Comment expensive != good sound quality (Score 0) 820
When you spend more than, say, $10,000 on a recording:
1. You are paying for the producer/engineer's time. Odds are, if it costs this much, he also recorded Hendrix, Beatles, Dylan or some other larger-than-large act, or has some other sort of whacked-out, expensive credentials.
2. You are paying for 'studio tricks.' For example, one thing that indie music is good for is raw, unedited, undressed recordings (mostly). They aren't laden with punch-ins, vocal assistance, drum triggers, samples, etc, etc. Grab any song from mainstream (major label) radio and listen hard enough, and you'll know what I'm talking about.
I am by no means a professional engineer, but I've had a home-built studio in my house long enough to know that major-label recordings (the really expensive ones) usually sound like shit to me, if for no other reason than because I can hear all the unnatural crap that they saturate the recordings with to make it digestable for the mainstream.
It's almost as if, in the music industry's naive youth, a standard was set or a rule was defined that said that for a recording to be good, it had to be saturated in large hall reverb, have dynamic delay on the 4 simultaneous vocal tracks, use amp simulation on the 44 guitar tracks and use pre-sampled drum triggers for the drums to pass off as legit. Do you ever just want to hear what the musicians really SOUND like? Me too! Hopefully this bullshit ideal will die with the music industry.
I'm really not trying to be a troll or something...I'm just trying to illustrate that it REALLY doesn't cost that much to make a recording. It's actually very cheap. I said $10,000 at the top of this post, but even that is WAY more than I'd ever spend for "perfection."
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z
1. You are paying for the producer/engineer's time. Odds are, if it costs this much, he also recorded Hendrix, Beatles, Dylan or some other larger-than-large act, or has some other sort of whacked-out, expensive credentials.
2. You are paying for 'studio tricks.' For example, one thing that indie music is good for is raw, unedited, undressed recordings (mostly). They aren't laden with punch-ins, vocal assistance, drum triggers, samples, etc, etc. Grab any song from mainstream (major label) radio and listen hard enough, and you'll know what I'm talking about.
I am by no means a professional engineer, but I've had a home-built studio in my house long enough to know that major-label recordings (the really expensive ones) usually sound like shit to me, if for no other reason than because I can hear all the unnatural crap that they saturate the recordings with to make it digestable for the mainstream.
It's almost as if, in the music industry's naive youth, a standard was set or a rule was defined that said that for a recording to be good, it had to be saturated in large hall reverb, have dynamic delay on the 4 simultaneous vocal tracks, use amp simulation on the 44 guitar tracks and use pre-sampled drum triggers for the drums to pass off as legit. Do you ever just want to hear what the musicians really SOUND like? Me too! Hopefully this bullshit ideal will die with the music industry.
I'm really not trying to be a troll or something...I'm just trying to illustrate that it REALLY doesn't cost that much to make a recording. It's actually very cheap. I said $10,000 at the top of this post, but even that is WAY more than I'd ever spend for "perfection."
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z
