15 Jun
2009
15 Jun
'09
5:36 p.m.
On Tue, 2 Jun 2009, Jostein Chr. Andersen wrote:
I was much more productive in the late seventies and
in the eighties:
I used to record guitars and vocals and bounce the tracks between two
stereo compact cassette recorders. When I had a little more money, I
got a 909, FB-01 , a JX8P (wonderful synth) and a KORG SQD-1
sequencer, but still into a compact cassette recorder or two. Not much
of equipment and the record quality was poor - but it was more than
enough for making demos and doing stuff. A local radio station in
Oslo, where I lived at the time, was even playing 6-7 of my songs in a
program in '88 or '89; still recorded with SQD-1 and cassette
recorders. Even back then, the local radio stations did compress the
music so hard that everything sounded like shit, so my equipment was
sufficient for that too.
I'm still catching up with old emails, so sorry about responding to a
thread so late...but...this is so true!
I also was more productive with sequencing and recording in the 80's.
I worked with tape. It never sounded like what you put into it, but it
also didn't sound bad when you did it right. I got way more done. To
this day, I don't sequence on the computer, and I have lots of hardware
synths, hardware drum machines, hardware rack effects, and I like to
play keyboard, guitar, and drum parts with real keyboards, guitar, and
drums. When I do program drum machine parts, it greatly carries over
that I can actually play drums, and don't have to go begging on the
Internet for a library of "loops" or something. I think that makes me
some kind of fossil. :)
But still the computer demands so much attention, and it gets it too,
because it promises so much. Computers are really diabolical that way.
Today, I have everything (and much more) I dreamed of
thanks to the
myriad of wonderful Linux audio apps and gizmos, but the productivity
is like shit. It's time to concentrate on #1 and #2 and just make
music.
I remember when Ardour wasn't at v1.0 yet, there was a disclaimer on the
web site that said something to the effect that it wasn't ready yet to
be equivalent to much more than a stack of ADAT's. I was like, "Oh
good! I really don't *want* my recording platform to do much more than
a stack of ADAT's!" I don't expect my DAW to do much with effects, EQ,
sequencing, sampling, or any of that. It's a recorder!
And I still don't use most of Ardour's features...
(Of course it's nice when your audio card *sounds* better than a stack
of ADAT's. ADAT ADC's are so *cold*!)
--
+ Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin + banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago + eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. + Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute + we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky