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Music The Almighty Buck Technology The 2000 Beanies

Billie Eilish Won Multiple Grammys Using Budget Studio Gear, Logic Pro X (engadget.com) 137

Longtime Slashdot reader SpaceGhost writes: Per Engadget, Ms. Eilish and her older brother (Finneas O'Connell) produced her massively popular album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? with minimal studio gear out of a bedroom studio in their parents' house. They used equipment that many aspiring artists could afford (about $1,000 worth of Yamaha monitors for instance, and at first a $100 microphone.) The 18-year-old singer swept all four of the night's biggest prizes -- Best New Artist, Song of the Year, Record of the Year and Album of the Year -- along with honors for Best Pop Vocal Album.

According to a Pro Sound Network interview with O'Connell, their production setup included a pair of $200 Yamaha HS5 nearfield monitors with a $450 H8S subwoofer, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface and Apple's Logic Pro X. The duo reportedly used to record with a $99 Audio Technica AT2020 mic. "The stems (that is, individual layers of instruments and music) were then sent to mix engineer Rob Kinelski to compile," adds Engadget.
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Billie Eilish Won Multiple Grammys Using Budget Studio Gear, Logic Pro X

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  • by tsager ( 196659 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @02:11AM (#59663508) Homepage Journal

    .. and again. See Jacob Collier, two Grammys in 2017 and two just now. Fittingly, his first album was called: In My Room

  • by Anonymous Coward
    The truly amazing bit was the complete lack of... Talent
    • I found the song/videoclip which was used in Brightburn movie soundtrack to be interesting. The movie sucked ass though.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • There's the odd track/videoclip which catches my attention every now and then. Could be simply because I am tired of the "more of the same" stuff dominating music nowadays.
          I went through lots and lots of music genres through the years, found weird songs that I found interesting and other times I found songs that everyone else liked to be shit, from my point of view.

          Throwing another one for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] :)

        • by hey! ( 33014 )

          That's just Sturgeon's Law at work: "99% of Everything is Dreck."

          The human brain prefers the familiar, so everyone imprints on a style of music when they're young that becomes the soundtrack for their lives. Anything that comes after tends to sound like meaningless noise. You're just in the latest generation to age out of being cool. It happens to everyone.

          I was an adult when hip-hop had its very beginnings, so it will never be something I actively seek out, but even I can listen with an open mind I can se

      • by Megane ( 129182 )
        So is this the "mumble rap" I've been hearing of? Couldn't stand ten seconds of it before getting bored.
  • Metrics? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vell0cet ( 1055494 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @02:29AM (#59663534)
    Do there need to be metrics?

    I would hope that good music could be made on rocks and seashells... I understand that a bunch of people don't think she deserves it... but for me, her album was quite good and if not "worthy"... at least better than all the manufactured shit that came out that year.
    • Re:Metrics? (Score:5, Informative)

      by E-Lad ( 1262 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @02:48AM (#59663572)

      Home studios can be quite an investment, and like any gear-centric hobby/semi-profession, its participants can waste so much time and money chasing the perfect MIDI interface, the perfect studio monitors, the perfect sound interface with clean amps and good ADCs, and so on - so much that they become more of a gearhead than an artist, believing that the limitations they encounter or perceive is because they lack some quality or capability in their gear rather than introspecting on their own talent or self-confidence. While quality gear can help attain some very specific goals or open up a few production options, stories like this are good in reminding people that it's not required and people can be successful without a $10,000 home studio. Further, a great sound engineer is worth the money for their time. Mixing down is a further art unto itself, and often makes or breaks a track despite the efforts of the artist. They know what to listen for and how to present the pieces spatially and emotionally... and to a degree can even put some polish on a turd. To a degree.

      • by Hadlock ( 143607 )

        Yeah I played this game for a couple of years, I probably had ~$1500 worth of equipment including a mixer board, XLR microphones etc and I was alarmed at how crisp and clear the audio was despite all of it being mostly 1930s technology purchased online and built in a chinese factory.

