Looking for a high quality recording studio between Portland and Salem with rates between $12-$20 an hour.

And this isn’t necessarily very low-ball, either. The going rate for small studios seems to be about $25/hour, or $250/day. Imagine buying $50k of equipment + studio construction and trying to recoup that cost, plus pay yourself (assuming a lone engineer/producer). Eek.

I didn’t get very far with the AM radio trick, it being too difficult to program, and not all that interesting, sonically.

Later in the 1980s, I used my Mac Plus to generate drum machine tracks for some songs recorded by my friend Paul & I. This was wonderful, in a lo-fi sort of way.

Over the years, as digital recording became The Next Big Thing, I would occasionally experiment with new audio converters, plugins, editors, and the like. However, I nearly always found the tools unintuitive and complex, requiring too many mouse clicks for too little return (in comparison to the beautiful simplicity of pressing a “record” button). Simulated dials and buttons just made for a messy and fussy interface, rather than somehow bringing back the intuition of a traditional studio.

And the more I exploited the plugins and other software gizmos, the less I felt like I was in a studio, and the more I felt like I was in the computer. To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with being in the computer; as a programmer, I completely enjoy the feeling of “playing” the computer. However, it seems, to me, incompatible with creating the kind of music I like to create.

(I will admit that MIDI, while a crappy protocol itself, is a wonderful idea, and very powerful in a studio. Being able to remotely control processing, including mixdown, has real potential. It’s a cool way to use the benefits of digital even with an analog signal path.)

I also felt the recorded sound quality was far less than I had been used to in the old analog world. Granted, most of these experiments were on cheap hardware. Better preamps help, as do better analog-to-digital converters, and that’s exactly what’s being advertised these days. But that’s part of the current problem with digital: cheap hardware is what most people buy, and it’s easy possible to hear the lack of depth in many contemporary recordings. 4-track analog cassette tape sounded better than some of these digital tracks.

Finally, the largest problem I’ve had with digital recording is the latency. This is a huge issue, and one that is obvious if you read the marketing materials of any of the companies producing audio interfaces. It may be fine for a MIDI-based keyboardist, looper, or primarily in-the-box sound creator, but as someone who primarily overdubs real/live instruments, the delays I encounter while recording are completely maddening. Again, this could be somewhat improved by better, more expensive hardware — eg, Firewire or PCI interfaces instead of USB. However, it seems impossible on regular Mac/PC architectures to reduce the latency to a level that is totally inaudible, especially if any sort of digital processing (compression, reverb, etc.) is being performed. I have always found it interesting that most folks selling digital audio tools are lost without an answer when I really dig into the latency problems.

The usual “fix” is to turn off any processing while recording, reducing the latency to a minimum. However, this goes against my own recording methods of using the studio as an instrument. By delaying any sort of creative texturing until mixdown, I feel like an electric guitarist forced to play without an amp, being told that I can always add that Marshall stack later.

I’ve always found it difficult to describe my music. I can say a lot more about what it isn’t than what it is. I produce songs, but rarely in a usual pop verse-chorus-bridge style. I like creating soundscapes, but not in a classical/orchestral style, nor in a purely ambient way.

I’m definitely not a singer-songwriter; I rarely write a song as an entity to be performed or recorded. Nor am I at all skilled in learning others’ songs and recording them.

What I seem to be, primarily, is what I’ll term a studiast. That is, I treat the studio itself as an instrument to be played. I do play traditional music instruments — mostly guitar and bass, and I’d like to learn pedal-steel guitar and concertina — but I most enjoy processing the sounds of those instruments into a sonic field. Sampling and synthesis bores me; far more interesting to me is modifying sounds that are originally acoustic. A guitar becoming a sound more like a jet engine is fascinating to me. With layers (not loops!), dynamics, and (hopefully) emotions, based in time, the field becomes a song.

I’m certainly not alone in all this. I look (very far) up to folks like Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, plus a lot of folks far more obscure.

So when I think of what I want in a studio, I visualize being inside this “instrument,” and the kind of control and sound it produces. Overall, I want intuitive interfaces and interesting sound. The specifics may vary — digital recording or tape? tube preamps or opamp chips? stereo or surround sound? — but the generalities remain. If something adds an interesting texture, or opens up a creative avenue, then I move closer to it; if it’s a hassle, sounds crappy, or limits creativity, I move away from it.

A turning point came when listening a rough mix of friend Dave Hudson’s band, The Boxcar Saints. He and his band had self-recorded an album, but were unsatisfied with their recording; they re-recorded the tracks at a studio in Northern California, on a 16-track analog recorder. Even listening to this rough mix in Dave’s apartment on small speakers, the depth and emotion of the music really shone through. I realized then that perhaps the “state of the art” technology — specifically, digital capture into an audio workstation (DAW), with all processing and mixing done “in the box” — was perhaps the wrong path for me. As evidenced by the Boxcar Saints’ recording, analog was most certainly not dead.

Curious about why this could be, given the huge amount of hype and gear dedicated to digital recording, I began exploring what audio recording means today. Happily, I’ve found many alternatives to the “studio in a computer” hype — in fact, a far larger spectrum that existed when I had my first studio, twenty years ago.

This blog is an attempt to document that exploration. I didn’t think to start the blog at the beginning of my research, so I will first play catch-up with myself. As I build the studio, I’ll do my best to document the process. Of course, the final proof will be in the pudding of actual audio tracks uploaded here.