I have a tendency to repeat myself. At a NAMM dinner, say, sitting with a few industry friends that I may only see once a year, I’ve found myself pausing mid-story and thinking, “Damn, by the looks on their faces, two of the three at the table have heard this before.” Over the holidays, I found out my brother Kit does the same thing. We decided that we need to start more sentences with, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before…”
It’s the same with pet sayings, although unlike the stories, they are mercifully shorter and tend to change every year or two. One of them, however, is an evergreen. I’ve been saying it for more than three decades now, and every time I inject it into a conversation, it’s in reference to something new, so it never gets old. It’s usually some variation on the phrase: “If you like sound, and if you like technology, it’s a good time to be alive!”
The first time I used it, I remember, was on a trip to the Midwest, sometime around late 1990 or early 1991, to write a feature about what was happening in Chicago studios. At the time, the trend was that video post facilities were adding audio post rooms, but when I stopped by Skyview Film and Video, after a quick tour of the new studio, the owner took me up to his office and said, “You gotta see this.” He sat down at a Mac and started dragging short video clips into a timeline for a Buick commercial, then moving one forward a few frames and dropping another clip in a half-second later, then moving it back three seconds and hitting Play. “It’s the Avid Media Composer,” he said, “and I got the first one in Chicago.”
The next day, I visited Streeterville Studios to meet with Jimmy Dolan, and he showed me how they’d been trying out the new AMS AudioFile on a few Alligator Records mixes. I was still relatively new to Mix and to pro audio at the time, but even I could see the Big Change Coming with non-linear editing.
From then on, advances in audio technology started coming fast and furious. I might have said the same thing on hearing the first powered desktop monitor or stadium-sized line array; the first software-based DAW or the first 32-bit plug-in; the first playback in discrete 5.1 and, many years later, immersive; software samplers and virtual instruments; digital consoles and control surfaces; multifunction audio interfaces and high-res converters for turning analog source into digital information.
All of these advances (and dozens of others) make it “a good time to be alive,” and with every introduction of New Tech, artists and creators have found new ways to push both their art and the technology forward—a symbiotic relationship that drives progress and lowers the barriers to entry.
READ MORE: From the Editor—Why Woody Matters.
This is a good thing, and it’s made even better by the fact that professional audio and recording, unique among industries that rely on high-tech, has reverence for its elders. Microphones from 1947 don’t get put out to pasture, and tube-based processors aren’t placed in nursing homes. In transitioning to digital, audio left a path for analog electronics— tubes, resistors, capacitors, circuits, op amps—to sit in the signal chain alongside 3-D randomizers and AI-infused limiters.
If a director were to release a film today that included digital capture, CGI and 16mm cameras, the brain would freeze on the 16mm and think: Vintage. Nostalgia.
If a rock producer today were to record a band live, in-studio, to 24-track analog tape, using vintage mics and a 60-year-old tube compressor, then dump the tracks into Pro Tools and add VI strings and 32-bit horn samples at the mix, when it was played back, the brain would hear Music.
Discover more great stories—get a free Mix SmartBrief subscription!
Because of this, there are now seemingly infinite ways to make and distribute music, incorporating tools and techniques developed across three or four generations, or tools developed last week—and they’re all valid.
In this issue alone, we have a profile of Greg Rahn, a composer who, back in 2017, spent the year in and out of sessions at Studio D in Sausalito with engineer Joel Jaffe. A big room, great musicians playing live and wearing headphones, an all-analog front-end recording to Pro Tools and/or Logic.
On the cover, we have red-hot producer/musician Roget Chahayed, classically trained on piano, who counts Ravel, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev as inspirations. He makes music fast, throwing out ideas on synths and samplers in real-time, challenging the artist and thriving on collaboration and spontaneity. He might create a beat in 30 minutes one day, then hear it on a record a year later.
This is all just a long way of saying that AI is coming. Another Big Change. The Music Industry, at its most basic, is driven by Talent, Technology and Business, and while Business often seems to muck things up, if the past is truly prologue to the future, Talent and Technology will determine AI’s future role in music.
Who knows? Maybe five years from now, some enterprising producer/musician/coder will develop a way for AI to verify copyrighted material, down to the sample, and award songwriters, publishers and artists fair payment in real time, any time that any song is downloaded or streamed.
To paraphrase David Foster Wallace from his famous commencement speech: “Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible.”