it also makes me think that for the TRUE music head the only way to keep a sacred relationship with music any more is to make it for one's own consumption. sort of like growing one's own vegetables.
Well, not making it for yourself. That's like holding conversations with yourself. But I like the idea of making music only for people that you know personally. This is like the electronic underground returning to a kind of folk industry stage, where the line between artist and audience is erased - clusters of artists develop around certain styles with less closely aligned members hopping from group to group. Hey, the future of music is atomic theory!
I tell you, the best thing I ever did in my life was to accept that I would never make money from music. It freed me to do something genuinely productive with my life, instead of hanging around in dead end jobs waiting for my music career to 'happen'. And now I make music with people I know in mind, rather than to some abstract commercial imperitive, and I've improved light years as a producer.
it's sad to think that nobody will ever devote the money, skill and effort to making a record that went into classic records of the 70s and 80s.
Couple of things. First, let's not forget that while the great studios of yesteryear were used to make some superb records, they also made a lot of fucking terrible ones, while talented artists were unable to get thier work on tape because A&R men controlled the keys to the studio. I think we take digital recording technology and the access it gives us for granted these days
Second, you don't need a technically pristine recording to document a performance or make an exciting record: no one listens to old blues recordings and thinks 'shit, I wish Alan Lomax had done this on a 48 track Neve console'. No one listens to hardcore records and critiques the snare sound.
And I disagree that the techniques of making great recordings are dying out. More people than ever before are going to college to study music technology and learning the basic principles of mic placement, acoustics and signal processing. The increase in gigging and the lack of money available from major labels will mean that more artists are coming into the studio fresh, focussed, well rehearsed, communicating easily and realistic about what they want to achieve. Making a good record in those circumstances is not difficult. The 'voodoo' of the great producers of the past was in taking a group of fucked up individuals who were barely speaking to one another, and were too sidetracked by internal politics and money to have given much thought to the music, and somehow getting a great record out the other side. Which is rare skill, definitely, but it only existed becase of the unnatural major label enviroment that surrounded it.
I agree that mastering is unnaturally loud these days, but who cares? If people are dumb enough to want that, then fuck 'em. What matters is what's on the original recording. If that's OK, then someone in the future can always go back and do a new master when sanity prevails.
