ABC article on recording studios
jwvm
recording:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/home-technology-makes-recording-studios-obsolete/story?id=9419472
Mike Rivers
> News article about large recording studios closing due to home
> recording:
So what else is new? I read about that in Mix 15 years ago.
hank alrich
It also super simplfies things, overlooking that sales are way down and
hence there is far less money for recording, home studios or no home
studios. Moreover, "home studio" is some cases is a full-on professional
installation in an artist's abode.
--
ha
shut up and play your guitar
http://www.armadillomusicproductions.com/CarryMeHome.html
http://hankalrich.com/
Scott Dorsey
I think also it has a lot to do with the kinds of acts being recorded
today. There aren't many times today when you see a singer being
fronted by a 30-piece band. Consequently, there's a lot less of a need
for big rooms designed for that kind of work.
I think this is a shame. The home studio thing is a good thing, but the
lack of big orchestras is a bad one.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
Laurence Payne
>There aren't many times today when you see a singer being
>fronted by a 30-piece band.
Interesting way of putting it! Way back when, the band was the star
and "vocal refrain by..." was added in parentheses. But generally now
the singer fronts, the band backs.
PStamler
value of real estate in urban centers, particularly NY and LA. There's
always something more profitable you can use the square feet for than
a recording studio.
Peace,
Paul
Scott Dorsey
You know, just the other night some friends were discussing the arrangement
of Amy Winehouse's _Rehab_ song. It's actually a catchy pop song with a
really nice arrangement; I'd love to hear it performed with a real band.
Moshe Goldfarb
Yea...
Another Korean produce market.
At least in NYC.
Must be a hell of a lot of money in produce because these things are
sometimes 3 to a block in NYC.
Richard Webb
> recorded today. There aren't many times today when you see a singer
> being fronted by a 30-piece band. Consequently, there's a lot less
> of a need for big rooms designed for that kind of work.
That's lamentable too. Rare to find a quality room with
enough room to really develop such things as drum sounds
imho. Also, rare to find a quality room with a piano which
is well maintained. INstead of recording something in a
room where the sound develops naturally and capturing it
well we add artificial reverb and record the damned thing in a closet <hrrrumph>.
> I think this is a shame. The home studio thing is a good thing, but
> the lack of big orchestras is a bad one.
Agreed, you had to learn to play with dynamics, and to be
part of an ensemble to play with them. Becoming a lost art.
Regards,
Richard
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Ty Ford
(in article
<fca2a5f8-bd71-4586...@k9g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>):
+1 on pretty much what everyone has said. I'm not sure there were a lot of 30
piece bands in the 70s, 80s in rock. The major label system was in place and
"that's the way things were done"; big (by today's standards) studios.
I was writing articles for a video trade magazine that covered the
mid-atlantic. I became the "grim reaper"; the guy who wrote the articles
about the closing of this or that video facility. In many of their cases,
they no longer needed the wide hallways and huge rooms they had built in the
1980s, but their landlords were sometimes very tough on their idea of
downsizing.
Not to denigrate a proper recording facility, but a lotta good music has been
produced in houses.
Lets start a list:
The Band - Big Pink
Regards,
Ty Ford
--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA
hank alrich
> On Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:57:50 -0500, PStamler wrote
> (in article
> <fca2a5f8-bd71-4586...@k9g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>):
>
> > Another very important cause for studios shutting down is the high
> > value of real estate in urban centers, particularly NY and LA. There's
> > always something more profitable you can use the square feet for than
> > a recording studio.
> >
> > Peace,
> > Paul
>
> +1 on pretty much what everyone has said. I'm not sure there were a lot of 30
> piece bands in the 70s, 80s in rock. The major label system was in place and
> "that's the way things were done"; big (by today's standards) studios.
>
> I was writing articles for a video trade magazine that covered the
> mid-atlantic. I became the "grim reaper"; the guy who wrote the articles
> about the closing of this or that video facility. In many of their cases,
> they no longer needed the wide hallways and huge rooms they had built in the
> 1980s, but their landlords were sometimes very tough on their idea of
> downsizing.
>
> Not to denigrate a proper recording facility, but a lotta good music has been
> produced in houses.
>
> Lets start a list:
>
> The Band - Big Pink
Was largely a studio album. The work/demo tapes, later released as The
Basement Tapes, were recorded at the house.
