A moment for reflection

Steinberg Lounge
#1

I don’t know about the rest of you guys but from time to time i’ll be sitting there working on something and i’ll suddenly start to think how things have changed and progressed over the 30 years or so i’ve been playing/recording music.
I remember my first band scrimping enough cash to be able to afford two days in our local 8 track 1/2 ich tape facility (which sadly seems to have shut its doors a few months ago) (one of these iirc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNjpyHAOC48 and being amazed at what could be done in there… fast forward to today and we all have pretty much an unlimited track count, audio to midi sync, virtual fx and instruments, modelled tape, eq and pre amps etc… enough virtual guitar cabs to fill an entire warehouse!!! Total mix state recall FOR THE ENTIRE STUDIO… and all at a couple of mouse clicks!
Imagine someone from even a high end studio like Basing Street/Sarm West, Ocean Way… any of them, being dragged forward in time from the mid 70s to now and being presented with even the most modest of DAW setups and they would most likely FREAK out on the spot lol…
Ok so DAWs do have their drawbacks… bugs etc, but relatively speaking they’re a godsend, imagine if all those VST/i’s were real physical devices, the physical space they would take up, the amount of power they would draw, the amount of heat they would create, the sheet amount of maintenance they would require etc etc…

I feel pretty lucky that i was born when i was because i’ve been fortunate enough to live through this transition so am able to see it in perspective, i’m sure there are more than one or two others on here that feel similar!

Hippy rant over! :smiley:

#2

Same here, me and my mates got into recording in the early 80’s, splicing, striping tape with time code, and growing a huge 52 unit synth/sampler/MIDI array which heated the studio in winter. In my PC now I have probably 500 times the capability that that setup did…

Thinking back, one of the craziest jobs I had was fixing the vocals on 12 songs a client performed, he should have hired a vocalist… I had to sample with my Roland S550 all the sour notes on each vocal track of each tune (he doubled it all), re-pitch them with the sampler and then fly the back to tape as punch ins. With two of us it took about a week of evenings. I think of this almost every time I use Variaudio.

I’d love to bring JS Bach or GF Handel back to see what they could do with Cubase :sunglasses:

Last night I took a percussion jam into Cubase which we captured in my living room a few years back, just two condenser mics, and no time reference, just me and another friend on djembe and kahon and alcohol :laughing: , so the meter was wandering, tempo detected it, locked it to bpm, a little light quantize and compression, and presto, a usable track from some fooling about. It continues to amaze me what we can do now.


:sunglasses:

#3

My first recording was done in 1963 using a two track reel to reel and an Echoplex for effect, boy have we come a long way since then, almost getting too much for my old brain now :unamused:

#4

Hi,

I am probably the most LATEST starter on here! lol

I did not own my first PC until I was in my 40’s. And only had CUBASE about 4 x years.

So I think that EVERYTHING will always seem pretty NEW to me!

Cheers,

Paul