Bunsen
Admin-Witchfinder-General
In 1995, I was not a tech-head; I was a musician. Having recently dropped out of music school, I had moved to a large city to pursue my dreams of composition and performance. Looking back 15 years (wow), it is surprising to think that multi-track, release quality music recorded at home was once a revolutionary, unheard of, and world-changing idea.
If you wanted to record and release music to the general public, you gigged and gigged until someone from a huge multi-national corporation noticed you, and if you were lucky they would give you the keys to the magic kingdom - the recording studio - whilst tying you up in a life-sapping contractual nightmare from which you were lucky to emerge with a cent. If you were really swish, you had a four-track, analogue cassette-based recorder at home to knock out demos, but there was no way you would ever release something recorded on that POS. If you wanted a professional demo, something worthy of shopping around to the industry, it cost you an arm, a leg, two kidneys, and your first born child.
At school in '93, we used 16 and 32 track analog tape in purpose-built studios costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a $3 million building. A reel of 1 inch tape cost $250 - and you had to buy your own. ProTools was still being assessed for purchase until after I left. We used Atari 1040s and 540s - 10MHz 68000s - for MIDI composition, hooked up to racks of $2,000-plus ROMplers, analog synths, and hardware samplers - if you could squeeze in a booking. If you wanted to work with MIDI and live audio - guitars, vocals, etc - at the same time, you had to record a sync track - through another $1000 piece of equipment - onto one of those precious tape tracks. Then you had to play it all back while "flying" the desk - moving all those faders and dials with your actual hands (or those of an engineer) at the right time, and the right amount, to get the results you wanted on your finished stereo master. Automation? Ha! Maybe in a couple of years we'll look into it.
And this was the largest and best facility for hundreds of miles in any direction.
Digidesign's ProTools rigs were so outlandishly expensive, and tied up with their dedicated DSP hardware, that it remained a tool for those already flush with funds - the medium to large studios. Then ADAT emerged, with 8 tracks of CD quality digital recording onto VHS video cassettes for under ten grand.
Iva Davies from Australian band Icehouse was a guest lecturer at our school; he raved about ADAT and how purchasing one had transformed his workflow, and was transforming the industry. He could sit at home overlooking the Pacific beaches, with his Prophet, a mixing desk, a guitar, a microphone, and a drum machine, and put together an entire album. The mid-level recording studio industry was in a death panic, and indeed over the following decade their business model collapsed, their $100,000 machines being run out of town by artists and small bands working in their bedrooms and garages.
Then along came three guys from San Francisco with Deck. $400 and a Mac - that was it. From your ideas and talent to a releasable product. In theory at least - if you really wanted to polish it up, you took it downtown to a ProTools studio and fed it through their Neve desk and their valve EQs and compressors, all under the watchful eye of an experienced and competent engineer. But those endless, wasted $200-per hours of studio time while you thrashed out those ideas - that was a thing of the past. You (and your band if you had one) had the time and the luxury to noodle away for as long as you wanted, to get it sorted, without the sound of your credit card being siphoned in the background.
This is the sort of workflow, the convenience, we take for granted now (grumble, kids these days, etc). At the time though, Deck was the only game in that end of town, and it changed everything. It was a revelation.
Deck was the reason I bought my first Mac, and the reason I'm here today. Deck (and later, Logic) are still the only pieces of software I ever purchased new, at full retail. In fact, I bought Deck, and then went looking for a Mac to install it on (a 6100/60, which I still have around here somewhere). It was either Deck and a Mac, or an Atari, analog tape and an analog mixer. The latter would have either been crappy, or run into many more thousands of dollars.
This was also my first experience of the bitter taste of vaporware. A sales rep whispered to me that OSC were about to release an 8 channel audio input output box, connected via SCSI, for US$800. Unheard of! Can't wait! Yamaha's CBX series cost five times that for half the channels.
Then Macromedia bought out OSC, and the rest is history.
