Music Production
In the early 1970's, my only means of recording songs was an old, much battered and bruised, single track reel to reel tape recorder. It was pretty unforgiving - you could record once and playback but little else. I had the, then, very exciting chance of three hours in a four track studio in the mid 1970's but three hours goes by in a flash. Once the excitement had died down, I came to the conclusion that to create the sort of thing I was wanting to produce would need much more than three hours. We did use the time but ended up playing live and the resulting sound bled from each instrument to every other track. So, the final result was disappointing to say the least.
Still in the mid 1970's, I bought a second- hand two track reel to reel recorder together with a small mixer. This was great at first, allowing sound on one track to be re-recorded onto the other with another instrument. In principle, this was wonderful, as long as the bassier instruments (Drums & bass) were recorded first, then guitar and keyboard & finally the vocal. However, this sort of approach often resulted in really poor recording quality. This was made much worse when one of the tracks stopped recording altogether and the machine went into a repair shop. When it was returned, it worked but the two tracks were not recording at the same level or quality & despite multiple returns to the repair shop, it never had the quality I was looking for.
The TASCAM Portastudio was the first four-track recorder based on a standard compact audio cassette tape. The Portastudio, known as the Teac 144, was too expensive for me at the time but it certainly launched effective home-recording , allowing musicians to cheaply record and produce music at home.It enabled musicians to affordably record several instrumental and vocal parts on different tracks of the cassette recorder individually and later blend all the parts together. The Tascam Portastudio 244, introduced in 1982, improved upon the previous design with overall better sound quality and more features, including: dbx noise reduction, dual sweepable EQ's, and the ability to record on up to 4 tracks simultaneously. In general, these machines were typically used by musicians to record demos, although they are still used today in lo-fi recording.
In 1982, I spent , what was for me, a huge sum of money on a 244. I only had two cheap condenser mic's and an old dynamic microphone but the ability to use four tracks was a godsend. The quality of recordings I produced was nowhere near as good as some of the professional musicians who used them for demo's but it was still a huge leap-up for me. It also was my first real step on learning how to produce music.
In 1985, I managed to get a job in another part of the country and my instruments and the 244 were mothballed.
By 1991, I was producing training videos, using Umatic & betamax video recorders and looked around for some software to be able to mix music with voice-overs. I came across 'Cool edit Pro' (Terriblle name!) which was being used by the BBC and that was my first real venture into computer based recording. Later that year or perhaps in 1992, I bought 'Cakewalk pro audio'. Although I've tried many different platforms over the years, ranging from an early 'Pro tools' to 'Cubase', 'Studio one' and too many others to mention, I remained loyal to the Twelve tone company and their cakewalk products, upgrading through each version of Cakewalk, then to Sonar and lastly to platinum. Unfortunately, Gibson bought the product in around 2013 and it suffered from several unresolved bugs, which caused me to try other products. I stuck with 'Reaper' & 'Cubase' for a time until in early 2018, when Bandlab technologies bought the rights and gave the revised product away for free. I had mixed feelings about this - mainly because I'd spent a fortune on buying the product & upgrades over the years.
To be fair, Bandlab breathed a new lease of life into Cakewalk, fixing bugs & providing upgrades, often on a monthly basis. So, I came back to Cakewalk in 2018 and still use it to this day.
Producers tend to favour one Digital Audio workstation (DAW) over another but the truth is that if you've grown up with a product and it works, you are most likely to stick with it , mainly because the learning curves are quite steep. Generally speaking, they all record audio and MIDI, so choice is more about preference than true differences in quality. More important is often the audio interface attached to the computer.
Whilst the interface I use is not a 'top-end' device, its pre-amps compare favourably with other interfaces in that price range (i.e. under £300) and it does all I need, with the bonus of having midi input.
So, that's a brief overview of how things have changed over my time in the music scene. I may expand this section to include production techniques in the future.