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Words » In Tune

Digital dilemma

Times sure are changing. It used to be that recording an album required musicians. These musicians would get together at a studio, go over a song idea, plug in their gear and start playing. Someone would sit in another room with a tape machine, and make sure everything was going down on tape. A little red light outside the door meant you were recording, and no one could enter. It was all very mysterious.

Now those good ole days are over. You can still do it the old fashioned way, but why bother when you can use technology for the next big hit.

Here’s the way the next album I’m producing is being recorded. I’ve collected a dozen songs that I’ve written onto my hand held personal information manager (PIM). These songs were written while sitting in traffic, on airplanes, waiting at the post office, between meetings, walking to work, and wherever else a song idea happened to spring into my head. Instead of reaching for my instrument or a piece of manuscript paper, I just hum the idea into the digital editing section of my handy PIM. If I needed to edit the idea a bit, I could do it between making phone calls from the back of a taxi.

Once I’ve got enough of these songs together, I download it to my laptop. It gets stored under c:\cw\song ideas\current. These are only musical jottings, so I need to spruce them up a little before they actually become “songs.” That’s where my sequencing software and computer come in handy. I convert the PIM song files into .wav audio files, and play it over and over in the background while I search through my sampled CD collection for the right drum loop with the perfect “feel.” Once I have the right feel, I loop it and save it as a track in my digital audio sequencer. Once the basic groove is established, I turn on my midi gear, fiddle around with some sounds, and get a good rhythm section happening. Everything goes straight into the computer as digital tracks. If I want to add vocals or guitar or some other acoustic element, I just fly the data out through my USB port converting it into an AES digital signal that my 24 bit Akai digital recorder can understand. Then I record as many tracks as I need, storing them as virtual digital tracks on the nine gigs of Seagate Barracuda hard drive I have stacked inside the Akai.

Now comes the fun part. We do all this in reverse, sending the info back to the computer, so that I can play around with the sounds, edit, add effects, whatever. After I play around a while, I have a pretty decent basic song idea recorded in 24 bit digital audio.

But it’s starting to get lonely. Just me and the cathode rays from my monitor. I miss the smell of beer and sweat in a late night studio. I miss hanging out with musicians. It’s more fun when there are other ideas thrown into the equation. What should I do? Simple. Just convert the audio files into mpeg, squeeze them down to about 1/20 of their original size, and email them to my buddies, Stanley in LA, and Katsu in Osaka. Stanley adds some bass and keyboards, then fires off his reworked tracks to Katsu, who puts down guitar and adds a few new samples.

A few days later I check my mail, and find four new messages waiting for me. My new songs are finished. I open up an audio player, record it all digitally to DAT, and send the tape via messenger to the record company. It’s the only time the music has appeared in physical form.

The record company people listen, they smile, and everyone lives happily ever after. That is….until someone loses the tape, and asks me for a copy, but I just opened up Happy99 and my hard drive crashes and all my files get corrupted, and the next day there’s a headline in the China News, “FOREIGNER LEAPS TO DEATH FROM TWENTY-SIX FLOORS WITH COMPUTER, details on page seven.

Ah, emusic in the making.

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