Rehashing the Recording Process: A look at the democratization of audio production
A few months ago, my band and I entered a competition, the goal of which was to help undiscovered artists get their music heard. A lot of different groups of entered, and we figured our chances of making it through to the end were pretty slim.
You can imagine our surprise, then, when we got the call that said we’d won the San Francisco Bay Area title.
“We’re in,” I said to the representative over the phone.
“Great! I’ll shoot you an email with the contract.”
Contract? I was a little surprised; there were still 50 artists left in the competition, and I’d figured signing something would only come into the picture in the event that we won. Either way, all other 50 artists would have to sign, so it had to be mostly harmless legalese.
On the surface, it was tempting. The record label would commit $100,000 to paying for studio time, recording and mastering engineers, and equipment. They would work with us the whole way, hiring a producer to help us perfect our sound and make a great record.
Reading between the lines though, there was cause for concern. The label pledged no money to actually promoting the record, but rather insisted that the cost of any promotional materials come out of our royalties (there was even a clause that said “hair-styling” was included in this). We’d also be “working for hire”; this means we wouldn’t own the rights to anything we produced, instead granting them to the label.
Perhaps this sort of deal would be permissible for a one off record, but the label had five options to renew, without artist consent. That means that we could be on the hook to produce six records for the label, with no ability to negotiate the terms of the contract.
The decision in front of us was essentially this:
- Sign the contract and either win the competition and be stuck with a deal that we’d regret for years after, or lose the competition and gain nothing.
- Don’t sign the contract and end our participation.
The choice was pretty clear to us. We didn’t sign. But 47 other artists did.
I don’t blame the label — I later learned that this is the standard sort of deal you can expect to get as an upcoming act. Artists need investors to kickstart their careers, and it makes sense that in exchange for $100,000 of what’s effectively “seed funding”, an artist should be obliged to give up the rights to their work. The label was just practicing business as usual.
Regardless, we left the experience a little disillusioned with the music business as a whole, pocketing childhood dreams of rock and roll stardom.
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That drawn out anecdote isn’t so much a complaint with the record label, or with whoever drafted and approved the contract, or even with the bands who were willing to sign it.
Rather, I found myself asking, “recorded music has been around for 160 years… why can’t we do better than this? Why do I still need to rely on other people to get my music recorded and played?”
Historically, there’s a long list of valid excuses.
One that’s frequently brought up is that making a record is expensive. Your everyday starving artist isn’t going to be able to shell out $300k for a Neve console, a Steinway from 1912, and a Dumble Overdrive Special. Recording studios exist as a service to make this gear more affordable, and record labels exist in part to help artists cover these costs.
Labels can also help with artist development. As much as we all wish we could go into a room for six hours and come out with a polished harmonic masterpiece, the reality is that the best songs are worked on by teams of dedicated musicians and producers. A great producer will help an artist build their sound without gutting them of their originality, and for that reason the best are hard to get in touch with and expensive to hire. Labels have the connections and the money to pull these people on to their artists’ projects.
Perhaps the most important function a label performs is marketing. Every serious indie producer knows a great track will go nowhere if its not put directly in front of target listeners. Labels are around to help with that. They can streamline conversations with radio stations, streaming services, and (increasingly less so) music shops to get your music heard by hordes of potential fans.
I’m going to set out to disprove all of these — my claim is that all of these problems are already solved, or that there’s a good way to solve them.
Before I dive into this in more detail, I want to make clear the difference between three terms I’m going to use a lot.
Recording is the process of producing real sounds and capturing them on a physical or digital medium. In the old days, you’d use microphones, a mixing console, and a tape machine. Swap the reel-to-reel for a mac mini, and you have the bones of a modern studio.
Mixing is what happens once all the parts of a track have been recorded. This is when an audio engineer tweaks the volume and stereo pan of each part, and applies effects like compression, equalization, and reverb (among many, many others) to create a deeper and more exciting mix.
Mastering is the final step in the music production process. After the mix has been completed, the mixing engineer typically sends it off to the “mastering engineer”. They apply subtle effects to the whole mix to ensure that it sounds good on a variety of different listening setups, is at a good uniform volume level, and is sufficiently “polished”.
Ok, let’s go.
