The rise of the home studio

[Guy Rowland]

Thought this would be a fun thread.

My musical journey started in the 1980s, just when home studios were a thing. In just a few short years it was a total revolution - home studios became ubiquitous and eventually good. I'll never forget reading an article in Sound On Sound, must have been mid to late 80s, where a studio engineer was saying they were toys and no-one was ever going to have a hit with one.

I think we all share a bit of sadness at the demise of the proper recording studio.

The Fostex A8 (and its sequels) were everywhere for a while, then it was those ADAT things. If you didn't have the budget for that, a portastudio of some kind. I ended up with a weird 6 track cassette thing that ran at double speed, a Sansui, running timecode on one track leaving 5 for vocals - I think that was in the era of the Atari 1040ST and Pro 24. I had a small 24 track Tascam line mixer where you could automate mutes via midi.

The Drawmer compressor seemed to be everywhere, and most could only afford one.

Everyone used to have either a microverb or a midiverb, and an SPX 90 if they were lucky. Even though all these were budget options - the big studios all had the AMS or Lexicons - it strikes me know just what an incredible revolution that was. This was what studio reverbs used to look like before the digital revolution:



Then in the 90s computers developed the ability to handle audio and that was that. I do sort of miss those days - I can't shake a feeling that with everything so cheap and easy now it's all quite rudderless and meaningless. My boomer feelings are somewhat similar to the internet - with the benefit of hindsight when it was in the corner of one room in the house and you had to dial up and restrict your time on it, it could have been the sweet spot. Same for home studios, maybe?

[Jaap]

I have nowadays a bit the same feeling with how we went from the edge of tonal music to free atonality and then to serialism and minimalism.
We are on the edge that technology can gives us everything and therefore a sort of absolute freedom. But I think that just like with free atonality it won't really work. Our creative mind needs some sort of boundaries/rules/restrictions and I think out of all this freedom of gear and stuff we will likely create a way again to limit ourselves in order to keep the real creativity flowing.

[wst3]

I lived through the revolution, grudgingly.

My idea of a home studio was a properly treated room with a tape deck and a console and all the ancillary gear. Now my budget was slightly lower than a commercial studio - ok, a lot lower, so I did take advantage of some of the inexpensive gear. I was also fortunate to be able to repair most studio gear, so I bought a lot of non-functioning devices and fixed (most of ) them

The console is sitting in boxes in my basement - I may yet reassemble it.

The 2" 16 track is still in my "studio", and most of the gear I used back then is still racked up - no idea why. The acoustical treatments are all from my previous studio, and they work reasonably well in the new space.

But the fact is, there are very few devices I cannot replace with plugins. Even my beloved Instant Phaser and Instant Flanger finally made their way to software.

In some cases, mostly EQ and dynamics processors, I find the repeatability of the plugins to make any perceived sonic differences well worthwhile.

Two of the few effects I'd like to see are models of the Yamaha SPX-90/SPX-900 and the Ensoniq DP/4 and DP/2 (I think I saw an ad for the later).

The IR approach to copying these effects has never been satisfactory to me, so it will probably need to be reverse engineered?

[Thomas Mavian]

First little setup was in the late 80s, around 87-88 I think. It was an Oberheim OB-Sx a Roland D-50 (crazily expensive, for me) and a Roland TR-606. Stripped the cables and soldered them together with the output of a tape deck (hardcore mixing!) and into a second tape deck. If I could do it in three passes the noise was, erhm, "acceptable". The TR-606 was quickly replaced by a Roland TR-505 because it sounded like real drums

My first "real" setup was a few years later, around 90-91. An Akai X7000, a Kawai R-50 drum machine, Roland MT-32 and a Roland EM-101. Had to run the R-50 and EM-101 in mono through the BOSS BX-600 mixer since it only had 6 channels. Mixer routed to a tape deck and sound coming out of two home built cheap car speakers. Everything controlled by an Atari 520ST (with DOUBLE-sided floppy!) running Steinberg Pro 24.

A friend was part owner of a real studio and I still get goosebumps thinking of the first time we got the Fostex R-something (16 tracks) in sync with Cubase 1.0. That was mind blowing! Actually wrote the music to a documentary on that, fun times. Had no sync at all so starting the sequencer at the right moment was key. When I saw the final result the music started 3 or 4 seconds too late which made me very upset but I guess nobody noticed it since there were no actual sync-points.
A few years later still the Akai was replaced by a Kawai K5, added a K4 and replaced the drum machine to a BOSS DR-550.

Kind of miss those days, creativity was mind boggling. The things I sampled on the X7000! A total of 0.7 seconds @44K, haha...

[Guy Rowland]

Excellent, Bill and Thomas!

I wouldn't go back for all the tea in China, and yet.

