Cheap Audio Production

OneInEveryCrowd writes "Rolling Stone reports that four out of five new albums are now produced by a program called Pro Tools (or similar packages) that costs $495 for the home version or $15,000 for the pro version. The article describes a fairly amazing savings in time and effort compared to the older ways of producing an album. I realize that a talented producer can cost a lot of money and some bands drink a lot of beer, but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"

What about Protux?

[ghost1911]

THere's an open source tool that I just started playing with called Protux [sourceforge.net] that just happens to be very similar to protools, but has a smooth keyboard and mouse interface. So... I guess the point of this post is that for $495 you can get the industry standard but for $0 you can get the "free" and "almost function complete-similar" tool that you could contribute $500 worth of work into to make better... IMHO a better deal :)

Um, maybe

[kalidasa]

because the bands pay production costs most of the time. Here's a better question: when CDs first came out, their outrageous price versus cassettes was justified by the fact that there were only 2 stamping plants in operation. Why didn't they ever go down in price?

ProTools is a large reason modern music sucks

[Faggot]

ProTools, while of course being immensely powerful and featureful, is responsible for many pervasive problems with modern music:

• over-compression of everything (ever notice how most modern music is the same volume all the time?)
  
• voice-tuning (as debuted by Cher on "Love After Life"). able to make a crappy singer perfectly on-key, and since it's matured a little it's much harder to notice
  
• lifelessness resulting from using the "best" parts of a recording session (a riff here, a drum fill there, a bassline there) to collage together a song. the resultant music is (surprise!) devoid of the life which comes from musicians interacting with each other
  
• the same effects make it into modern songs at the same time. unoriginal overuse of ProTools plugins

it's depressing how such a featureful tool is used mainly for evil.

Not as cheap as it seems ...

[Mike610544]

Even with the slickest low cost hard disk recording system, there are still several other important items involved in making a good sounding recording.

1.) Microphones: It's very easy to spend $30K on mics for drums alone. Using cheap mics makes things sound like ... well like you used cheap mics.

2.) Recording Space: Without an Acoustically good space in which to record, it's easy to end up with a real thin "inside a tin can" sound.

3.) Engineer/Producer: Even in a high-end pro studio, results will be poor without some talented people running things (both technically and aesthetically.) Pro tools systems work especially well for electronica/hip-hop/modern r&b where real recording of real instruments are rare, but to get a really professional sound out of a live band, there are very few alternatives to spending some serious (sure less serious than even 10-15 years ago) money.

Re:Why? Hmmm.... let me think

[Anonymous Coward]

That's correct, but there's another aspect to the question which keeps me wondering: With studio costs rapidly decreasing and distribution costs almost 0 thanks to the internet, shouldn't there be a lot more competition, driving prices down? Word-of-mouth promotion is incredibly powerful, if the music is great, and publicity should follow naturally, right? That's the real question: Why isn't there more competition, now that every garage band has access to professional grade production equipment?

They have one themselves too:

[delphi125]

http://www.digidesign.com/ptfree/ [digidesign.com]

http://www.digidesign.com/ptfree/ptfree_qa.html [digidesign.com]

Free as in beer, obviously, and limited, but hey - beer good!

Savings? well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not so sure... I mean, sure it's 15k for the pro version and all... But that's just the protools setup, and if I remember right, not a large one... Besides all the interfaces, firewire drives, computers and mixing boards, a studio still has to have mics (which good ones cost thousands) eqs, effects modules (better reverb units can cost around 15-20k), vintage equipment for artists who like that sort of thing, special computing equipment and enclosures, and so on and so on and so on... Not to mention that audio recording requires specifically designed space to do it in (with soundex and all of that). It seems like if they even *suspect* you might do something audio related with a product, they slap a few hundred bucks on it...

Besides, protools has been the recording industry's baby for years and years... It's not too new... (most refuse to use anything else, despite some of it's shortcomings)

To me, not much has become cheaper... And where things have become cheaper, the industry has found ways to stay expensive... *grin*

Re:Why? Hmmm.... let me think

[PacketCollision]

Despite the natural reaction to such a thread (I mean who doesn't want to bash the recording industry?) the fact of the matter is that studios are still very expensive. Add to Protools (which, in the configurations I've worked with, could easily cost over $30,000) all the other gear, and a studio can easily cost in the 100s of thousands to build. A good recording engineer isn't cheap either, nor is a good mixdown engineer. The best mixdown engineers cost several hundred an hour. All the design for the cover, etc. isn't free either, nor is mastering, nor are musicicans, for that matter. That, and as the parent post stated, there are many costs that aren't related to the production.