BS Claim #1: Mixing and Mastering a Track is Expensive
Up until recently, this was the brutal truth. Before the days of digital music production software, there was no way to produce a record without thousands of dollars of funding to pay for time on the necessary equipment and to hire somebody who knew how to use it. Now, there are ways to combat and even totally avoid these costs.
In the modern music production workflow, the mixing and mastering process has been greatly simplified. Digital Audio Workstations (“DAWs”) are anywhere from free to affordable and, coupled with a digital audio interface (a device for connecting microphones to a computer), offer industry standard recording capabilities on a laptop. You no longer need a huge reel-to-reel unit to lay down a guitar part, and you don’t need to know how to glue together pieces of tape to comp a great lead vocal performance.
This isn’t to say that audio engineers are useless now. There’s still a lot to know and a lot to learn about mixing, mastering, and audio engineering. But most of the minutiae like splicing tape and patching together physical hardware units has been streamlined or done away with altogether. Now, learning to mix and master tracks is more about honing your ability to use relatively intuitive tools artistically, as opposed to learning how to operate complex physical machinery.
Acquiring these skills is also easier than it’s ever been before. The internet is overflowing with written and video tutorials (see musictech.net or this reddit thread), opinions of master audio engineers (here’s Ian Shepherd talking about “LCR Mixing”), and forums of amateurs and professionals learning and teaching the art of mixing (GearSlutz comes to mind).
While mixing is a creative and subjective process with a wide range of techniques, mastering is a more subtle art form that is, in some ways, more scientific. Some companies, like LANDR, are trying to make professional quality mastering more affordable by automating it with algorithms. This would be near impossible for the mixing process, but applied to mastering it’s actually worked quite well. These services won’t be the right thing for every track, but they’re cost effective, easy to use, and could be a good crutch to lean on before you feel comfortable mastering your own tracks.
All of this is to say that the barrier to entry to start mixing and mastering recorded music, both in terms of financial agency and trade-specific technical capability, is significantly lower than it used to be. You don’t need a record label to hire somebody to mix and master your music, and that’s a huge win for modern musicians.
BS Claim #2: Recording at Home is Impossible, Recording in the Studio is Costly
Why might this be true? Because of… rooms.
When you’re trying to capture sound, like a vocalist or acoustic instrument, you have to take into consideration the room you record in. As sound bounces around a room, certain frequencies will be accentuated or dampened, depending on the room’s shape, material, number of windows, and a whole host of other features you probably weren’t thinking of when you remodeled your bedroom.
For this reason, studios have specially treated rooms that are optimal for different recording purposes. Recording voice? Step into this acoustically dead vocal booth so we can have a completely dry base to apply effects over later. Drums? Set up the kit in this drum space with a rich short-decay ambience. Rooms are the most important resource studios have to offer.
There are plenty of startups attempting to “democratize audio production” by allowing users to record, layer, and post-process tracks on their mobile devices. I’d argue that these are doomed to fail as actual methods for recording and producing music, at least for the use case of the serious artist. No matter how great portable usb/lightning microphones get, you need a great space to record in, and no app can give that to you.
This seems to throw a wrench in our plan to cut out record labels; if you still need a label to pay for studio time so you can track all your recorded instruments… well, we’re pretty much in the same place we started.
One possible solution — though some traditionalists may want blood — is to use digital instruments as often as possible. In addition to mitigating the room problem, this can also help to solve the “nice studio gear is really expensive” problem. Rather than setting up five mics on a vintage Baldwin grand in a treated piano room, you can reach for your MIDI keyboard and Native Instruments piano sim.
Leveraging digital instruments is especially useful in certain genres; if you’re writing indie pop, indie rock, rap, neo-soul, or (clearly) electronic music, chances are digital instruments will actually make up a large portion of your mix. The unique timbre of an 808 drum machine simulator might fit the vibe of your mix way better than a real, physical drum kit.
Guitar and bass amplifiers can be close mic-ed so that the room sound isn’t noticeable, or an amp sim can be used. There’s even some “amp farm” businesses that license out time on vintage amplifiers for a cheap minute-by-minute rate, piping raw guitar signal from your laptop through an amplifier in an iso-box thousands of miles away.
