GRATITUDE - Don't bitch

[? ? ?]

I don't think that's true at all. If you're doing it right, it's hard work.

It may be true that it takes hard work to write a song but that doesn't mean it'll come.out to something one will like. If hard work paid off everybody would love their job.

Musical ideas are certainly a dime a dozen but taking them and crafting a song from them is a skill.

No skill is acquired without enthusiasm. You will not continue anything if you feel no inspiration to do so. People get good fueled by enthusiasm no matter the level of that enthusiasm. Even a droplet will get one going.

I'm not sure what you mean by an enthusiastic song but it sounds like something I would not want applied to what we do.

Stop kidding yourself. You will NEVER finish, let alone release, a song you didn't like (feel enthusiastic about),

A 32 channel mixer has 32 channels all the time. OTOH, most of our finished songs only have a dozen or so channels and when I'm getting started on something, it usually starts with just one.

Having a mouse and a qwerty keyboard is manageable regardless if you're looking at one channel or a hundred channels. A good portion of DAW users would still be intimidated walking into a studio with a mixing console even knowing or at least being familiar with what each channel does.

Adding effects in a DAW is an order of magnitude less work than adding hardware effects in a studio.

Well yes the initial patching of a new effect is more involved but once that's done it's just a matter of using the patchbay.

mics are annoying and you have to know where to place them, do your gain staging to minimise line noise, etc., etc. A lot of skills that take a lot of experience to develop.

There are numerous major label artists who have released songs containing demo recordings and I can assure you these "rock stars" didn't concern themselves with gain staging etc bullshit.
Off the top of my head, artist/bands like Ween, Third Eye Blind, Kate Bush to name a few.
And no it doesn't matter wether you like these artists or not so you can save the extra text.

[ghettosynth]

Who in that era owned all that gear in his video? Music studios or very wealthy? I doubt he and the rest of us would have had all that gear to be annoyed by it. Maybe he could have borrowed bits and pieces here and there though.

I started later in the 90s but it was with MOD trackers. Producing music in effectively a DOS spreadsheet is it's own form of punishment. Cubase today is worlds apart and such a breeze to use in comparison.

In many parts of the country a lot of that gear was super cheap in the 90s.

The context was having that gear in the 1980s though.

Where was a Prophet-5 and an OB-X super cheap then? That MPC60 wasn't cheap then either ($5000 USD in 1988 dollars or 13,000 USD in 2023 dollars) and he would have to wait until 1988 for it to be released anyways. I doubt it would have been considered cheap in the 1990s though.

Thus it is very unlikely this guy would be jamming out with such gear in the 80s from his bedroom studio. More likely he'd be using the low end portastudio with some radioshack synth or some casio board, again unless hes financially loaded or knows someone(s) who will loan him the gear.

Very true. Had a quick look at some of the prices in the Sound On Sound archive from 1985;

https://www.muzines.co.uk/mags/sos

..then using the Bank Of England's inflation calculator (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetar ... calculator) converted them to today's prices.

e.g.;

Casio CZ1 £299 to £877
Akai S612 £749 to £2148

...and that's 'entry level' type of stuff back then

No, it's not true. Your data is not going to capture the essence of my comment. In many parts of the country (the USA) some of that gear was cheap in the 90s, which is when VitaminD asserted that he started. I think that 1985 in the video is a bit of a stretch as the MPC wasn't released then. Really, he's showing a late 80s early 90s low cost non-midi setup. As I said, that was an attainable setup at that point in time in some parts of the U.S. If that's a 16 track tape, well, that was still pricey, but most of the rest of that gear wasn't expensive, some of it was ultra cheap, e.g., the mixer.

I was playing music in 1985. My mates had a similar set of low end equivalent gear in a small home studio. No, no MPC, that wasn't released until later, but the way one worked was similar, particularly with respect to the topic of this thread. The Fostex A8 came out in 1982 at about 1200 pounds, I don't know what it was in the U.S., I wasn't buying that type of gear then. By 1985 they were certainly available used at about half that price. Ok, no MPC, but in this context the MPC can be replaced by a drum machine and a mirage, which is what my mates used.

I had a lot more typed, but frankly I really don't care. But don't kid yourself, in podunk USA, analog gear was way cheaper than you can fantasize about from about the mid-80s through the mid 90s. In fact, the expensive stuff was the digital sequencing/sampling gear.

[VitaminD]

Who in that era owned all that gear in his video? Music studios or very wealthy? I doubt he and the rest of us would have had all that gear to be annoyed by it. Maybe he could have borrowed bits and pieces here and there though.

I started later in the 90s but it was with MOD trackers. Producing music in effectively a DOS spreadsheet is it's own form of punishment. Cubase today is worlds apart and such a breeze to use in comparison.

In many parts of the country a lot of that gear was super cheap in the 90s.

The context was having that gear in the 1980s though.