        Turns out I am a terrible musician and not a good sound engineer. But if you are musically talented and have an ear for it, it certainly doesn't surprise me that someone put together a studio for under $10k at home rathe

        • You can make something quite decent sounding for under $1000. Used laptop $200. SSD $100. Headphones $50. Audio interface $150. Reaper DAW $60. Virtual synths free, a small midi keyboard $100. Chinese condenser mic $100. A used large keyboard $150. Pair of used monitors $200. With some craigslist trawling doesnt take much time to put together.

          • You can even clean up a Korg D1600, download the Computer Music software libraries, run VSTs, score a $25 MIDI keyboard, even a counterfeit SM58, and make a lot of surprising music. The Korg burns great CDs, lossless recording, and if you fill it up you can solve that. Let your lead player jack right in off their floorboard. If you need another mixer there are a lot of old 1202s out there that aren't glittery but they will work.

            And your hallway is cheap reverb/acoustics.

          • by Megane ( 129182 )
            It also helps to be good at finding stuff in pawn shops. There can be a lot of good stuff that goes to the third or fourth price reduction simply because it's not where many people who know what it is go. Just go every couple of months to check what's new, and be willing to wait a few weeks if something is about to hit a price reduction.
    • Re:Metrics? (Score:5, Informative)

      by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @03:22AM (#59663614)

      "I would hope that good music could be made on rocks"

      Away back in the dripping evergreen woods of Llamedos, in a rustic shack of mud and wood, Imp y Celyn spent the gloomy winter writing a song. It made him the new star in a country that listened religiously and took music seriously, but defined it too narrowly for him, and he set off to find his muse. After a while, he came to a crossroads. Finding no one there, he took the road more travelled and came to Ankh-Morpork.

      There, he found a horn player named Glod Glodsson and a percussionist called Lias Bluestone, also out of work and money, and then they found the shop that had always been there since yesterday. So the strange guitar found Imp, and the phenomenon began. The guitar wasn't something you played; it played the holder, it played the other musicians, it played the room and the audience. It didn't just play music, it played want and need and feel and go crazy right now before you lose your mind. When Imp held it it played him as no one ever played before.

      Glod was a Dwarf and an experienced professional musician with an idea of what sold in the city. Lias, a Troll, brought the throbbing rhythms of Ggroohauga and the acoustic rocks that would give the new sound its name. Under the influence of the stuff in the guitar, the three made Music With Rocks In, and it was irresistible. It went from The Mended Drum to the Cavern Club to a regional tour to a huge free concert in Hide Park in days. Naturally, CMOT Dibbler attached himself to such a major new opportunity, and money poured in. (The "free" concert would generate a fortune in food, t-shirt, and recording sales.) They became so big they needed a roadie just to protect the money. The phenomenon took the great city and the neighboring plain to a pitch of excitement even higher (and even briefer) than the moving picture craze. It lasted about a week.

      • Thanks for the Sir Terry Pratchett reference (from Soul Music) BTW: the Audio Technica AT series of large condenser mics are amazing. I've done studio voice prompt recording for voicemail and IVR systems with them ( the AT-4040 in particular ). I've had a chance to A/B compare them with $1K+ "pro" studio mics and I actually like them better ( less coloration, more natural sounding to my ear ).
        • And I guess the big studios won't like this one bit.

          • by ktakki ( 64573 )

            >And I guess the big studios won't like this one bit.

            The big studios don't care. They depend on clients like advertising agencies, film and television productions, and the major labels. The digital revolution that started in the '80s with MIDI gutted the low-end and middle-tier studios but the big studios live on.

            -- k.

            • by Megane ( 129182 )
              To be fair, the one thing a big studio will have that your garage won't is a well-seasoned recording engineer. But still, the days of finding an up-and-coming band and making them famous in exchange for owning the copyrights to the recordings are coming to an end. And maybe we'll see a few of them learn how to become decent recording engineers too.
      • I honestly thought you were fucking with people. This reads like something out of Middle Earth.
        • "I honestly thought you were fucking with people. This reads like something out of Middle Earth."