> Regards,
>
> Ty Ford
>
>
> --Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
> Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
> Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA
Les Cargill
Either than or immigrants will suffer margins natives would not.
Marimba player Jingchen Sun's parents are immigrants. She's at
Julliard. Her parents sold the house to buy her a marimba. The
PBS people all called this "a sacrifice"; I'd say it looks
more like "an investment".
It's just a different way of looking at the world.
--
Les Cargill
Moshe Goldfarb
How much fruit can a person buy?
NYC has always had immigrants, at the turn of the century they in fact
were the cheap labor that built the city.
That included my parents.
The living in the back of the store and working 24x7 stereotype only
goes so far when rents are $20,000 per month along with all the other
costs of living in NYC.
It all just doesn't add up and many people who were born and raised in
NYC will tell you that something is going on. The popular theories are
the underground economy, lack of proper paying of taxes, money
laundering etc.
PStamler
> Ty Ford <tyreef...@comcast.net> wrote:
> > On Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:57:50 -0500, PStamler wrote
> > (in article
>
> > > Another very important cause for studios shutting down is the high
> > > value of real estate in urban centers, particularly NY and LA. There's
> > > always something more profitable you can use the square feet for than
> > > a recording studio.
>
> > > Peace,
> > > Paul
>
> > +1 on pretty much what everyone has said. I'm not sure there were a lot of 30
> > piece bands in the 70s, 80s in rock. The major label system was in place and
> > "that's the way things were done"; big (by today's standards) studios.
>
> > I was writing articles for a video trade magazine that covered the
> > mid-atlantic. I became the "grim reaper"; the guy who wrote the articles
> > about the closing of this or that video facility. In many of their cases,
> > they no longer needed the wide hallways and huge rooms they had built in the
> > 1980s, but their landlords were sometimes very tough on their idea of
> > downsizing.
>
> > Not to denigrate a proper recording facility, but a lotta good music has been
> > produced in houses.
>
> > Lets start a list:
>
> > The Band - Big Pink
>
> Was largely a studio album. The work/demo tapes, later released as The
> Basement Tapes, were recorded at the house.
The Band's second album, though, simply called "The Band", was mostly
recorded in a house in LA, which I believe Capitol rented from Sammy
Davis, Jr.
Peace,
Paul
Mike Rivers
> The Band's second album, though, simply called "The Band", was mostly
> recorded in a house in LA, which I believe Capitol rented from Sammy
> Davis, Jr.
Probably not a lot of difference between that and a Capitol studio other
than
no reverb chambers in the basement. Some of these "home studios" where
well paying artists record are pretty sophisticated, and even come equipped
with engineers, maintenance techs, and ProTools operators. They aren't all
like Les Paul.
vdubreeze
Well, no one outside of the audio world reads Mix, so it's telling the
rest of the world. And the article is a bit better than a rehash of
how things looked 15 years ago, at least for the intended reader.
vdubreeze
It's not that there's such a killing to be made in fruit stores, it's
just that they're the ones with the network to create something out of
a raw space the easiest, with the least investment risk. Real estate
in NYC is in the pits,and has been for quite some time. The markets
are in small, storefront spaces, not exactly recording studio
potential anyway. All the NYC studios I knew that no longer exist
were in big buildings and you took an elevator to get to the door.
Never saw a fruit stand takeover any of those spaces : )
Arny Krueger
"jwvm" <jw...@umich.edu> wrote in message
news:f3387821-b249-4bbe...@22g2000yqr.googlegroups.com...
> News article about large recording studios closing due to home
> recording:
>
> http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/home-technology-makes-recording-studios-obsolete/story?id=9419472
>
One well-known, successful and positively ancient example of home recording
hitting the big time was the Motown studios here in Detroit on Grand
Boulevard. When they outgrew one house, they bought the house next-door and
built a covered ramp over to it. Very old news. If memory serves, when
Motown broke up into Motown and Holland-Dozier-Holland. HDH moved into an
old hardware store.
Moshe Goldfarb
Hahah!
Yes you do have a point!
What happened was the gross over speculation of the Koch and Guiliani
era on rents.
The yuppies moving into lofts in Hell's Kitchen amongst other places
and turning them into high priced, well, high priced lofts.
