What is “Pro” Audio Anyway
I have been listening to more and more “professionally” produced recordings (commercial and locally produced) that make my ears bleed. Ok not bleed, but hurt. Ok not hurt but just want to close up and fall off.
I started thinking about how audio recording gear gets better and better and better. And cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. But that is not translating into better recordings. It is truly amazing what kind of quality can be had (relatively speaking) with a $200 interface, a good piece of software and good plug-ins. All you need now is a decent pair of monitors, and there are quite a few out there around $500.
So for a few thousand of dollars anyone can have a setup that would rival much more expensive recording setups of 10 years ago. They can have “unlimited” time to work on their music, the production, the sound. They can make a CD, or high quality MP3, or heck, a surround sound DVD. If you think your dog will enjoy the upper frequencies record the whole thing in 96K to boot, disk space is cheap (but more on that rant on another post).
Yet people who are paid to the job of recording are producing sub-par material. I know people who have paid a lot of money to “known” local producers and stuff sounds dead. And I have heard productions from guys working on their laptops that are better than commercially released material.
We all know the days where “pro” recording meant at least $50-100K in gear are gone. It just seems like not all of have realized yet that behind the expensive gear there is know-how, good hearing, musicianship and ultimately love and care.
Can anyone make a plug-in that makes bad producers good?
P.S. What is everyone using for “reference” recordings? Anything made in the past couple of years? I have heard a few “singles” that were very well done, but no albums as a whole.
Edmund
Posted July 9th, 2009
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2 Comments
EdmundJuly 10th, 2009
Excellent point. I should have made it more clear I am in no way equating "being paid for" as being good at. Part of my frustration is that I am finding many "amateurs" as in not paid to do music/production doing better work than "professionals" as in being paid.
And from my technical viewpoint there are many "professional" tools that really aren't that good.
Kerry GallowayJuly 9th, 2009
One problem to me lies in the ambiguity of the term "professional". It can either be meant literally - one makes one's living from it - or more generally in terms of one's respect for the craft; one's striving for excellence, adherence to standards/principles etc.
Lots of folks fall into one but not the other. To call someone "not a professional" - whether musician, coder, athlete, chef - has a very different flavor in my book than saying someone is "not professional". Maybe it's just my own loading of the terms, but one seems to me to be a simple statement of fact and the other feels pretty strongly pejorative.
Maybe the problem lies in the assumptions we make as a society. We speak the word "professional" as if the *monetization* of any art represents its highest pinnacle of achievement. That hasn't always (or even often) been my experience.
As Bill Evans states so well in this brilliant video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm6V7bWnVpw
"... I do not agree that the layman's opinion is less of a valid judgement of music than that of the professional musician. In fact, I would often rely more on the judgement of a sensitive layman than that of a professional, since the professional, because of his constant involvement with the mechanics of music, must fight to preserve the naivete that the layman already possesses."
Hard for me to separate out the sonics from the beauty of the music - I'm a producer/musician rather than an engineer. And none of these are particularly new. But I've been enjoying Nitin Sawhney's "Prophesy" lately - not really referencing to it, but certainly drawing inspiration from it. For sonics, been enjoying Beady Belle's "Cewbeagappic".
And for sheer musical excellence and flat-out *joy*, lately it's been the earlier works of Rosa Passos. If you like Braziliana, there are cuts in her "Greatest Hits" album that are sheer musical perfection. The mixes may not be "North American Commercial Nashville/NYC/LA Puppy Mill Formula", but there's a striking beauty in the way it all gels.