          It's way better, you should give it a try.

          I didn't for years, because I thought it was some flat earther spiel, but after 1 book I was hooked and I read them all.

          • I didn't for years, because I thought it was some flat earther spiel, but after 1 book I was hooked and I read them all.

            For real? That's funny. I just wanted Pratchett to explain how the oceans and water kept replenishing, whilst pouring over the edge constantly. I don't recall any explanation of it teleporting back to the Discworld, but then, since that's exactly what happened to Rincewind when he went over the edge, maybe that's the doing of those gods on Cori Celeste.

            • For real? That's funny. I just wanted Pratchett to explain how the oceans and water kept replenishing, whilst pouring over the edge constantly. I don't recall any explanation of it teleporting back to the Discworld, but then, since that's exactly what happened to Rincewind when he went over the edge, maybe that's the doing of those gods on Cori Celeste.

              To quote Death in the books, I BELIEVE THAT ARRANGEMENTS ARE MADE

        • by Megane ( 129182 )
          Really? You don't know who the late, great pterry [wikipedia.org] is?
      • Music made on rocks, not Music With Rocks In.

        GNU Terry Pratchett.

      • I'd forgotten about ol' Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler. It's been a while since I read the series.
        Though, as a musician, I can't say I connected with this particular book as well as I wanted to.

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @02:34AM (#59663546)

    Yes, we all know that Logic Pro X is a great deal at any price - but had Billie and Finneas taken advantage of the incredible $200 Apple Pro Apps Student Bundle?

    Five Amazing Apps! One Powerful Collection.

    This amazing deal is only available on Apple.com! Hurry to get yours before supplies run out!

  • Hyped article (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FaxeTheCat ( 1394763 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @02:34AM (#59663548)
    They did not "produce" the album on the low cost gear. They recorded the raw tracks on (relatively) low cost gear.

    Then: "The stems (that is, individual layers of instruments and music) were then sent to mix engineer Rob Kinelski to compile,"

    Nothing is said about what equipment the mix and mastering was done on. And that is what determines the sound quality of the end result.
    A best guess is that it was mixed in a professional studio, and mastered by a professional mastering studio.

    And this is not to detract from the artists. Just that there is a lot more to producing high quality tracks than recording the raw tracks.
    • And this is not to detract from the artists.

      Definitely. The artists made the music. They had nothing to do with the journalists misrepresenting the process.

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      Sure, but compare to the traditional approach of the major labels where they burn a few weeks of very expensive studio time (approximately a gadzillion dollars an hour) to record those same raw tracks. That explains a lot about how an album can go double platinum and still not be producing any royalty checks.

      • Sure, but compare to the traditional approach of the major labels where they burn a few weeks of very expensive studio time (approximately a gadzillion dollars an hour) to record those same raw tracks. That explains a lot about how an album can go double platinum and still not be producing any royalty checks.

        more specifically, bands couldn't usually afford studio time, so they /had/ to sign a label contract to get an album made. From there they were indebted with so-called creative accounting.

        Which is why

        • There was a time when even a 4-track recorder wasn't cheap, and mixing down was a destructive process. Today an artist can indeed lay down raw stuff and if it gets attention they send it to a decent engineer who makes it commercially viable. Then it gets mastered.

          And downconverted to 128k, destroying much of the mastering work. Ugh. I miss the 70s.

          • by Megane ( 129182 )

            And downconverted to 128k

            Not if you get it on CD or FLAC. But kids these days seriously only want to stream music to their smart phone, or buy it on cassette. If they have a few extra bucks they'll buy the vinyl, then play it a couple of times on a crappy budget turntable without even knowing how to brush off dust. Then it'll go on the shelf to collect more dust.

            Say what you will about the quality of vinyl (either side of the argument!), but streaming music is the real problem these days when it comes to quality. CD is still way u

            • True. I've got three separate archives of my music from CDs, one .wav, one .flac, one hi rate mp3. I would have an ATRAC set also, and I ought to, minidisc is underrated. My Sharp 702 was a joy.