All but the most popular albums don't even make much money (for the artests at least), where they make their money is off radio-play, which goes to the artists, not the label. But even this isn't free - you need a publicist to get your work out.

All in all, the buisness isn't as easy as sitting down in front of a computer with some software. There is a complex set of variables, and making the statement that with the advent of ProTools, albums should cost less is a gross oversimplification.

here is the thing

[RonenKauffman]

Passing the saivngs on to the consumer is a realtive issue. There are records youc an buy that were recorded on a traditional studio setup but which are somehow still only $8 from your local independent record store. Conversely, you can have items like "Bread You Off," from the latest Roots record - this song alone cost $300k - why? the licensing for the samples. a-ha! The truth is that there are way more players taking their cut than just the labels and the bands. take it from someone who knows!

Re:ProTools is a large reason modern music sucks

[Mr_Dyqik]

I'm sure similar things happened when Les Paul invented multitracking.

I think that it now needs different qualities in a producer to get good results with Pro Tools than it did to record with old style big desks etc., although the techniques haven't changed that much. Pro Tools essentially simulates using a very big and expensive studio in software, so you can do everything that very expensive studios have been doing for years. It does automate some of these things though, so that there is a temptation to over use some things.

Just using Pro Tools doesn't mean that recordings suffer from the afflictions that you've listed (listen to Martin Grech's "Open Heart Zoo" for a recording which certainly isn't over-compressed, and was recorded on Pro Tools, with just two instrumentalists).

Pro Tools is allowing my brother to record almost an entire album, where he plays almost all of the instruments (not the drums, but only because he has a drummer available, he can play drums), for the cost of a computer and the software/hardware, in his bedroom, and get a better sound than most people managed in the 1980's (from a technical point of view, I'm not diss'ing the 80's sound).

Re:ProTools is a large reason modern music sucks

[onepoint]

Amazing, you post the best response about issues using PT.

People don't realize that the best music comes from band interaction. the WHO who's music will live for a long time.. there band had a huge interaction amoung each other. same for Rush, Metalica and other very popular bands that feed off each other while creating music.

but to the topic, the money is fronted to the band, the band then is required to produce the tracks. how they produce the tracks is not related to the lable, if anything they should be able to produce more tracks for the album because studio time will be less and the artist keeps more of the advance.

Re:Why? Hmmm.... let me think

[blamanj]

OK, recording studios are very expensive. However, film studios are even more expensive and the costs of making a movie exceed the costs of making a record by an order of magnitue. But you can get some DVDs at prices lower than that of a music CD.

Re:Why? Hmmm.... let me think

[Stickster]

Films recoup costs in both the theater and on video. They also recoup through deals for cable and "big 4" network broadcast, as well as for exhibition on airlines and such. For blockbusters there's also marketing tie-in deals. None of these things really apply for music albums... yet.

It's not quite that simple

[CoreWalker]

Production budget for My Big Fat Greek Wedding: $5,000,000
Production budget for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: $94,000,000

I bet tickets were the same price to see each one in a first run theater. The cost of entertainment (well, anything really, but especially entertainment) is based on perceived value. The cost is however much people are willing to pay for it. The only way I see this bringing down the cost of CDs is that it is so much easier for an individual to set up a recording studio of their own and put out high quality (not quite professional quality, but much closer than a 4-track cassette recorder) music for a price that drastically undercuts the RIAA based music.
With today's software and fast computers, it's amazing the quality of stuff that can be put out with just a couple good mics, some time, and a good/creative ear.

Re:Why aren't savings passed along?

[Zenin]

Exactly. With the exception of really old music, no two record companies ever sell the exact same album and most all have exclusive deals to everything a group produces (for a set number of albums or such, but effectively years). There is no competition in art.

What's needed is some system where the laws of the open market can be applied to an artform. One method might be to (drastically) reapply the first performance rules to apply simiarly to the actual publication of albums. The idea might go something like this:

• Original production company gets exclusive first pressing rights for one year from start of publication.
• After one year, any other pressing company can press and sell the exact same recording (minus box art and such, but titles are the same).
• These second run pressing companies pay resonable and fixed royalties to both the musician and the production company of $1 per album each (if track list is sold unchanged) or $.25/song otherwise (to each, not split).
• Online pressing rights are identical to second run pressing of real CDs with reguard to these rules.