Where was a Prophet-5 and an OB-X super cheap then? That MPC60 wasn't cheap then either ($5000 USD in 1988 dollars or 13,000 USD in 2023 dollars) and he would have to wait until 1988 for it to be released anyways. I doubt it would have been considered cheap in the 1990s though.

Thus it is very unlikely this guy would be jamming out with such gear in the 80s from his bedroom studio. More likely he'd be using the low end portastudio with some radioshack synth or some casio board, again unless hes financially loaded or knows someone(s) who will loan him the gear.

Very true. Had a quick look at some of the prices in the Sound On Sound archive from 1985;

https://www.muzines.co.uk/mags/sos

..then using the Bank Of England's inflation calculator (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetar ... calculator) converted them to today's prices.

e.g.;

Casio CZ1 £299 to £877
Akai S612 £749 to £2148

...and that's 'entry level' type of stuff back then

No, it's not true. Your data is not going to capture the essence of my comment. In many parts of the country (the USA) some of that gear was cheap in the 90s, which is when VitaminD asserted that he started. I think that 1985 in the video is a bit of a stretch as the MPC wasn't released then. Really, he's showing a late 80s early 90s low cost non-midi setup. As I said, that was an attainable setup at that point in time in some parts of the U.S. If that's a 16 track tape, well, that was still pricey, but most of the rest of that gear wasn't expensive, some of it was ultra cheap, e.g., the mixer.

Wait wait.. I did NOT assert prices in the 1990s for the gear. I said *I* started with trackers in the 1990s. My first paragraph and my second paragraph weren't linked.

But where exactly was a Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 and a Oberheim OB-X selling for 'cheap' in the 1980s? What do you consider cheap?

Both of those were well over a thousand dollars in working condition back then, likely closer to two. And a dollar went further back then as people made less of them. So multiply between 2.5 to 3 for current dollar amounts.

And, again, that drum machine was 5000 dollars in 1988 and that's like $13000 in today's dollars. I doubt many bedroom producers had those as a result. I wouldn't consider that cheap. Would you? Maybe our budgets are different.

The context for my first paragraph was directly in relation to the youtube video of the young man jamming with a bunch of particular gear that would have been very expensive in the 1980s. The point was he wasn't realistic in his view of the average 80s bedroom producer. One may have owned one of those, I doubt many owned all of those.

If he wants to have a more realistic experience, he needs to pare down his budget and start using some less exciting, old gear. Then let's hear his jam.

[PatchAdamz]

In 1985 I was still completely focused on live performance so, even though I had a Fostex X15, I only ever recorded stereo to tape. In my mind, multi-track recording is what you did in a studio, not what I did at home. Realistically, that continued right through my hardware days and only changed when we went ITB in the early 2000's.

First machine I ever purchased was the Fostex Model 250 4-Track Cassette Recorder.
Back then it wasn't cheap ($1000). It sounded surprising good for a 4 track cassette machine.
I got hired by the band Scream to come to their house and record them which they later came to my house and did the vocals. The recording is on one of their releases.


I moved up to 8 track reel to reel (Tascam).
Then got hired by Unrest to do several of their releases on TeenBeat Records.
Those LPs were done live in the studio and mixed, all in about 4-5 hours.


I mentioned these because your likely one of only people on KVR who knows these bands and may have had the recordings. The DC underground scene was thriving then and a bunch of those bands were in the studio and recorded on this stuff.

Funny note, at that time I was working in a kite shop downtown, a few doors down, Henry Rollins was serving ice cream at the Häagen-Dazs, I bet he spit in it....



The underground music scene in DC was a powerful contrast to the city that is the seat of US government and at that time all rockets were burning.....

[BONES]

I was looking at that pic and thinking "that can't be Rollins but it really does look like him". Ha!

[PatchAdamz]

I was looking at that pic and thinking "that can't be Rollins but it really does look like him". Ha!

Yea, its him...Here is one of Dave when he was in scream.....
(He didn't have to sell Ice Cream...)

Dave G.png

[harryupbabble]

does pat smear scream like a germ?

and why would georg albert ruthenberg
change his name to something so
similar to pap smear?

also, why would james osterberg
change his name to something so
similar to biggy poop?

i just, i just
don't understand

[ZacCorey]

definitely grateful here and definitely not bitching
daws are almost as good as real recording studios?
what's to bitch and be ungrateful about?

well, the internet seemed to have killed the "supergroup"
where are the led zeppelins and pink floyds now?
heck, where are the billy joels and the paul and carly simons?
and the robert smiths and the freddie mercurys?
and the bowies and other prolific young dudes and gals?

well, there's taylor swift
and that's it?
kinda sparse compared to before?

still, i'm so glad that i'm living in this era
sure, the 60s and 70s are the decades
when so many more songwriters were busy being great
well, it just seems like that to me
maybe the 2030s will be another "songwriter" decade

unlike pete townshend...
i hope i don't die before i get old
i actually wanna see what's ahead

vlad, don't push that red button
please

How much of todays output will be listened to in 20 years time?