      • by guruevi ( 827432 )

        These days studios are relatively cheap or even free. YouTube Space for example can be used completely free, many Universities and schools also have high-end setups that can be used at low cost or free, often with an aspiring engineer.

        A 'professional' music studio still exists but only for well established bands which are diminishing by the day as even an average YouTube channel (eg. Billie Eilish has been on YT with millions of followers for at least 2-3 years) can well afford to build a studio at home.

        • by Megane ( 129182 )

          YouTube Space

          Never heard of it. [google search] Oh, it's only in a few monster coastal cities where the "beautiful people" live. Not even Chicago or Dallas.

          Anyhow, remember that Weird Al got his start with a recording done in a men's room. Don't flush until we're done!

    • Then: "The stems (that is, individual layers of instruments and music) were then sent to mix engineer Rob Kinelski to compile,"

      Nothing is said about what equipment the mix and mastering was done on. {...} A best guess is that it was mixed in a professional studio, and mastered by a professional mastering studio.

      It's Sound Mixing . At this stage, the sound has left the finicky analog world, it lives as some (losslessly compressed) digital files (heck it could even by a FLAC-compressed Audacity project) and is being assembled by a talented individual.

      What counts toward the quality is near entirely the talent of the engineer.
      Hardware-wise it could be done on some not not old laptop (something that isn't more than a decade old) and running on opensource software.

      Though having some MIDI interface might be of some help

      • This.
        The final product is 99% skill and 1% expensive tech. The final tuning is to play it on some reference audio HW so that the record sounds good in different media such as car stereo, home stereo, radio.

      • Re:Mixing (Score:5, Informative)

        by GuB-42 ( 2483988 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @08:11AM (#59663946)

        As always, you can do really good work with cheap equipment, but it will make your life harder, especially if you are a beginner.

        From time to time, you see a world-class professional work with cheap equipment and produce breathtaking results. Better than what most people will ever do with top-end gear. So you start to wonder, why use top-end gear in the first place?

        The reasons are things like convenience and reliability. In a good studio, you will have monitors that don't miss on any frequency, controls that are responsive and accurate, software that doesn't crash... Nothing a competent sound engineer can't work around, but said engineer would rather do his job than battle his equipment. It is especially bad for beginners. For seasoned pros, it is an annoyance and a waste of time. But if you are a beginner, it is worse: you don't know if a poor result is the result of a mistake on your part or bad tools, meaning that you don't know how to fix it and learn from your mistakes.

        • by jgaz ( 6199828 )

          As always, you can do really good work with cheap equipment, but it will make your life harder, especially if you are a beginner.

          From time to time, you see a world-class professional work with cheap equipment and produce breathtaking results. Better than what most people will ever do with top-end gear. So you start to wonder, why use top-end gear in the first place?

          The reasons are things like convenience and reliability. In a good studio, you will have monitors that don't miss on any frequency, controls that are responsive and accurate, software that doesn't crash... Nothing a competent sound engineer can't work around, but said engineer would rather do his job than battle his equipment. It is especially bad for beginners. For seasoned pros, it is an annoyance and a waste of time. But if you are a beginner, it is worse: you don't know if a poor result is the result of a mistake on your part or bad tools, meaning that you don't know how to fix it and learn from your mistakes.

          ^ This, not to mention the fact that when it comes to the mix and master phases, the room matters just as much if not more than the equipment. If the acoustics of the room you're mixing/mastering in aren't properly treated, you really can't trust your ears and your mix won't translate to other speakers/rooms.

        • As always, you can do really good work with cheap equipment, but it will make your life harder, especially if you are a beginner. {...} The reasons are things like convenience and reliability. In a good studio, you will have monitors that don't miss on any frequency, controls that are responsive and accurate, software that doesn't crash...

          Nowadays, the kind of equipment that passes as "good enough" *IS* pretty cheap.

