Recording Studios’ Fears Realized?
It is a familiar story to all of us, previously expensive domain of the few becomes digital and suddenly the rug is pulled out from under an entire industry:
For several years, as various factors conspired to engender a severe music industry recession, studio owners and managers, engineers, technicians and producers have voiced increasing fears about the future. Recording budgets shrank; rosters were trimmed. All the while, the tools and methods of recording were undergoing dramatic transformation.
Wolf Stephenson, an owner of recently shuttered Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Ala., spoke for many industry professionals when he said last month, “When computer and hard-disk recording really got cheap and better at the same time, it just knocked the socks off a lot of studios, (Muscle Shoals) included.”
As is typical in all these “doom and gloom” stories, Reuters tries to buoy those invested in the status quo with a ray of hope:
But large facilities will not disappear entirely: An orchestra cannot be recorded in an apartment, nor can any self-respecting jazz or rock combo. “There may be some work going away because of the home studios,” says engineer Al Schmitt, speaking from Avatar Studios in New York. “But (for) the rhythm-section stuff, brass and orchestra things, it’s still the good studios with the good consoles.
Unfortunately, they’ve missed the mark entirely. We here at BBB frequently record orchestras on our laptops using the power of software synthesizers and samplers. Instead of lamenting about the few highly paid musicians they should be writing about the millions of new musicians. The sum total of the music in the world is increasing exponentially not dying out like the dinosaurs.
Would you believe Reuters if it said that mini-DV tape was destroying the film industry?
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