Dappa1
Hard to break out of the production line type of production if that is how you have been taught.
My question is.
How do you learn in a new way for you to stand out? Is it better to learn by ear and be creative from day dot or, be taught to be like everyone else then create your own style? Which is quicker, better and which is the smarter move?
I have my own thoughts on this but an interesting topic, how different can we really be when all our learning is taken from somewhere?
Hey Shaun, this is where my idea of historical perspective comes in. Firstly though there is a massive problem in the production and audio engineering side of things. Although I was never a fan of the "studio" apprenticeship which was the way producers and audio engineers came up through the system from the begining to the advent of the digital age (for me it always smacked of a form of cheap labour, I have never liked apprenticeships because of this disparity when it comes to income) it did however work when music producers and audio engineers were being pushed by artists to come up with new sounds. Basicly everyone was learning.
Then something happend in the 90's artists stop pushing the envelope, or perhaps the studio system that worked for so long started to fall into a Rome type scenario: This is, the music industry was awash with money, greed and over self-belief. The first CD issues of classic recordings had been and gone, now the money men thought ah ha, and the technology allowed for the remaster game to kick in and so the market was then flooded again with "classic" remastered recordings, a second wave of money came flooding in.
The money men thought this river of gold would last forever, it didn't. The money men forgot to re-invest in research and devolpment as Pete Towshend put it, or if you like they stoped taking risks on edgy music makers. They played it safe. They were then blindsided by the digital revolution, Napstar and the advent of consumer electronics that allowed people to make quality recordings from their bedrooms.
This then flooded the market with more and more stodgy product and the rivers of gold from the re-masters market dried up. How many times can you buy Dark Side of The Moon??
It has got so bad that EMI is virtually bankrupt, they have tried unsuccessfully to sell Abbey Road. Basicly when you have to sell the silverware you know you are in trouble.
Then as Pete Townsend likes to put it, the digital vampire came along: Apple and figured a way to make money from music again but Apple refused to be a record company and just took the profits, they forgot to invest in artists, like a record company would have done in the past.
Now even Apple have been broadsided by Spotify (the most evil of all the bandits) and we are moving to this nasty subscription model, this is where nobody owns anything and nobody but the corporate vampires make money. Basicly the artist gets .004 cents for each stream, not even a cent.
Now I am sayng all of this because this is historical perspective and a good part of the reason why production sounds so homginised.
What also happened whilst this was all going on another bunch of companies moved in and used the Apple model that further homginised the music industry. You start to see the Rome scenario play out.
Rome=Music Industry, once all powerful starts to fall apart a number of smaller empire's start to feed, think Pro Tools and those odious audio engineering schools.
And (sorry I took the long way around to answer your question) here is why music is so homginised, no longer is production and audio engineering taught in the studio with top bands pushing the envelope but in these vampire schools, turning out even more green students with very little understanding of production and audio engineering skills. They think they have all the skills but in reality, there is one maybe two who have got it. Then the next problem is all the jobs are gone. Nobody but a few record in studios anymore, the dumb idiots think they can record without, and here is the punch line: historical perspective.
So to answer your question, Shaun. First get yourself imersed in the process would be my advice, learn an instrument, then start to explore the now large back catalouge of popular western music. Learn how the greats put these recordings together.
Then trawl the internet, the formula for audio engineering is there now. Don't get caught in the trap of equipment envey, I have been complemented on recordings and have had music I have recorded on TV using nothing more than a 150 dollar microphone and a 90 dollar Behringer preamp.
Once you have got to this stage, I would suggest going to audio school, just to round out the edges, as long as you go to one of these schools with a headful of knowledge, as I did, all you do is speed up the process of perfecting techniques such as EQ, Time Based Effects, Compression and Mastering.
But if you go without this knowledge, you end up in the homginsed trap because experimentation is frowned upon and it has to be perfect (this is why Danny and I fight) I don't care if it's perfect I care about feel. Do we have a great song???
Now I'm in another learning curve and this is the final phase of how to learn and to be an indivdual when it comes to audio production, this is how to transfer the classic analouge techniques we love so much from our classic recordings into digital techniques. This includes, varispeed, harmonic distortion and the list goes on. Then we can go further how do we invent new digital techniques, not just meloydyne.
Sorry I took the long way around to answer you question Shaun but this is how I learnt to be an individual in terms of production and audio engineering.
But this is the sorry part of the tale, nobody cares anymore about being an idvidual, music is consumed like McDonalds (Can I have some fries with that) and I do not see this changing in the forseeable future. Perhaps ever because music no longer is at the centre of the cultreal heart. I don't even know if culture really exsists anymore apart for the elite few.
Peace Ben