Wanna know why mega-budget music sucks?

This is sort of old news in the pro audio world, but haven't seen it discussed here, so figured I'd point it out for serious music fans with spare time.

Over several months last year, a guy calling himself MIXERMAN posted a series of diary entries on a well visited recording/sound forum over on prosoundweb.com. MIXERMAN was supposedly working on a huge budget project with some up and coming band that had been the subject of a major label bidding war. He documented to the moronic goings on of the studio, the band, the producer, the label, and often himself.

While there is really no way to know if this series of articles is real or fiction, the series has struck such a chord in that world because every single piece in the diaries could have happened-- and even if MIXERMAN's stories are not true-- they most certanly are a composite of stories that have actually happened.

This series is real long, and occurred over several months last summer. I would encourage anyone who is remotely interested in music, especially "popular" radio music, to start reading these- it might give you a bit of a glimpse into how the stuff really goes down.

Oh, and one note that will help this make sense:
ALSIHAD is another word for “Protools”, the Digidesign Digital Audio Workstation that most professional engineers use at the “LA rock” level. There is an open disdain for Protools in some segments of the industry, and thus it has been dubbed in the pro audio discussion forum world as “Alsihad”, as in “I didn’t have a tape amchine, so I used alls-I-had.”

Here's a link to the beginning of the diary:
http://www.prosoundweb.com/recording/mm/week1/mm.php

Enjoy, and feel free to post your favorite quote from the article, or any topics you thik are interesting, here.

Actually, it just depends on the sub-niches of the industry you work in. There is a very large purist segment (like there is in any interest actually) which simply will not trade off sound quality in exchange for convience. If you're really interested in this type of stuff, I'd heartily recommend the TAPE OP magazine: it's free.

Tape Op takes more of the "music recording as art, expression as well as science" approach-- and in that world you get many people with an open disdain for ProTools (and for most DAW in general)... If you're interested, even as a hobbiest, in music recording- I would strongly suggest a subscription to TAPE OP.

I think a lot of the "Laserdisc sounds better in DD 5.1" stuff comes from the recent use of protools to transfer masters for DVD-- where this wasn't yet the defacto standard for masters and digital encoding in the mid/late 1990s.

Pro tools certainly has it's place- but it's popularity seems to stems more from the ease of use, and what some would call "cheating" of sound.



Indeed- and I pray to god they are never gone. Actually- often even on large productions with the LA drone engineers and producers, they will track drums to 2 inch tape and dump that into a DAW since there is nothing quite like good tape compression/saturation. They will then do all the drum editing in DAW...

I'm actaully always surprised at how much drum editing is done these days. With the ease of use of a DAW like protools, it's the common practice to have an assistant stay afterhours and spend all night fixing the drum tracks. This will often include hundreds of edits! It's too bad they won't just let drummers play!

-Vince

PS: There is a follow-up beyond the 8th week on the prosound web forums. I can post a link if anyone is interested.

I have also copied this whole thing and printed it out. It's like 150 pages- but I have been handing out copies to people who tell me they wanna make records for a living.

Here's where it picks up after the 8th week:

http://recpit.prosoundweb.com/viewtopic.php?t=3581

A lot of guys are real partial to RADAR. I believe that Radar is used in the mixerman sessions on bitch Slap at some point. Radar isn't as "powerful" in many ways a Pro Tools, it's often treated more as a simple hard disc system... but many guys swear by it, and have declared it to be much closer to analog that Pro Tools...

Also, at the lower end- there are some other cheaper HW/SW combos that some people use. Since PT is so expensive (Entry system is like $9-10k), there are many people who get the same or better performance using Nuendo or Logic with decent audio hw like MOTU stuff.

-Vince

As others have said- this is false- there are tons of similar systems. Really it's also very similar to any subcontracting or work-for-hire system, it's just that artists are paid based upon the income of the finished product (much like film producers or actors that atke a cut of income instead of being paid up front).

I think the major label system is completely faulty, don't get me wrong, but it's not illogical. It is just the problem that kids buy in to this "cribs" image, and feel that the pay off for making music is big cars and houses, instead of a satisfaction of making a living creating art that affects people. I get 20 emails a week on my site (musicianassist.com) from kids looking for the ticket to the big money, and I always suggest they consider law school.

-Vince