I tend to think of going into the studio as a bit like catching a cab home with only a fiver in your pocket. You know the money won't get you where you want to be, but you try to get as close as possible before you are kicked out. Many unsigned bands enter those beautiful acoustically treated, gear laden rooms to have their creativity strangled by budget. Hurriedly performing their work to a person who has probably never heard them strike a note before.
Now let me be clear because it's not that I don't like professional studios, I know some great guys who work in them. My band just can't afford them. It's not that I don't love expensive gear. Those oh-so valuable microphones hanging in their shock mounts like Jesus cradled in Marys arms are a thing of beauty. I just can't afford those either.
These days so much music is written with software that it seems traditional format bands with actual instruments are expected to sound just as synthetic as their binary coded counter parts. When Zeppelin recorded the drums for ‘When the Levee Breaks’ they did so in a stairwell. Proof in point that an expensive acoustic treatment is no substitute for an experimental approach. In contrast when they recently produced 'Celebration Day' Jason Bonhams drums were beefed up with samples. The bass guitar alone was assigned 15 tracks in an effort to wring the most from every harmonic. It’s all well and good to make the best use of technology, but I think the techniques are pushing it too far and having a detrimental effect on the ability to create. Anybody who is familiar with ‘The Loudness Wars’ knows that what the label wants, isn’t in the interest of the end listener. They are there to manipulate a marketplace that the majority of us aren’t a part of. The majority of us want to make the music we love and be able to document that in some format. We're often told that MP3 quality is shit. Well that's true, relatively. I remember owning cassettes that were 5th hand recordings with more hiss than a basket of snakes I still played them ragged because it was the tunes that mattered. Lots of acts such as Sebadoh, Pavement, Guided By Voices and many more have made landmark recordings that were completely LoFi. Today most people own a computer capable of audio quality that would piss from a great height upon the 4 track Portasounds of old. And for the price of less than a week in a typical studio you can buy yourself the equipment to record your band. OK, so there's a learning curve, and it's fairly steep, but I'm a big believer in skills for life. Remember when you couldn't even play an instrument for toffee? Well now you can. The same attitude to recording can see you support your musical ambitions for life.
@praisetheloud