Dampening reverberations by draping blankets from the walls can help to optimize a space for recording — I’ve done this many times in my closet to record vocals and it’s often been good enough for me. Additionally, ambient room noise can be filtered out of less important tracks via a digital noise gate.
That said, some things like live drums need to be recorded in a good sounding room. Biting the bullet on these is necessary to get a professional sound. The best strategy is to have your arrangement completely fleshed out and well practiced, rent a studio for one day, and record all the parts one after the other. This will usually run you a few hundred dollars, but there’s really no good alternative.
BS Claim #3: Good Producers are Hard to Connect With
Again, this isn’t wrong. Producers are people, and the best ones have offers being made to them all the time. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to shoot one an email and expect a response within the year.
It’s not really a possibility to get one great producer to help you out with your record without shelling out some serious cash. But what if you could get fifty ok producers to all give you their opinion?
This is what ReverbNation is trying to do with their “crowd reviews” platform. It works like this: you do up a demo mix of your song, upload it, and ReverbNation sends it out to a random sample of a few dozen listeners to provide “unbiased feedback”. This boils down to answering a few multiple choice questions and writing a short blurb about their opinion on your track. The final report can help give you a sense of what your strengths and weaknesses are, and in some ways can be that second opinion you often need when you’ve listened to a song so many times you don’t know what to think anymore.
In addition to commercial song advice sites, there are informal communities like Reddit’s r/wearethemusicmakers and blend.io that are built around musicians sharing useful production advice with each other and evaluating each other’s songs.
Perhaps this is one area where the stereotype about “the internet connecting the world” actually rings true. I’ve gotten some great production advice from audio engineering experts, because they troll around these forums just as often as I do. Everyone’s a music critic, and everybody can be a music teacher; taking advantage of the web to leverage this is an important step toward making music production advice accessible.
BS Claim #4: Promotion is Impossible Without Funding
Two words: Social Media.
We live in an age where more artists are discovered in the depths of YouTube than at local band shows. As artists, we have this opportunity to connect tangibly and immediately with our potential fanbase. We can curate playlists, share our songwriting processes, and upload music to the world the minute we bounce the masters out of our DAWs.
Simon Cowell (of American Idol/<country>’s Got Talent fame) says, “For the music business, social networking is brilliant. Just when you think it’s doom and gloom and you have to spend millions of pounds on marketing and this and that, you have this amazing thing now called fan power. The whole world is linked through a laptop. It’s amazing. And it’s free. I love it. It’s absolutely brilliant”.
The existence of social media introduces a new responsibility for the independent artist. You are no longer just a musician. You’re a public figure. Your fans should want to hang out with you, and following your Twitter/Instagram/Spotify feeds needs to be a way of doing that.
At any rate, regardless of how you use social media, the good news is that it’s powerful and it’s free.
Big radio stations are the least influential they’ve ever been, so label connections with them are less meaningful. Getting your music on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music is now an online form away. Services like CDBaby and SymphonicDistribution can help you license your music for TV and Film. All of the things a record label is meant to help with are now just online services!
It goes even further. Services like BandLab, RecordGram, and a host of others have come into the foreground in the past few years trying to create homes for new independent music creation, collaboration, and promotion.
I would comment on a strategy for continuing to democratize this component of music-making, but truth be told the actors in this space are doing such a great job that it’s now up to us — the music makers — to take advantage of the tools they’ve provided us with and rid ourselves of the idea that expensive ad campaigns are the only way to promote our songs.
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The music business is a space in constant flux. The more I think about it, the 160 years we’ve been working with recorded sound isn’t a lot of time, considering how far we’ve come. Even now, we’re again on the cusp of changing the way music is made for the better, of giving artists control over all aspects of the production process.
It’s a war to be fought on both sides. As much as innovators are responsible for designing new tools to unburden artists from the chains of the bad record deal, we artists need to learn how to be more than just musicians.
We need to be recording engineers who know the ins and outs of modern production tools. We need to be constant learners, seeking out advice on how to improve our songwriting and mixing wherever we can find it. Perhaps most importantly, we need to be media-savvy entrepreneurs, leveraging the power of the social networking tools at our fingertips to get our music in front of the millions of listeners trying to find their next favorite song.
Until we can rise to this challenge, we’ll just have to keep paying record labels to style our hair.
