Monday, July 18, 2011

'expensive old analog' = 'cheap new digital'

Our July 14th class examined what analog is; as opposed to digital. Simply the title of this class made me think about how this topic relates to the music that I've been making. When I went over to my friend/producer's recording studio later after class (in his basement,) I was definitely able to apply what we had just learned. I glanced over at one of my producer's three monitors. There was a copy of 'Logic,' a very popular program that artists use to compile and edit music. There were the tracks (this particular song had over 50 of them). Obviously, the whole 'world' that this recording studio was revolved around the laws and entities of the 'digital universe'.
What really got me thinking were the dozens of plug-ins that my producer was messing with. I had seem many of them before, but I had never thought twice about them. They had very colorful interfaces...that was about it. After 15 minutes of discussion about them with my producer, I guess you could call me informed. These plugins (each of which costs from $500.00-$5000.00) were actually just a digital inscription; but of what? Virtually all of these plugins (with the cool colorful interfaces) were a transformation if you will; a conversion from the old to the new. Instead of rebuilding each of the original, analog machines (the oldest from 1960, the newest- 2002) to create and maintain the best possible sounds in my producer's basement, which would cost millions upon millions of dollars, he just buys a copy of the software. The software loads up and appears in the computer's GUI as an additional window that is linked to the 'Logic' 'mother-software'.
A few hundred megabytes, which are incredibly microscopic (relative to our digital world in 2011,) suddenly become a sound replacement ( pun-intended :D ) for massive, extremely expensive machines.

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