Where Big Studios Should Go
“I understand that commercial studios see a slice of their pie going away with facilities like mine working with artists off the street, if even on the lower and middle levels. Smart studio owners, if they are willing to come to terms with guys like me, should acknowledge the obvious. If, in their market, there is a lot of business like the kind I do, maybe they should open a budget facility in a less-than-fancy environment. Give the power to the people who can afford it.
“If the market has a limited amount of this business, maybe they should just let go of it and develop their business in other areas, such as corporate, ad work, record company projects or audio post-production. These are all areas I and people like me probably won’t get into, for all the obvious reasons.
“They should face up to the fact that their business is being redefined, along with the industry, along with the society and the culture. It’s a different world today, with MTV, computers, foreign imports, foreign property holdings, glasnost, you name it. People like me have nice little rooms that work, nice old microphones that work, formats that work and translate well, and we can record all of our stuff in-house.
“We can mix there if we want to, but some really smart guy should open up a franchise of mixdown-only rooms all across America to take advantage of all the home studios and their lack of investment in DSP devices, reverbs, dubbing capabilities and the opportunity to mix down to the reigning digital format of the hour. Imagine a scenario where an act says, ‘We saved all of our money because we worked in our own room, and were able to spend hours and hours getting our saxophone and guitar solos absolutely the way we wanted to, and now we’ve got a good budget to go into somebody’s control room to do a quality mix – down with all the latest toys.
“A smart businessman could develop this angle and really be profitable, because there are a lot of guys who don’t even have the gear I have. A mixdown-only room is a viable business that doesn’t exist right now. It’s a million-dollar idea. [Remember, you read it here first – Ed.]
“Something else a smart studio can do is develop the specialized areas that lend themselves to studio work. Like live albums. jazz, bop, live scoring, classical music. Things that musicians need rooms for when they play together. Become known as the room in town that records quartets, or heavy metal. Do a light show, or pyrotechnics, to let the players feel like it’s a real live show. That’s a unique market.
“If I was a competitive commercial studio, I might go after something like the religious recording crowd, creating a facility that was geared to exactly them, spiritual music. Get some recommendations, get printed up in the secular papers and magazines, create an environment, subscribe to the right magazines, do the research, and seriously and respectfully address the needs of that large and barely understood market. Become the mecca for people who deal in that kind of material. Advertise the fact. Tell the world you’re sensitive to their needs. In other words, compete through specialization.
“Look at car parts shops: some specialize in 4 -wheel drive, some VW, some foreign, some Corvette, some Mopar parts. If you’re a customer, you want to talk to someone who knows about exactly what you are doing. Parts shops learned their lesson long ago that you can’t be everything to everyone. You have to specialize to succeed. Our infant industry, only fractionally as old as the automotive, is just now learning this lesson. Even tax accountants specialize in personal, small business or corporate clients.
Wrap-Up
“It is interesting to consider what will happen to music with the popularization of the new digital technologies, like disk-based recording, where you have the ability to easily and cheaply buy gear that lets you sing one line and loop it and edit it to your heart’s content, so that every chorus is a clone of the first chorus, perfect. It has the potential of killing music as we know it. But, then again, just like the rhythm technology of the ‘80s had the potential of dousing all the drummers, you and I both know that there’s lots of work out there for drummers. You can’t tell a drum machine to ‘play it like a bowling ball just fell on your foot: You can say that to a drummer, and I do say things like that to the players. That interpretive value is there. There will always be a place for the humans, for many of the players to contribute different ideas toward one song at one moment in time.
“New technology always allows you to be creative in areas that you were never creative in before. Before the saxophone existed, saxy things couldn’t be done. It’s a new and wonderful world, and although digital technology can certainly be used to turn art into injection-molded plastic music, and it can and will be, it can also allow the creation of stuff that we’ve never heard before, more human than ever.
“Commercial studios need to realize that it is a brave new world, and the very juice that made them grow and develop from their original garage and basement spaces had better be brought back into play, so they can keep growing and changing to take advantage of what’s happening in the ‘90s. Lord knows I am, and there are lots more out there just like me. We aren’t going to go away. It’s a changing world, but there’s still lots of room for guys with ideas.”
Editor’s Note: This is a series of articles from Recording Engineer/Producer (RE/P) magazine, which began publishing in 1970 under the direction of Publisher/Editor Martin Gallay. After a great run, RE/P ceased publishing in the early 1990s, yet its content is still much revered in the professional audio community. RE/P also published the first issues of Live Sound International magazine as a quarterly supplement, beginning in the late 1980s, and LSI grew to become the monthly publication that continues to thrive to this day.