instruments he wants — is on a PC running inexpensive digital recording software.
"Once you get a basic little setup, you can do anything you want," says Rob, who started his home PC-based studio a few years ago for about $1,500. “It’s amazing what you can do with a decent home studio and this software.”
Another artist, Emily Richards, 27, is one of the most-heard pop singers never to have appeared on MTV. By day, Richards is a manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Los Angeles. In her spare time, she cranks out songs in her home studio, outfitted with about $12,000 in equipment.
Though her seven albums have sold a modest 22,000 copies combined, the songs she's posted on her MP3.com page have been downloaded more than 1.6 million times, earning her royalties of about $60,000 — much more than the typical indie artist.
The trend of at-home digital recording is having a huge impact. Fueled by plummeting PC prices, low-cost software and other sophisticated tools, this recording revolution is allowing anyone with the time and savvy to produce albums in their bedrooms with quality near that of CDs recorded at professional studios.
Need horns? In the computer. Extra strings? No problem.
With access to literally hundreds of digitally replicated instruments, not only are extra instruments no problem, neither are the multitude of mistakes that are inevitable. The technology is so good that one can easily mask anything from singing off-key to a note being played at the wrong time. In fact, even playing an instrument is no longer required, with software such as Cakewalk’s $49 Plasma that allows the user to cut and paste audio clips, mix them, and add effects.
"There'll be times when I'll sing a whole take and there's one note that kind of goes flat," says Trent Reznor of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, a longtime Pro Tools user. "We can go in and correct the pitch a little bit at the end."
Music For the Masses, By the Masses
 According to Cakewalk’s Chris Rice, "The tools are coming out of the ivory tower and are being put into the hands of the masses." The company's products target "everything from high-end professional musicians to ... people who never had any musical training."
"Computers are the new garage," said James Rotondi, the editor of Future Music, a new magazine packaged with enough free software to get any would-be Moby started. "A lot of people who are making music right now have never recorded to tape. The concept is completely foreign to them."
How accessible is a basement studio? GarageBand, a user-friendly band-in-a-box made by Apple, came preinstalled on 4.5 million Macs sold in the last 18 months. And Mr. Rotondi estimated that hundreds of thousands of copies of Reason, a sound-creation application produced by Propellerhead Software in Stockholm, have been sold, along with many more pirated copies.
The line between the music consumer and creator is shrinking to the point where the kid bopping his head on the bus may well be listening to a song he came up with in his bedroom.
"We are in the midst of a true consumer push to create music," said Tim Bajarin, a technology industry analyst with Creative Strategies. "They now have the ability to storyboard a song by dragging and dropping."
"Instead of one band, I can have 10," he said. "Instead of lugging a bunch of equipment to the rehearsal space, I can stay home and make music."
"We live in a world of simulation, so no one should be surprised by what is going on," Mr. Rotondi said. "Before, everybody wanted to be a guitar hero. Now they want to be a D.J. or a producer."
One result is that homegrown music is exploding, especially on the Internet. The MP3.com Web site, for example, has 200,000 artists and 1.3 million songs; about 95% of the artists are not signed to major labels, says Derrick Oien of Vivendi Universal, which owns the site.
Easy Doesn’t Always Mean Professional
Of course, the ability to do this musical sleight of hand is changing the expectations of people who hire musicians, and even of musicians themselves.
"I'll be given a show, then I have to write 40 minutes of music and I've got four days," says musician and producer Shawn Clement. Since 1994, he has worked in his home digital studio to record the scores for video games, films and TV shows, including the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
"What they expect after a week is a final, mastered, produced soundtrack."
True music professionals understand that there is still an inherent gap between a self-taught music ‘producer’ and someone who has had even minimal formal training. There are many lessons to be learned in achieving a crisp, professional sound and quality, and of course there are the many subtle nuances that separate a seasoned veteran from the weekend warrior.
RAC – Add A Professional Touch
 RAC Digital Arts College, formerly Recording Arts Canada, offers highly-regarded intensive Summer Workshops for aspiring music producers and artists. These 2- week workshops have been designed as introductory courses in the areas of Recording and Digital Music Production.
RAC’s 2-week workshops are divided into 3 components: Recording Basics, Intro to Pro Tools, and Intro to Reason, with actual hands-on training provided by professional instructors in RAC’s famous world-class studios.
Designed to give students real insight into a professional studio environment, in the Recording Basics component students will learn about the principles of sound, microphones, signal processing, and how to properly use microphone techniques in many applications.
Intro to Pro Tools , ideal for students who want to independently record their music and ideas, focuses on Digital Audio Workstations or ‘basement studios’, and takes an in-depth look at the program’s powerful capabilities, as well as impart many ‘tricks of the trade’ used by the pros.
The workshops end with Introduction to Reason, designed to educate students on the most powerful synthesis program available. Students will learn drum programming, virtual instruments, sequencing, and song arranging. This course will help you take your beats and sounds to the next level, and is perfect for any type of music
Demonstrations, student projects, and other exciting features make this course a must-have for any up and coming musician, producer, or performer’s portfolio. RAC’s twenty-plus years as one of Canada’s leading music studios and training colleges add prestige to any resume, and the contacts you will make will be invaluable. Check out RAC Digital Arts College today for more information on kick-starting that music career you’ve always dreamed of! |
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