This is an exerpt from

June 24, 2003

This is an exerpt from something I wrote for an upcoming issue of Canadian Musician. You'll have to keep checking your newstands to get the full deal....

The great thing about technology is that it can be used to make things better. The problem with technology is that, before you can say "I forgot the music" it can also pave a direct route right around you and lead you quickly up a tunnel and into your own back entrance.
Technological advances in recording over the last 10 or 15 years have turned almost every musician on the planet into some form of recording engineer. I, for one, have waited for these salad days for my whole musical career. Anyone who hears something in their head and cannot figure out a way to get someone else to capture it for them has suffered agonizing pain. Man plays guitar in studio. Guitar sounds like angels whispering of endless sexual gratification. Man experiences performance of a lifetime. Man ventures into control room. Guitar sounds like dolphins farting through a wiffleball. Engineer says, "man this tone is sweeeet". Man is deflated and goes to bathroom to escape. Man stares balefully into toilet at his own distorted reflection and ponders the truth of Dad’s old "goodbye cruel world" bumper sticker.
I’ve always been evangelical in my belief that all musicians should learn how to record themselves. This doesn’t mean they should always do so. It just means they can learn to communicate what they want when they know what they want and defer to someone else when they don’t know what they want. The multitrack cassette machine opened up my world like a New York bus pass. I felt like the first kid on my block to split an atom. That crazy thing taught me about bussing, mixing, overdubbing, pre-amp levels, mic techniques...all kinds of things. Most rock musicians learn to play by ear (trial and error). These modern wonders made it affordable to learn to record by trial and error in the same way and in all in the same bedroom. One was limited enough by the 4 or 8 available tracks that a lot of decisions had to be made along the way. You had to throw away and combine things to get to an end result. You had no choice but to comp your 16 guitar ideas down to one or two. Sometimes you just had to learn how to play all 16 at once -- hence the popularization of two handed finger tapping in the ‘80s. Learning to make those decisions ended up being the most valuable thing I took away from each demo or experiment. Knowing how to make certain decisions can turn you into a ...God help me ‘cause I’m going to use the word... producer.
Personal multitracking entered its "stocking stuffer" era when it became available in the form of a little box and some affordable software. For the price it costs to spend one day in a top drawer recording studio mom and dad can buy junior a full recording studio. With a little elbow grease they can fit it in his or her stocking. Junior’s guitar and amp now cost more than the friggin' studio. Now people collect mics and recording peripherals like they collect stompboxes, turntables or string winders. Its a beautiful thing. I’m not saying that all these devices sound as good as the vintage stand alone stuff but they certainly can compete -- that old audio nerd debate makes me sleepy. I stopped using analog tape back in about 1995 or ‘96. I started with a couple of those first Roland hard disk units and never looked back -- they’re for sale if anyone wants them. All of a sudden I could collaborate with myself like I collaborated with other musicians. I could fly things around in time and space and copy and paste them like in a word processor. Ideas could be test driven at lightning speed and the happy accidents were glorious. The creative upside for a songwriter remains HUGE. Good ideas and performances don’t need much more than the technology that is available to anybody. Demo recordings no longer have to be demo recordings. Your first ideas can now be well recorded so freshness is sealed in and not lost to poor audio quality or the drudgery of repeated performance. Great first takes that have a note or two to fix can be fixed without compromising the original performance. That aspect of "autotuning" or "cutting and pasting" can keep a truly organic performance pure and alive. It can keep spirits up when you are, in fact, "producing".No studio clock ticking. No "red light syndrome". All the time in the world and no pressure to get it right the first time. Anyone can seize the day. We have touched the underside of heaven! Here’s the rub.
The next step was trading up to the "magic music television" of the computer based recording platform. These little flight simulators can actually fly! With this step it is possible to accidentally fall into the virtual world and NOT seize the ACTUAL day. With all the video game effects and visual aids it might be getting tougher to learn how to make decisions about what constitutes a great performance and what "mistakes" are necessary. Yes. I said, "mistakes are necessary".