          I stand by my comment. Going for a 1'000'000 USD studio setting instead of just "decent stuff bought second hand" (think monster cables vs. ebay some audiotechnica gear) won't help as much in the mixing process as hiring a talented guy.

          Or to go back to the top poster, it's the fact that it was sent to Rob Kinelski that matters, not what equipment he has in his studio. He could have done the mixing in a home studio too.

          (Well ok

          • (Well okay, as long as he's not doing it on some Raspberry Pi 1 runnign on a noname SD Card from Amazon. Plugged to a pair of in-ear left laying around from the original Gameboy).

            You probably meant that as a joke, but honestly I bet a modern Raspberry Pi is plenty powerful enough to do audio editing. The no name SD card works just as well as a brand name one. Even the headphones don't have to be that expensive anymore.

            • You probably meant that as a joke, but honestly I bet a modern Raspberry Pi is plenty powerful enough to do audio editing.

              A modern Raspberry Pi 4, multicore with its 4 GB of RAM, yup very likely, specially if you plug in an external DAC.
              (The internal DAC outputing to a jack is known to be noisy).

              The original one Raspberr Pi 1, single core with 256MB of RAM, well that's pushing it a bit.
              It should definitely be possible, but you're bordering on the "battling his own equipment" that the post above was referring to.

              The no name SD card works just as well as a brand name one.

              Nope. No no no no.
              There's an epidemic of horrendous quality cards on e-shops like amazon and ebay. (and thanks to the

      • I love Audacity, but teaching the kids to leave the effects alone during recording is tough. They have no concept of dry v wet until they realize that once in a lifetime riff is ruined by crap, and try for a month to reclaim that inspiration. Thankfully they have no aspirations to tour.

    • Now, I don't know much about music production but if they recorded all tracks and then sent them to the studio, would the studio not just use a standard pc/mac to do the mixing? A 4000$ computer, should be able to do the mixing, so what kind of expensive hardware would the studio need for mixing?

      • Often mixing and mastering engineers will, post recording everything, convert some/all of the mix to analog to use some analog hardware and then re-record that into the computer. There are many software emulations of classic hardware but sometimes, subjectively, the real deal works better for that particular mix
      • by Megane ( 129182 )
        You would also want good quality monitor speakers, and maybe some appropriate sound-canceling stuff on the walls. It's still going to be a lot cheaper than a full recording studio. And it can be built in a spare room of someone's house. No longer needing multiple multi-track tape recorders is probably a big help too.
    • Re:Hyped article (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @06:34AM (#59663800)

      And that is what determines the sound quality of the end result.

      Not quite. No amount of post-processing is going to get rid of imperfections in the signal caused by low-quality input equipment. This especially applies to microphones. AD conversion is less critical (i.e. you can get cheap ones that are quite good).
      You also have to be careful when recording the tracks to avoid distortion etc, and resist the temptation to do all kinds of processing before you send the tracks off for mixing and mastering.

      • Noting of course that the album makes very very heavy use of distortion.
        • by ebh ( 116526 )

          I thought the virtual sidechaining of the vocals at a subharmonic of the already low bass was clever. Had to listen to it through a few different systems to decide whether or not it was transient intermod distortion.

    • Re:Hyped article (Score:5, Informative)

      by Danny Brizzi ( 4831093 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @08:11AM (#59663944)
      Rob Kinelski mixed this in his home studio. He has worked for Sony in the past, but this was done by him at home. So no massive studio and support team. He chats about the process in detail here... https://youtu.be/3VzuqSCBJHk [youtu.be]
    • Yep. Trent Reznor used a i286 to record Pretty Hate Machine in 1988. He worked as a janitor at a recording studio and was starting to learn to be a sound engineer. He got to use empty studio time to mix his own recordings.

      This was a 286 computer. In 1988. Billie Ellishs accomplishments are almost laughable painted in this context.

    • They did not "produce" the album on the low cost gear. They recorded the raw tracks on (relatively) low cost gear.