The above idea is also very similar to the Brand Name/Generic Name drug markets (albeit with much shorter timelines, for obvious reasons). Record companies could still make their money hand over fist for new albums as they do now, AND not only cover the cost of bust albums with the high price of star albums, but they could use each other's older catalogs in open market form to help offset those costs as well. -And of course, if some other pressing company sells one of your albums, you get royalties as well, so your bust albums could even help offset your bust albums if/when someone else manages to sell them better then you. Furthermore it would open up a new business of the pressing company (which again could likely be an online only store, like Apple is doing, but without needing to cut deals with everyone under the sun, allowing startups to compete in a big player world).

Honestly I just pulled this idea out of my ass, but the more I reread my own idea the more I like it. Anyone see any major flaws in this thinking?

Why "Savings" aren't passed on to the consumer.

[Luckboy]

These savings aren't passed on to the consumer simply because the consumer has never paid these costs to begin with. Most standard recording give the artist an advance to produce their album, varying in amount based on the artist, the label, etc. This money is recoupable, paid back by the artist in full to the record label. If the label advances $50,000, the first $50,000 in sales (should the artist ever hit that point) goes to the record label. Only at that point does the artist begin to see profit.

As for ProTools being the cause of all music's woes, it is only a tool. Handing a chimp a paintbrush certainly won't make him Rembrandt. Over-compression is simply a bad production value, compounded by radio compression, or MP3 compression in some cases. ProTools is certainly capable of dynamics. Voice pitch correction? This isn't included in ProTools, when I last looked. There are other companies that provide pitch correcting plugins, but if you rely on those, you shouldn't be singing. Overdubs have been happening for years, since the advent of multi-track recording (Thanks, Les Paul!).

And Frankly, if a full featured ProTools system could be had for $15k, I'd own one by now.

Because Senators are expensive...

[MS_leases_my_soul]

As the cost of political campaigns goes up, it takes more money to buy a senator these days. The RIAA has to own senators in order to infringe on any rights of consumers that it *THINKS* hurts profit margins, so they must keep more money.

Besides, the RIAA thinks 9 out of 10 songs are pirated anyway, so they are just recouping losses.

Get with the program, buddy. Work. Pay Taxes. Consume. Repeat.

speaking out of experience

[silicongodcom]

pro tools doesnt necessarily cut overall time / cost. it saves a ton of time in the actual recording process, but the real benefit of a good producer is helping the bands make better songs. pro tools just gives the band / producer more time with that

Re:ProTools is a large reason modern music sucks

[SerpicoWasTaken]

An interesting aside, Norah Jones' "Don't Know Why" (the track that won a whole bunch of awards) was actually a demo recording. It was done live in the studio and made the album sans glitzy post production. I wonder if this will have any affect on producers as they realize they can pretty much stick to the basics and still produce a great song. Of course, "Don't Know Why" was made on a jazz label, and I think they tend use more traditional production techniques anyway. But, I had a fact and it sounded semi-relevent.

ProTools has its place

[blinder]

I'm an avid home studio type. I've got a 24-track studio (based around a Mackie MDR24 - disk-based recorder) and I have the Mackie 32-channel 8-bus console and a nice modest collection of outboard stuff and mic-pre's... which is to say that I generally prefer to record using a separate machine and relying more on performance rather than editing capabilities of the engineer in order to record good music (which means I rarely record anything "good" -- but its fun trying).

I do, however, believe there is a place for ProTools (and Ardour -- the open source PT). I'm slowly warming up to the whole "PC" based recording, but more for the editing flexibility you are provided with. In the past, "editing" was just simply cutting out blatant mistakes, but now with the tools and capabilities with PC-based recording programs... editing, for me, now is part of the creative process (and not just clean-up).

As for the "over-compression" discussion earlier, yes most modern MAINSTREAM music suffers from over use of compression. My philosophy is that music should breathe. When I hear stuff today, I just notice myself repeating over and over "just let it breathe!!" Compression is a useful tool for taiming a wild snare hit or shaping a guitar track, but it should ALWAYS be considered completely TRANSPARENT.

Oh well, what do I know.

you will find your answers here

[mr_burns]

the mixerman chronicles:

http://www.prosoundweb.com/recording/mm/week1/mm .p hp

This has by far been the most read and loved diary of an engineer on a major label project. It might take you a few days, but you will be entertained!

Plus you will learn that one workflow improvement for one cog in this machine doesn't amount to a hill of beans as far as what it take to get the whole project firing on all cylinders.

