I remember in the 1980s when I was told I could build a recording studio at home using stuff costing a fraction of the price of entry for a ‘real’ recording studio. What’s not to like? No more paying for studio time. No more dealing with grumpy studio engineers who thought my stuff stank and would rather wipe their ass with sandpaper than have to record my band. No more travelling, jump out of bed and within seconds I could be writing and recording another masterpiece.

Win, win, win!

My weapon of choice was a Tascam 244, 4 track cassette based mixer and recording device. I had other bits of stuff, like a reverb, a mic, a Sony stereo cassette for mastering!!!! I loved it.

Compared to today, the gear cost more and did far less.

So why is there so much I hate about modern home production. Am I just a miserable bastard and don’t know that ‘we’ve never had it so good’, or is my analysis of the situation a fair one?

You decide.

1 - I Have To Wear All The Hats

Now in the modern home recording studio I can do everything if I want.

I can play everything, and even if I can’t then there’s plenty of software and other tools that can do it for me. There’s drum VIs, chord creators, and chord packs from that ghastly guy from Unislum (name changed to avoid one of their spurious take down notices… really). I’m sure his mother loves him, but one of his ads on YouTube is enough to want me take a razor to my brand new MacBook Pro screen.

I can mic up, record, mix, then master and distribute. Again, what a dream!

Is it? It seems that while I’m doing all the other jobs which were originally done by someone else, then I’m not being creative and concentrating on the craft of writing and arranging a song.

The very stuff that’s meant to help me make the song is often distracting me, or not doing what it’s supposed to do… which leads me to my second point.

2 - Things Take A Long Time

I’m not talking about taking care of the details of a melody or making sure the mix is just right, details matter.

The problem is that in order to get the best out of a lot of this stuff you need to learn to use it. Every new piece of software or plugin, and every new piece of hardware requires a commitment to learning it, even more so, to mastering it. That can take hours. Often hours we don’t have. So many of us buy stuff, learn the bare minimum about it and then use it for about 10% of what it can do. Then when disappointment sets in we go hunting for something else to do it better!

We end up with drives full of content we either hardly use, or don’t use at all.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times I see people in forums and on social media saying things like “I’m going to buy X and then figure out what project to use it on.” Really? Imagine going into your local Home Depot or Homebase and finding trades people buying a tool and saying “I don’t have a job for it yet, but I hope to have a customer where I can use this latest power tool.” That’s frankly insane.

The other reason things take time is that I spend time dealing with stuff not working as it should, updating software and wondering why my hard drive keeps dropping off my system or my interface only connects to my Mac when I turn it on with one leg in the air during a full moon.

I need a solution so I go to YouTube, can’t find it but in the meantime watch a video about a cat who sleeps on an SSL, 30 minutes later I’ve watched a lot of pointless sh*t and I’m still none the wiser. Now the idea has gone, or the enthusiasm, usually both, so I go and make a sandwich.

I simply don't have the time to learn most things and still be able to deliver quality work on time and budget. I can't be the only person who tries to read an entire 100 page PDF user manual in 60 seconds so that I can get back to the job. After all, an hour spent in a user manual, Googling or screaming at my computer, is an hour I can't bill. Don't get me wrong I believe in learning how to use things properly, but at a time of my choosing not every time I come to work on a project.

Everyone who comes to my house and sees my studio says 'wow it must be wonderful to have this.' Don't get me wrong it is, I do love having a space where I can go and create and get paid to do so, but I am coming to the conclusion that if we are not careful, we allow the very thing that is meant to empower our creativity to restrict it.

There’s a lot of time I spend figuring out stuff or fixing stuff that means I’m not being creative.

3 - One Set Of Ears

When you work alone in a studio there’s a problem of no second set of ears. No one is there to tell you your vocal take stinks, or conversely is a Grammy-winning performance.

With one set of ears you can spend days on making an average song that even your mother would hate sound technically perfect. It might be a bad song that is so forgettable no one could whistle the chorus but hey, the snare took three days to sound like that!

Again, you may, like me, have a hard drive full of half finished ideas because there is no one else in the room to tell you it’s not a bad idea, in fact it’s your best idea. This is also partly compounded by the lack of time available which means not only do you not have a second opinion, you have less time to evaluate the stuff that with some work could become a great song.

So we end up putting out sh*t no one wants to hear and dump stuff that could earn us enough money to buy a house, or retire.

It might sound like the nightmare of studio jokes, but having the band in the studio to work as a filter during the creative process had its upsides too. Even a drummer can have a good idea in these moments!

Which brings me to my next point.

4 - It’s Lonely

I’m sure there are plenty of people in the world who like solitude. Some of us are wired to thrive working on our own. I enjoy my fair share of alone time, usually to watch a boxed set and forget about all the stuff that is stressing me out.

Working alone can be demotivating and demoralising.

However, working on your own for any length of time can be lonely and isolating. Certainly for me it can.

Dom Morley addresses this point in his recent article The Struggles Of Mixing Alone - Top Mixer Gives Sound Advice

I miss the rough and tumble of sitting in a studio with a team and having a two hour discussion about what to have for lunch. Or even when there’s down time and the bass player is putting down their parts, the rest of us sit outside and talk about all sorts of stuff.

Online collaboration is cool, but I do like working with people who “have skin on”.

Summary

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool gear that make the job of creating great sounding music from home a breeze… technically. We live in great times given the power available at our fingertips.

I grew up in the 'good old days' of studios; you know real consoles, tape machines and all that. Anyone who calls them the good old days has never had to line up a tape machine or spend hours pulling out channels from the console trying to find the problem, or indeed spend about £100 to buy the tape for one track. I'm not suggesting that recording before the home studio explosion was any less technically taxing, but because a studio was a costly purpose-built investment when most of us went to use them all we did was make the music, other people did the hard stuff.

Of course, you can get the same technical results for a fraction of the cost from a room in your house, but I'm coming to the conclusion that there is a price to pay, and it's a higher one, and that's creativity.

Perhaps we’ve been seduced by all the technological side of music production and lost sight of the musical and creative aspects. I sometimes feel I have no headspace for that stuff, I wish I had more.

Perhaps I’m in the minority and just need to get some therapy?

Discuss

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