Many of you will know the name Bobby Owsinski from the several recording and production books he has authored over the years. His texts are common resources at recording schools. I’ve used some of his writing in my own production courses, at the high-school level.
Not surprisingly Owsinski, has a blog, well worth reading regularly:
http://bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com/
“Let’s start with a proposition…High-quality recording is style-agnostic.”
— George Massenburg
OK, sorry for the hyperbole. And, in truth, we don’t yet know if it’s the end of Abbey Road. But it doesn’t look good, no matter which news outlet you follow.
CNN: EMI to sell iconic Abbey Road studios
Guardian UK: EMI puts Abbey Road studios up for sale
MSNBC: Beatles’ Abbey Road studio on the block
NPR: EMI Seeks Buyer For Abbey Road Studios
Gearslutz debate incessantly whether Abbey Road will close
My buddy Keller Glass recently posted an amusing reaction on his blog to a December NPR piece on the Loudness War. In his post, Keller offered a succinct differentiation of dynamic-range compression and digital compression—two often-confused audio concepts. (The part where he compares encoding MP3s to excoriating flesh is especially nice.)
I’d actually heard the NPR essay and had planned on writing something in response. What follows, then, might be considered a companion piece to Keller’s writing, and perhaps the beginning of a friendly dialog between blogs on this and other subjects.
___________________________________
There is a penchant in popular discourse for using language of conflict to characterize our reaction to any pervasive cultural affliction. It’s a tendency shared by politicians, pundits, and common individuals. We’ve embarked famously on a “war on drugs,” a “war on poverty,” a “war on terror,” and now (with appropriate anticlimax) a war on…“loudness”?
Such phrases are supposed to be inspiring, as they tacitly cast us in a heroic struggle against an insidious—if frustratingly abstract—foe. The problem with such rhetoric, however rousing, is that it isn’t particularly useful: How exactly do you wage a war on poverty—or loudness for that matter—anyway?
I’ll probably get slammed for this, but I couldn’t resist. Watch the attached video and try to figure out if Spoon (I love Spoon. I really do. Let me rhapsodize about them for a moment…) got their most recent record (the wonderful Transference) mastered by renowned Masterdisk engineer Howie Weinberg (who has done projects for, um, U2, Nirvana, The Clash, and The Chili Peppers, to name a few)—or by Joe Pesci.
In all seriousness, it’s priceless. My favorite part is when Weinberg asks “How do you leak a record? Do you have to put it on a web site to do that?” Or perhaps when he explains how his photo ended up on the back of a Public Enemy record.
Good fun. Enjoy.
Calling all ProTools users, there’s a new (well, to me, at least) blog out there dedicated to Digidesign’s (err, Avid’s) “Advanced Instrument Research” group—the folks responsible for designing and updating the company’s latest virtual instruments and plug-ins.
Here’s their home-page greetings:
Welcome to the AIR Users Blog, a huge community for users of Pro Tools and AIR. Over the last months it has grown to bring an even greater remit and advice to the community, expanding into other areas of software and instruments used by the music community.
We get around 40,000 visitors a month checking out over 500 free patches for Structure, over 100 HD FREE videos and much more, so welcome.
Go check it out.
In today’s music-making climate, to suggest that the recording studio should be considered an “instrument”—no less a compositional tool than the piano or guitar—is a bit like saying the world is round, digital files will supplant CDs, and the demise of the traditional record industry is imminent. It’s one of those blithe claims someone makes at a cocktail party—like “isn’t it cold of late”—to which everyone within earshot inanely nods.
What follows is a rather lengthy preamble to an amusing video. If you’re not feeling the rant, skip ahead to the link and circle back for my discursive remarks.
If you’re a recording engineer, mixer, producer—or even hobbyist—you’ve almost certainly been involved at one point or another in the mother of all music-production debates. No, I don’t mean Beatles or Stones, Les Paul or Strat, Neve or API, or even (for you real geeks) U47 or Tele 251. I’m talking about a dispute far more divisive, far more inflammatory, and far more prone to bluster and propaganda: Digidesign or, well…every other gear manufacturer.
This is the inaugural post in a series highlighting great recording studio web sites. Future studios will be selected not merely for the quality of their facilities but for how appealing, innovative, and informational their web presence. I suppose this means I’m launching a category of posts that is, at the core, pornographic. At least for studio geeks. Our first selection is Chicago’s Electrical Audio, home of legendary engineer and audio iconoclast Steve Albini. (I’d have called him a “producer,” as well, but as you may well know, he doesn’t like to be called that.) Electrical is one of America’s most distinctive recording facilities, from it’s old-school, analog-centric production ethos to its peculiar (and uniquely-named) acoustic spaces, to the maverick reputation of its founder.