Then 9-11 happened....
Then the economy crashed in 2008.
Now instead of brokerage houses and their associated back room
clearing houses being all you would see around the Wall street area,
you now see families living in those same buildings.
Rents have come down a great deal, but it's still far too expensive to
operate a small studio in all but the worst sections of NYC and even
those become expensive when they are declared "trendy" by the yuppies
or whatever they are called these days.
Scott Dorsey
>Rents have come down a great deal, but it's still far too expensive to
>operate a small studio in all but the worst sections of NYC and even
>those become expensive when they are declared "trendy" by the yuppies
>or whatever they are called these days.
Perhaps. But, in the seventies and eighties there was also a big build-up
of nice studio facilities in rural areas where there wasn't much around.
These facilities were mostly intended for the use of rock bands who would
want to get out of town to a remote location where they could work quietly.
Consquently, most of them weren't built to handle larger groups and as
they weren't in areas where there were a lot of good studio musicians to pick
from, they were mostly used for laying down tracks which would be added to
later on.
Even THESE facilities collapsed right and left. It's not as if there
was a big real estate boom in the Catskills, for instance. I feel kind
of bad about Future down in Virginia Beach; they had a nice facility in
a tourist town with a lot of resources, and they specialized in hip hop
music and brought a lot of people down from NYC for week-long lock-outs.
But even they couldn't make a go of it under current conditions.
In the meantime, those of who actually _do_ work with acoustic music have
fewer and fewer alternative places to go. And those places are much less
likely to cut a good deal for odd time between big bookings.
Moshe Goldfarb
> Moshe Goldfarb <brick...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>Rents have come down a great deal, but it's still far too expensive to
>>operate a small studio in all but the worst sections of NYC and even
>>those become expensive when they are declared "trendy" by the yuppies
>>or whatever they are called these days.
>
> Perhaps. But, in the seventies and eighties there was also a big build-up
> of nice studio facilities in rural areas where there wasn't much around.
> These facilities were mostly intended for the use of rock bands who would
> want to get out of town to a remote location where they could work quietly.
> Consquently, most of them weren't built to handle larger groups and as
> they weren't in areas where there were a lot of good studio musicians to pick
> from, they were mostly used for laying down tracks which would be added to
> later on.
Yep.
Tons of them out in the burbs and mostly located in industrial parks
where they won't disturb the neighbors.
A lot of them double as rehearsal studios as well.
> Even THESE facilities collapsed right and left. It's not as if there
> was a big real estate boom in the Catskills, for instance. I feel kind
> of bad about Future down in Virginia Beach; they had a nice facility in
> a tourist town with a lot of resources, and they specialized in hip hop
> music and brought a lot of people down from NYC for week-long lock-outs.
> But even they couldn't make a go of it under current conditions.
At one point I thought of opening a studio up in the Catskills or
Vermont, something along the lines of Caribou Ranch.
IOW a gentleman's farm, complete with bed and breakfast, all the
amenities etc. Not just a place to track, but a place to get away and
create.
Then I saw Bearsville going down the drain and that kind of soured the
idea for me.
I was actually on my way to the Bearsville equipment auction when some
idiot clobbered my car on I-87 and ruined the day for me. In
retrospect it's a funny story, but let's put it this way, I was
knocked slightly unconscious for a few minutes, to awake to see a
bunch of Rabbi's, complete in penguin outfits, running around in
circles talking on cell phones.
I thought I was dead and in heaven :)
Hahaha!
Turned out it was a Hasidic school bus/van of some sort that rear
ended my car.
All turned out fine in retrospect and I got a new car instead of some
gear.
> In the meantime, those of who actually _do_ work with acoustic music have
> fewer and fewer alternative places to go. And those places are much less
> likely to cut a good deal for odd time between big bookings.
> --scott
That's what is happening, although in NYC you *can* get cheap time in
top studios if you get lucky when they are in between clients or have
cancellations and have an intern who wants to learn.
Like getting same day seats to a Broadway show you have to be ready to
move though.
Not the most creative way to work, but....
Arkansan Raider
This thread has been a goldmine. Thanks, folks.
/going back to songwriting in BIAB before doing some live recording in a
church building. Best of both worlds... ;^)
---Jeff