It has been ten years since I wrote my first EQ column. It was titled "The Side Effects of Technology." I think it is time to revisit our love/hate relationship with technology.

I like to think about how easy it was to work on an album (they used to call them record albums) where the musicians sat around in the same room, played together, and recorded all of the parts onto the same piece of tape. Recording, overdubbing and mixing a pop album would usually take from three weeks to three months, depending on the artist and the budget.

Mixing before automation was easy. You usually mixed two or three tunes per day. If there was a section of the song that was particularly hard, you would mix the rest of the song, and then edit the piece into the master by cutting the tape (and sometimes a finger) with a razor blade.

I have often said that automation was invented to keep you in the studio longer, not for better mixes. Console automation enabled you to spend more time fretting over minor little things that probably didn’t matter anyway. The reason you spend four hours balancing the vocals in one chorus is because you can, not because you need to. After you had a great mix, automation allowed you to depart into no-mans-land and experiment with a thousand other versions of your mix. One way to know if the mix you have is good is to try every other permutation; more guitar, less bass, more bass, less vocal, more echo, less limiting, etc. After you have tried all of the other mix versions, the one you originally had turned out to be the best by process of elimination; it just took two weeks instead of four hours.

Now we have digital audio workstations. I’ll bet that there are hundreds of CDs out there where not one note is actually where the musician originally played it. That guitar chink in the third verse probably came from the first verse. The keyboard pads in the first chorus were flown in from the second chorus. The sax solo came from another take of the song. That tambourine back beat in the fade was recorded on a completely different song, maybe even by a different artist!

A percussionist came into the studio the other day to play some shakers and stuff on one song. At the end of the first shaker pass the musician said that he thought he could do a better pass. The artist pressed the talkback and said "That take was fine, we only need one good bar."

How about sampling? Almost every Rap record uses a sample from someone else’s record. Don’t get me wrong, I like most of them. I like listening to them to try to figure out where the loop came from. Piano licks from Lee Michaels and Bruce Hornsby, guitar licks from Steely Dan, keyboards from Isaac Hayes… There were two different artists who used the same guitar lick from Steely Dan’s "Black Cow" and one of them accused the other one of stealing the lick off of his rap record!

There are Sample Guys who have gone through all of the old records and taken everything that could possibly be used as a loop and catalogued them by tempo and instrument content. Artists hire them for a session to play loops until the artist picks one that he likes. The artist uses the loops to construct a song and sometimes does not even know where the loop came from originally. All of the major record labels have Sample Police that listen to every new CD before it is released to see if there are loops that need royalty clearance. At one of the record companies the girl is actually named Lupe.

I have some Pro Tools sessions on my computer that have reached the limit of the current v4.3 software release. They contain 120 tracks with 82 of them sharing the 64 available voices. The session document is over 2 megabytes and contains 21,231 edits and 19,127 crossfades. All of this for drums, bass, three keyboards, four guitars, two vocals and six background vocal tracks. The reason that I was able to get the song finished just under the physical limit was because there was a physical limit.

When there were only four tracks on a professional tape machine, the records got done using those four tracks. The strings on track 1, the whole rhythm section on track 2, the vocals and backgrounds on track 3, and the horns on track four. The first time I moved up to eight tracks, I had two tracks left over with nothing on them. All of the Steely Dan records got made using one 24 track analog machine. We tried once locking up two machines, but the brain damage from the lock-up process in the ‘70s was an excessive price to pay for the extra tracks.

About when the 24 track analog machine was introduced in ’72, the desire for even more tracks spread like a disease. One company built a 40-track machine using 2-inch analog tape. MCI built a 36-track machine that used 3-inch wide analog tape. Both 3M and Ampex made tape for it, but the tape was so heavy that the reel motors couldn’t handle it. Second engineers had to do weight training before a tracking data just to be able to change tapes.

In the "good old days" the number of tracks was limited so multiple instruments had to share a single track. If you need empty tracks for vocals, you would combine instruments to a single track and add the effects during the bounce. After the bounce, you were done. That instrument with that effect was locked in. No changes were possible. In 1999, there are infinite non-destructive processes you can perform on every track you have recorded. Just to listen to all of the possibilities will take you the better part of a lifetime.

For the past few years Walter Becker and I have started what we call The Preset Factory. When auditioning sounds on a synth, or reverbs in a multi-verb box, or compression in a DSP plug-in, we only listen to the presets. If the sound wasn’t good enough for the manufacturer to include it in his list of presets, then it probably wasn’t worth hearing. This cuts down the auditioning time considerably. Now there are only a finite number of settings to listen to. It is possible to tweak settings beyond the preset, but we need a majority vote from all involved in the session. Each member of the band is also allowed one "gotta-have-it" for the entire album project. If he invokes the gotta-have-it, it overrides the vote. Sick, huh.

Here in 1999 we are at the dawn of new technology that will give us even more choices. DVD, DSD, AC-3, DTS, DVD-RAM, DVD-DA, DVD-R, DVD-RW, and PMS (sorry, that’s and old one). Mixing in surround will give you three times as many choices. Mixing audio for DVD-DA will allow you to choose among various sample rates like 44.1k, 48k, 96k, 192k, and program material that can have multiples of these sample rates happening at the same time.

The future looks bright and I don’t have to worry as much about cutting myself with a sample rate converter as I did when there were razor blades lying around.



Roger just crossed 30,000 edits on his Pro Tools 24|Mix Plus system and wonders if he needs to drop it off at the dealer for an oil change and lube.