I just added UAD's 8 free effects to the Happy Thread Of Free thread. A casual scan down that list in the OP - it's absolutely absurd. You could make a number 1 hit or even score a film now for £0.00, totally legal, and the quality would be excellent. KIDS THESE DAYS...

[Thomas Mavian]

Excellent, Bill and Thomas!

I wouldn't go back for all the tea in China, and yet.

I just added UAD's 8 free effects to the Happy Thread Of Free thread. A casual scan down that list in the OP - it's absolutely absurd. You could make a number 1 hit or even score a film now for £0.00, totally legal, and the quality would be excellent. KIDS THESE DAYS...

Haha, I wouldn't go back either but the memories fills me with a joy that nowdays is hard to get. Everything is possible, there is a plugin for everything and half of them are free.

Indeed, kids these days. Reminds me of the sketch with Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson

EDIT: seems that this one doesn't include Rowan.

[Tanuj Tiku]

I started in 2007 professionally, so the home studio was already here and well established. In balance, I think it is a good development and the technology has made massive leaps. We have incredible tools for much cheaper today. Many more people can get into it all and start building on those tools.

However, what is not possible is the replication of an acoustically treated space. The loss of a control room is I think a bigger problem. You can have all the tools and they have incredible specification but much of it cannot be appreciated in poorly made rooms or headphones. The economic disruption has caused bigger problems in the professional studio segment where bad rooms are built often due to lack of budgets or just a certain mindset as well.

But, we are past all that since many years now.

I don't think professional studios as a concept are going away anytime soon because the physics will not allow for it of course but I am thankful for the home studio!

[progger]

It took me a rather long time to finally get my home studio game together. I've been playing music my whole life and professionally for my whole adult life, and I've made the majority of my living as a performing musician, although my main interest is really writing and arranging. I was several years into a professional music career before I even started to try to produce any recordings myself, starting with Logic 7 on a Macbook that I bought specifically so I could learn Logic 7.

Many years later, after moving cities a few times and developing a bit of a reputation as "a guy who could do remote recording sessions well," the covid pandemic hit and suddenly I was helping my friends scramble to put together basic functional home recording systems so they could do any work at all.

These days I'm very happy with my situation. Instead of recording in a cramped New York City bedroom with an AT4033 and piled-up clutter as my only real sound treatment (and I got surprisingly good results in that room), I have a decently-treated room in a home I own in Austin with very respectable gear and a gentle but steady stream of work writing, arranging, and recording. Although live gigs still pay most of the bills. But I've gotten to do some pretty major stuff from this humble and happy little space, including working on something that ended up being nominated for "best original song" at the Oscars last year (we didn't win, but neither did Elton so I'm cool with that).

And as happy as I am in this spot, I still book one of the wonderful recording studios in town whenever the budget is there. In this age of automation fatigue, I can already see how important it is all over again for musicians to be playing music in a room together and for that honesty, rather than perfection, to be recorded and released.

[wst3]

Kind of miss those days, creativity was mind boggling. The things I sampled on the X7000! A total of 0.7 seconds @44K, haha...

This!!!

When I listen to some of the things I recorded in the early 80s, on a Fostex X-15, and with nothing but my stomp boxes, a Wurlitzer Rhythm King (and my guitars, of course) I'm really kinda proud of the writing, although I did have a tendency towards over-production. (UNDERSTATEMENT!)

The limitations led to all sorts of "interesting" ideas. Not all of them were good, but they were all interesting.

As the "studio" grew so too did the capabilities. I can't argue that. Compared to what is available today, and today's prices, those days seem downright pre-historic.

And yet, good music was made, not always well produced, but that's when one replaces the engineer hat for that of the fan.

At it's peak (more-or-less), my studio had a Tangent 3216, and MCI JH-16/100, and Otari MX-5050, and quite a bit of rack gear. It also had an Amiga with a Sunrize sound card and a Blue Ribbon MIDI interface, sync'd to the 16 track using a MIDIMan Timecode box. And it all worked well. It lived in my basement, which was built to be a decent sized production room, with room for three or four players.

A far cry from the X-15, SCI Multitracks, and SCI Drumtracks that started the whole thing...

Would I go back in time? And if so, where would I go?

TBH the fact that I no longer need to align tape decks and consoles, not keep a stock of razor blades, makes me think I really wouldn't. I'm good where I am. I just need to remember to challenge myself more, and to work with other humans from time to time.

[Thomas Mavian]

I'm good where I am. I just need to remember to challenge myself more, and to work with other humans from time to time.

This I find is key to unleash some creativity. Creativity grows as restrictions grow. Learned that in an acting improvisation class.

Example, two people taking turns to say a word, any word. Works for a while but feels strange. Repeat it with the requirement that the word has to be some sort of fruit. It actually gets easier.

Same with technology, limit yourself and trust the process

[Guy Rowland]

I started with the snazzy Fostex X-30, Bill. I never reached your dizzy heights Bill, that was quite a setup.