      Then: "The stems (that is, individual layers of instruments and music) were then sent to mix engineer Rob Kinelski to compile,"

      So basically the same way many other bands do it. Record demos on cheap gear wherever you like, then send it to a producer to be pinched, shaped, and massaged into something that sounds professional.

      Hasn't there been a thousand jokes about this in rock n' roll? Slash comes into the studio stoned, sounding crunky as hell. When the producer is done with it, it sounds like Mozart on a Gibson guitar. Producers make a lot of money for a good reason. They're in the illusion business, just like Hollywood.

      • Producers make a lot of money for a good reason. They're in the illusion business,

        No they're not: they make it sound good but... no wait that's literally all that matters with sound. If it sounds good then it is done.

    • Mixing and mastering can be performed on generic PC hardware to no detriment. Its all digital, you don't need high end hardware EQ's, compressors etc like back in the day. Just a DAW with good VSTs such as fabfilter. The only good hardware you need for mixing and mastering are the studio monitors.

      Recording is far more reliant on hardware than mixing/mastering is. You need a decent mic in a decent room with a decent interface to get decent results. Decent is of course relative. You can get away with an ATH20

  • by paralumina01 ( 6276944 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @03:06AM (#59663592)
    The greatest black metal bands recorded on cassette recorders with external mics to capture the music. In fact, the dirty and muted sound produced by this non-linear recording method is what helped black metal stand out from the other scenes and carve its own place in music history.
  • No surprise. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @03:25AM (#59663620)

    If you know what you're doing contemporary off-the-shelf microcomputers are capable of just about anything media production might need. I stream, record, chromakey and composit premium 1080p video at 60fps on a cheap-ass refurbished Laptop from 6 years ago using open source software. Live.

    20 years ago gear capable of this sort of thing would cost as much as a small fleet of cars and require a trained crew to operate. And even then some parts wouldn't even have been technically possible.

    • Now I'm dreaming of using a Raspi for this. Probably need better offboard DACs. Off to CL...

      Studio in your backpack. Batteries not included.

      Sidenote, when i was in PT last year i parked next to a kid that was always, always sitting on a lightpost anchor with an M-Audio 25 key something and headphones. He never answered me. I'm waiting for his work to surface, hope he includes a photo with it.

      • by Megane ( 129182 )

        better offboard DACs

        Thanks to USB, all good ADCs/DACs these days are off-board, you just need to not overload the bandwidth of the available USB channels. Your OS audio stack is more important. Core Audio is one of the reasons Apple is still relevant. But I'm not quite so confident about anything written by Poettering.

  • Huge amounts of very high quality music is created at home with minimal equipment and that includes the final mix and mastering. Sure, some artists pay a third party to master or even mix but many just do it all in-house, self taught (hurrah for YouTube etc). See https://ixband.bandcamp.com/album/6equj5/ [bandcamp.com] for a typical example. Bandcamp is awash with great self produced and published music.
  • I recorded and produced a track with Logic Pro X for a new artist starting out. I am not a pro-engineer, just a hobbyist. It took us an entire day produce one track. We had to record the vocals, MIDI instruments, and mix it together. We used a $100 microphone by M-Audio and a $500 Yamaha keyboard to record the MIDI. Logic Pro X running on 2013 MacBookPro was able to record the tracks then provide the drummer, bass, compressor, limiter, and track automation.

    With a little time, talent, dedication and will

    • I feel lucky to be just a bit older, so that I've seen it from the sand up, as it were.

      Knowing why something was invented and what considerations drove its designis often more useful than having or being able to use an instance of that tool.

  • by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @07:32AM (#59663874)

    Sorry kids, but people have been tracking keeper stuff in home studios for a really long time, and in mass digitally since the Alesis ADAT [wikipedia.org] was released in the early 1990s. It was a digital 8-track system that used VHS tapes (see, we didn't have hard drives big or fast enough to record 8 simultaneous tracks yet). Even better, using time code, you slave multiple units together to achieve up to 128 tracks of 16- or 20-bit 44.1 kHz digital audio. This was unprecedented, and the unit was affordable enough and worked barely well enough (pro engineers hated them because they were cheaply built and slow compared their studio gear: "they're fuckin' VCRs, man!") that their use went mainstream. The result was easy access to a high quality tracking workflow that was portable and facilitated mixdown and mastering in professional studios. They were so successful that their optical I/O interface (ADAT Lightpipe) is still widely used today on audio gear.

