In this article Julian looks at three ways the audio production world has changed since his and Russ’s formative years.

There is an old joke I've always enjoyed, a variation on the common lightbulb joke format.

“How many Oxford dons does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Change?!”

For Americans who may wonder exactly what that is, a don is a tenured professor and Oxford University is very old, and very traditional. 

When something new happens resistance is inevitable but in spite of this change is also inevitable and relentless. However it takes a little distance to really appreciate just how far we have come in a comparatively short time. You can say this about almost any area of human endeavour but on this blog we do tend to concentrate on audio production.

It was during a conversation with Russ the other day that he shared his observation after a trip to London that only a few years ago it would've been inconceivable that rather than seeking out the hotel restaurant or calling room service, guests in a hotel would be seen gathering in the lobby waiting for their individual takeaway orders. Which were all being delivered independently and were all ordered independently from a devices everyone was carrying in their pockets.

It’s only one example but it is the fact that it is as mundane as it is which makes it rather remarkable. While visiting a friend in Milton Keynes I observed my first delivery robot trundling down the pavement. This was flying-car, Jetsons stuff to me but inevitably I'm eventually going to see flying robot drones delivering house-to-house as an irritation more than a source of wonder. Change over time can lead us to places which would have astonished us comparatively few years before but we now take for granted. Here are three examples of things we discussed which would have blown our minds when we started an audio production in the late 80s and early 90s.

Digital Audio Workstations

We've spoken before on the blog about how it is that so many of the people who have a public enthusiasm for magnetic tape never actually used it.

If you are old enough to remember tape as a current technology rather than a stylistic choice you'll understand exactly how limiting that medium was. We talk today about the positive aspects of discipline and focus that recording to tape brings, but anyone who has ever performed a risky punch-in or has edited tape appreciates the DAW’s Undo function in a way a DAW native simply won’t.

I still remember making the transition from four track cassette to 1/2’ eight track. The options opened up by doubling my track count from 4 to 8 was dizzying, of course premixing of channels to tape was standard practice, as was at least one and sometimes two bounces but what you could achieve just courtesy of having an upgraded track count, which was still in single figures, was a transformative.

My earliest use of a computer for audio wasn't as a multitrack. My computer was far too slow for that. It was for stereo editing. Processing was off-line but just the fact that I could make accurate edits on stereo material was a source of paid work for me at the time. The ability to combine sections from multiple takes of stereo classical recordings made to a DAT machine and transferred digitally into my PC, while not cutting edge, was unusual enough to bring me work through word of mouth. Remember that at this time the lack of tape rewind times was marketed as a feature!

Of course we take the capabilities of current DAWs for granted. The idea of having a limitation on track counts which is in three figures causes people to protest online and people complain loudly that new features which would have sounded like fantasy even a few years ago aren’t available for free. We should stop and think about that!

Plugins

The inevitable accompaniment to a DAW. While a huge number of plug-ins are based on a hardware, something that is easy to forget but was featured heavily in early marketing materials when people were getting used to the idea of exactly what a plug-in was, is that unlike with hardware where you had one unit and only process one or possibly two things at a time, with a plug-in you get as many instantiations as your computer will tolerate. We take that for granted today but it had to be explained to early adopters that, not only could you get a little picture of an 1176 or a Focusrite Red EQ in your computer but it effectively gave you a rack full of processors for negligible money compared to the hardware.

You've also got full recall of your virtual hardware. I didn't mention earlier that you got full recall of your entire mix (with automation) with a DAW. That's kind of a big deal too! While we mourn the loss of entry level jobs in studios, we don't miss the work most of those entry-level jobs involved, like zeroing a 72 channel console. Comments from clients of “I love it but can we just” no longer has to cause shoulders to drop quite as far as they did in the old days.

But plugins have come so much further than just giving a more convenient version of what we already had. The wealth of feedback from UI’s, intelligent processes, AI driven plugins. Modern plugins make your SPX90 look a bit basic…

Plug-ins have of course distorted some people’s view of what mixing used to be like. Being able to instantiate a Pultec and a Fairchild on every channel of your mix may well be possible courtesy of your plug-ins but if you think even for a second that anyone has ever done that using hardware think again.

However the presence of imitative plug-ins which reproduce classic gear and more modern high end gear as well as being a clear threat to the hardware business also, to some extent at least, has supported it by publicising and promoting quality outboard with some users ultimately buying hardware inspired by their software experience. I'm sure many manufacturers would love to go back to the old days of selling racks full of noise gates but times change. The fact that anyone who wants to can get unlimited experience using previously prohibitively exclusive and expensive hardware is kind of amazing.

Sending Audio Over The Internet

The third example might initially seem a little pedestrian to anybody used to the idea that computers and the internet both exist in 2024. However compared to the first two on this list this one's so much bigger. From a production point of view the idea that you can invite a client to an attended mix session virtually, regardless of their location in the world is amazing. I'm not saying that the relative demise of in-person, attended sessions is necessarily a good thing but this isn't an either/or choice.

Likewise with collaboration, while a compromise-free way for musicians to perform simultaneously from remote locations remains stubbornly limited by technology and the fundamentals of physics, we only need to go back relatively few years to a time when for studios to collaborate on a project it was necessary for a bulky and irreplaceable master tape to be physically transported between studios. Inconvenient when the studios are in the same city, usually impractical when they are on different continents. Being able to collaborate by sharing files down an internet connection is kind of awesome when you think about it.

But of course in a perfect illustration of how new technology simultaneously brings benefits and threats to an industry, it's not just professionals who can access audio over the internet. I'm not going to get into a discussion about the effects streaming has had on the music industry but it certainly has had an effect.

There are so many more examples of ways in which the world has changed to a dizzying extent over the course of mine and Russ's careers. However the real takeaway for me is that it’s not the big attention-grabbing, paradigm-shifting changes which have moved the world the most, it’s the incremental changes over time. Generative AI is next and I’m not future-gazing on that one but its going to be interesting to reflect in a few years on what audio production was like in early 2020s… 

What strikes you about the changes you’ve seen in the course of your career, however long or short it has been? Share your thoughts in the comments.