Enjoy the following article; the meteoric rise and fall of OSC. I did, and it inspired me to write this post.
http://sitenoise.com/deck/index.html
If you wanted to record and release music to the general public, you gigged and gigged until someone from a huge multi-national corporation noticed you, and if you were lucky they would give you the keys to the magic kingdom - the recording studio - whilst tying you up in a life-sapping contractual nightmare from which you were lucky to emerge with a cent. If you were really swish, you had a four-track, analogue cassette-based recorder at home to knock out demos, but there was no way you would ever release something recorded on that POS. If you wanted a professional demo, something worthy of shopping around to the industry, it cost you an arm, a leg, two kidneys, and your first born child.
At school in '93, we used 16 and 32 track analog tape in purpose-built studios costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a $3 million building. A reel of 1 inch tape cost $250 - and you had to buy your own. ProTools was still being assessed for purchase until after I left. We used Atari 1040s and 540s - 10MHz 68000s - for MIDI composition, hooked up to racks of $2,000-plus ROMplers, analog synths, and hardware samplers - if you could squeeze in a booking. If you wanted to work with MIDI and live audio - guitars, vocals, etc - at the same time, you had to record a sync track - through another $1000 piece of equipment - onto one of those precious tape tracks. Then you had to play it all back while "flying" the desk - moving all those faders and dials with your actual hands (or those of an engineer) at the right time, and the right amount, to get the results you wanted on your finished stereo master. Automation? Ha! Maybe in a couple of years we'll look into it.
And this was the largest and best facility for hundreds of miles in any direction.
Digidesign's ProTools rigs were so outlandishly expensive, and tied up with their dedicated DSP hardware, that it remained a tool for those already flush with funds - the medium to large studios. Then ADAT emerged, with 8 tracks of CD quality digital recording onto VHS video cassettes for under ten grand.
Iva Davies from Australian band Icehouse was a guest lecturer at our school; he raved about ADAT and how purchasing one had transformed his workflow, and was transforming the industry. He could sit at home overlooking the Pacific beaches, with his Prophet, a mixing desk, a guitar, a microphone, and a drum machine, and put together an entire album. The mid-level recording studio industry was in a death panic, and indeed over the following decade their business model collapsed, their $100,000 machines being run out of town by artists and small bands working in their bedrooms and garages.
Then along came three guys from San Francisco with Deck. $400 and a Mac - that was it. From your ideas and talent to a releasable product. In theory at least - if you really wanted to polish it up, you took it downtown to a ProTools studio and fed it through their Neve desk and their valve EQs and compressors, all under the watchful eye of an experienced and competent engineer. But those endless, wasted $200-per hours of studio time while you thrashed out those ideas - that was a thing of the past. You (and your band if you had one) had the time and the luxury to noodle away for as long as you wanted, to get it sorted, without the sound of your credit card being siphoned in the background.
This is the sort of workflow, the convenience, we take for granted now (grumble, kids these days, etc). At the time though, Deck was the only game in that end of town, and it changed everything. It was a revelation.
Deck was the reason I bought my first Mac, and the reason I'm here today. Deck (and later, Logic) are still the only pieces of software I ever purchased new, at full retail. In fact, I bought Deck, and then went looking for a Mac to install it on (a 6100/60, which I still have around here somewhere). It was either Deck and a Mac, or an Atari, analog tape and an analog mixer. The latter would have either been crappy, or run into many more thousands of dollars.
This was also my first experience of the bitter taste of vaporware. A sales rep whispered to me that OSC were about to release an 8 channel audio input output box, connected via SCSI, for US$800. Unheard of! Can't wait! Yamaha's CBX series cost five times that for half the channels.
Then Macromedia bought out OSC, and the rest is history.
Enjoy the following article; the meteoric rise and fall of OSC. I did, and it inspired me to write this post.
http://sitenoise.com/deck/index.html