    Not that it means much to me, but I highly doubt these kids are the first ones to win a Grammy doing their tracking in a budget digital home studio -- that tech has existed for over 25 years.

  • by quantic_oscillation7 ( 973678 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @07:44AM (#59663898)

    ..have these kind of prizes do anything with music?

  • I wonâ(TM)t claim algorithmic audio mastering is equal to a seasoned professional one, but itâ(TM)s very affordable, about 10-20$ per track, and the result is actually not so bad at all (and itâ(TM)s not just me saying this).

    The two main online audio mastering tools Iâ(TM)m aware of are landr.com and cloudbounce.com . I personally prefer Cloudbounce because you can choose amongst several mastering settings. With such mastering, you end up with an more enjoyable listening experience. Thou

  • Then you had producers like King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry who did not even have any DAW, heck, Apple was not even a thing, using cheap equipment like a four track machine used by the latter https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] and then you had KingTubby who bought an obsolete MCI mixing desk in '71 ( https://bit.ly/2voCPbX [bit.ly] ) and produced some very nice tracks: https://bit.ly/3aRUV6r [bit.ly] Granted, perhaps King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry were not Grammy-caliber producers, but I think they did pretty 'durn go
  • by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @08:35AM (#59663994) Journal

    And good TV didn't require hi def. If it was funny or scary or moving or what have you, it was so even in plain old lo def TV with static.

    It's not the tech, it's the talent.

    • Everything shot in HD looks like a fucking soap opera. It's terrible. I'm sure the new generation is used to it already, though.

      • by Megane ( 129182 )
        That's not the HD, it's the 60fps. As the other guy said, your TV set probably has motion interpolation turned on, but you may see it native on some Blu Ray movies too. Turn off all that post-processing crap, its lag also fucks you up if you're using it as a computer monitor or playing video games.
    • And good TV didn't require hi def. If it was funny or scary or moving or what have you, it was so even in plain old lo def TV with static.

      It's not the tech, it's the talent.

      By that logic, there's no point in having anything more than a twelve inch black and white CRT.

  • Opinions aside, a good engineer can take something seemingly average and transform into something amazing.
  • Go read what Trent Reznor had to go through in 1988 to make Pretty Hate Machine, using an i286 and free studio time where he worked as a Janitor, and get back to me.

  • Ween recorded their classic album, "The Pod", using nothing but a $500 Tascam tape machine and five cans of Scotchguard.

  • The quality of music today doesn't really require good sound recordings. Streaming has also compressed sound to the point where a $100 Sure mic is sufficient for vocals. It's a pretty sad state of affairs IMO.

  • Billie Eilish won multiple Grammy's by buying them (yes, they're rigged), just as she bought non-stop appearances on all the late night shows, on every single fucking trending YouTube video/channel, etc. Her PR team has been on a non-stop blitz for the past 6 months.

    I didn't even know she was a singer until several weeks into their incessant ad campaign when I got fed up and asked someone who the fuck she was.

    I have no clue if she's a good signer or a decent person. All I know is I hate seeing her face ev

  • Her one expensive piece of gear is that Apollo 8 interface. The current Thunderbolt 3 compatible version, the Apollo x8, sells for $2700 with four mic preamps, or $3300 for the x8p with eight preamps. The older Apollo 8 with Thunderbolt 2 is discontinued, but is still available from some dealers for $2000 or so. If I were buying I'd get the new version because of better compatibility with computers going forward; by next year most new computers (other than low end systems) will have Thunderbolt 3 ports, exc

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (10) Sorry, but that's too useful.

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