Metal Reviews

I stopped reading there. What kind of reasoning is that?

I'm sure stevelovesmoonspell made Adverser's day by starting a thread like this.

I like talking about audio a lot. I'm kinda surprised how long the posts are considering that I am just scratching the surface.

I don't use pro tools, I use basically all old-school recording techniques that will work for every single interface and system ever used. I've never worked with master quality tape before, but their use is fairly uncommon these days. I've used cassettes to death so it's likely not problem to learn in a few hours.

Edit:

I actually started out using Creative wave studio. I believe it was stereo only, so I had to tweak everything just about perfectly and mix as I went to do anything other than two tracks. At that time I wasn't really a musician, so it was being used for remastering or remixing the stereo tracks. I started out using a friends 24 track mixing console and his 16 track digital recorder, all mic'd up and done in the old school professional way with a decent amount of outboard gear to work with the signals. Then when I had a mac, I used Garage Band briefly. Now I use audacity exclusively now that we have a few good and really fast windows machines around the house, all running XP Pro.

The fact that I have done everything the right way by the old standards and can work without a computer ever getting involved (until the mastering, naturally) is why I've learned so much. People that own a couple microphones and downloaded audacity and claim to be audio engineers are liars. That and I have electronics degree, which used to be the main prerequisite to touch studio gear.

Trust me folks, I know what I'm doing. I've mixed as much raw recorded material as anyone, but it was all just friends recording cover tunes and for me, learning how to sing. nothing anyone will ever hear if I can help it!

I'm aware that I probably come off as having a control freak personality since I do everything, but that is because I have the training to do so.

Well I also have an extremely basic idea of what recording onto tape involves and what recording onto computer involves. Doesn't really matter though since the "why" isn't what's at issue.

It certainly wasn't harder, but it was time consuming, noodles, and back then you were paying a couple thousand dollars a day for a studio at the very least. Nowadays, all the wannabes have unlimited time. Back then though it was almost like they had everything set up to go in and do a cookie cutter recording and mix and if you wanted to deviate from that it was gonna get expensive and impractical.

Tom Scholz didn't take 6 and 9 years, respectively, to create his third and fourth albums because he was nuts and obsessive, which he was. It was because that is how much time it takes to do something unique when dealing with strictly analog. He also worked a part-time schedule. When he was doing Boston full time in the 70's it took him about 2 years to do an album because he started from scratch and would physically build an effect he wanted if he couldn't find it or it wasn't in existence.

A little bit of sidetracking, but one could argue that these days most "studio engineers" do cookie cutter mixes as well that revolves around using preset patches and not tweaking or building their own from scratch too. Given the amount of time and ease of editting these days it pains me to listen to the same sounds, namely the "Djent" movement which seems to have the same guitar tone and drum plug-in across every single song. And don't get me started on "synth" players either .

Anyway~