I think it's emblematic of how far we've fallen that you can even ask the question. The Beatles were a bar band until George Martin. The Sixties don't happen without Phil Spector. Elvis is a talented kid without Sam Philips. Pink Floyd is just another acid band without Alan Parsons. The '90s don't happen without Rick Rubin. We won't even get into Dre, Don Was, and all the other names that music fans recognize but don't understand. There have been three "home studios" in the history of music, really. One of them was built by Les Paul, who basically invented multitrack, multi-take recording. He recorded everybody. Another was built by Boston, which used it on their own shit exclusively. You'll note most Boston recordings are ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag, too. The third was built by Peter Gabriel, and he created a label around it. And then Mackie happened. That's not entirely fair. Mackie happened about five years before MP3. The ADAT happened about the same time. So whereas Nirvana's Nevermind was recorded in a $250 an hour studio on a 32-track Studer through a TAC Scorpion, two years later you could build a better rig for around ten grand. And the studios started closing wholesale, and people started losing their jobs. Because, like DJ'ing, any fuckhead can layer two sounds on top of another. Make them sound good? That takes training. Or it used to, until all the amp plugins and software instruments and Apple Loops and all the rest started coming pre-EQ'd to make them fit uneasily together. So now any twit with half an hour can make a "song." You can't even buy an Apple laptop without GarageBand. I bought Dante Traktor for his iPhone on Friday for $5. By Sunday night he'd not only done the painting, he'd done the music: worthy of note, though: Dante was signed to Virgin at one point. He's produced a half-dozen bands. He's classically trained. He makes it look easy. But most anybody can muddle through and come up with some sort of song. The people who can make that "some sort of song" sound better? I know a guy. He wears a bag mixer on America's Next Top Model. He did location sound for SuperNanny. And we were mixing one of our bigger shows together a couple years back and he says "I can't believe they're still singing this song. I mixed it so long ago." The song? So yeah. Guys who know what we're doing? Completely devalued in the face of GarageBand. The funny thing is there are ten times as many "schools" where you can learn to mix as there were when I learned to mix. Their gear is orders of magnitude better, their tuition is orders of magnitude higher, and they're largely staffed by people who lost their jobs when everyone figured they could do just as good as a $150 an hour professional because, well, Apple told them they could. Do you know how to bake a cake? Sure you do. We all do. But do you know how to bake a cake? Of course not. You'd hire a professional. Yet for some reason, it's A-OK to call the existence of my profession into question, probably because 95% of us are permanently out of work. Which, hey, no great loss. After all, Reaper is only $60.I'm curious, do you think an artist generally benefits from having someone else produce their music rather than themselves?