Lower costs ARE being passed on to the consumer.

[Spittoon]

Look at it two ways:

1. People who never could afford to record before now can.
2. You can get lots and lots and lots of LEGAL music for free, because of those lowered costs.

If I had to pay for a studio every time I wanted to record something... well I wouldn't.

http://www.somesongs.com
http://www.songfight.o rg

Free music by real people.

I just record a disc with ProTools

[WebMasterJoe]

I just happened to be in the studio (and have one more trip there on Saturday) and we recorded with ProTools. Now I'm not an expert on audio recording, and much of the credit for the recording quality goes to the engineer (and my band), but ProTools seems like an amazingly capable program. Not only could the engineer apply get a rich, warm sound in all the right places, but he could do this quickly!

We were sitting in the engineering room, listening to a recording and thinking aloud what doesn't sound quite right, and the engineer kept up with our train of thought. By the time the song was done, he had applied most of our ideas to the song and we listened to it a second time, with everything as it should be.

I suppose I should provide a link to the song, even though I'm not sure if I'm pimping or backing up my opinion: Flipside [frontmoneymusic.com] - it's where your secrets went to hide!

If a tool like this can make such a great sound, the super-high-end systems may be answering a question nobody has asked in ten years.

Freeware Alternatives

[Rai]

I use a program called Buzz [buzzmachines.com] for composing and recording electronic music. It and a ton of plugins are available for free download. (Windows only, no Linux or Mac ports...yet) Also check out this site. [buzzxp.com]

You can also find lots of free plugins and other apps at Database Audio. [databaseaudio.co.uk]

ProTools doesn't suck, the industry does

[DustyCase]

I can't believe that we have the opening comment be so crass. ProTools is a tool. It doesn't force anyone to use loads of compression; it doesn't force anyone to autotune vocals; it doesn't force anyone to make endless edits and nit-pick the soul out of a performance. A pro-level PT system might just be the best thing ever for recording live music. Low noise, great headroom, and the ability to do some very useful EQ and gain adjustments in the mix and master phase. The Problem: The music industry dictates that if you want people to buy a million units of their latest pap then it has to be of a certain style. That is why you hear the same crappy production values on Korn albums as you hear on Dixie Chicks albums. Sweeet, Sweeeet pap, and loads of it. Music doesn't suck any worse now than it did before digital recording, it is just that us Old-Timers (30+) have a new villain to blame it on. The question was about why the benefit hasn't come across to the consumer in the form of lower prices. Well, the cost of everything has come down, with the exception of management and procuder salaries. They have skyrocketed. CD's cost pennies to manufacture, distribution is cheaper than ever, recording equipment has dropped in price against inflation, and still the artists don't expect to make any money from their CD. I've seen four interviews (on MTV, VH1, A&E, etc...)with artists from varying genres where they have said that despite selling a million CD's they only make money from touring. Speaking of the Dixie Chicks, I saw the interview where one of them is almost intears when the interviewer does the math of CD sales * shelf price. She bluntly relates that Sony remodeled their entire Nashville offices and studios on their sales reciepts. Amazing considering that RIAA is using the artists as poster children for their jihad against music sharing. What PT *is* doing is making high-quality recording equipment available to more independent musicians. Not just inexpensive PT systems, but inexpensive analog systems dumped by studios who went to PT! I can get 24-track analog (tape, remember tape?) time for a tenth of what it would have cost 10 years ago. Have you seen any other technology service drop from $3k/day to $300/day since 1993? Plus, I can put together a really nice home digital system for under $3k using either PTLE or any of a gaggle of DAW solutions. PT could be considered to be like Starbucks, while there is one on every corner there is also a competitor on every other corner.

Why by ProTools? Audacity is free...

[Dr. Zowie]

Audacity [sourceforge.net] has come a looong way in the last year -- I believe they're finally supporting professional-grade digital audio and not just CD-quality (not that I can tell the difference, or anything...).

Re:ProTools is a large reason modern music sucks

[op51n]

Exactly. Anyone can overproduce a piece of music, regardless of what was used to record it/master it.

The fact that one of the most notable users of Pro Tools is Trent Reznor, does however show what can be done with it in the right hands.

If used correctly, it is possible that the only thing anyone could complain about is the digital routes of it all. Recording every line, in real time, straight in, tracking it in Pro Tools (or Reason or something if you don't run a suitable OS (damnit!)) and then mastering it at console like you would normally.