I well remember the thrill when midi meant that I could run everything triggered live and master to DAT - no tape hiss! No bouncing! And from there it was incremental steps to where we are now. Where we festishise tape hiss.

I've always fancied the idea of setting up a completely free rig, no paid plugins and using Pro Tools Intro with it's 8 tracks - plus 8 instrument tracks, 8 midi tracks and 8 auxes, mind. Bounce where need be. The good old days - with no degradation. I know it would sound amazing,

Naturally I can't be bothered. It's a lot of effort.

[Piet De Ridder]

My first multitrack recordings were done on a Portastudio. One of the most euphoric and delirious moments of my entire musical life, I so vividly remember, was riding home on my bike with the newly bought Portastudio under my arm.
For some reason I also remember those two little plastic bottles with coloured fluids you were advised to purchase as well, to clean the thing: a pink-ish red one and a blue one. (I forgot which was which, but one was for the tape heads and the other for the capstan roller.)

The instruments I had at the time were a JX-3P, an SH-101 and a Drumatix. And a real upright piano (a Schimmel). Oh, and an acoustic guitar.

After a few years of that, a friend of mine and me built an actual (semi-commercial) small studio, the heart of which was a Tascam-38 and a D&R mixing desk. (You probably don’t now the D&R brand, it was a Dutch company and their product was considered of very fine quality.) By then, I had also bought a DX-7 and a Kurzweil K-2000R. And my first sampler: the Roland S-50.
(A thing I was rather proud of at the time, was that I actually understood the Kurzweil operating system and I could work with that synth beyond selecting presets. If you have any idea how complex and difficult that OS was, I'm sure you'd nod approvingly and admiringly after reading the previous sentence.)

When, again a few years later, the studio folded — we’re deep into the 80’s now —, I took the tape machine and the desk (and some other stuff) to the place where I lived and set up what was my first true home studio. (The Portastudio years happened wherever I put the thing in record mode, i.o.w. not in a dedicated room.)
A slightly funny memory from those days is that whenever I wanted to record my acoustic piano (which stood in a room on the ground floor), I had to run up the stairs to my studio (which was set up in a room on the first floor), press ‘Record’ on the tape machine well ahead (15 seconds or so) of the moment I had to begin playing, run down, get ready behind the piano, put on my headphones (which were connected to my studio on the floor above with a *very* long cable) and then, hopefully, ... record a good track. If, for whatever reason, I wasn’t happy with the recording (or made a mistake), I had to do it all over again. Boy, have I run up and down those stairs.

And then came my first computer, a Commodore 64. And several other instruments: a TR-707 & 727, a Oberheim Matrix 1000, an EMU E6400, a real clarinet and a real saxophone (alto), and for a short time I also had an upright bass, an instrument, alas, I never managed to feel at home on.

Again sometime later, I moved from the village where I grew up, and where all the previous paragraphs happened, to the city and the home where I still live today. The Commodore got quickly replaced with my first Mac and version 2 or 3 of Emagic Logic. And since then, almost twenty years have passed, and things have kept changing and changing. (Other instruments that have found their way in, and back out again, of my studio were a.o. an XV-5080, a Korg Z1, two EMU Proteus modules, a Yamaha MU100R, a GEM Promega 3, and a V-Drums drumkit which I still have ….)
The only gear I still have from that old studio my friend and I built, is one Auratone speaker and a pair of authentic, original Yamaha NS-10’s. I don’t use them though because they require a good amplifier and I don’t have one.

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[Guy Rowland]

Gorgeous Piet. Especially the running up and down the stairs.

So with the benefit of hindsight, do you have a golden era in all of that? When the balance of possibility, limitation and creativity peaked?

[Piet De Ridder]

I've enjoyed it all equally intensely. Hindsight is inevitable, obviously, but it's not the right way to look at it, I find. (Even if there's no other way to look back.) I don't think that hindsight is a benefit here, but rather a distortion. When I was recording on my 4-track cassette Portastudio, that was heaven for me, it really was. Complete heaven. I had no idea what was to come next or what the future would bring, so I've always been as happy and excited as can be in the moment itself, with whatever pieces of kit I happened to have at that time. Seriously. And it's been like that ever since, right through to this very day.

What we look at now as the limitations of the old gear of 20, 30 years ago, weren't felt or experienced as limitations at the time. Certainly not by me anyway. That's another thing that hindsight gets wrong: limitations of 20 years ago only become limitations when you compare them to how things have evolved 20 years later. The S-50, for example, with its dozens and dozens of 1.4Mb floppy disks was, in hindsight, an incredibly time-consuming, ridiculously limited and quite frustrating keyboard to work with, sure, but at the time, it was nothing less than sheer magic to me. I couldn't wish for anything more exciting.

So, no, I don't have an era that I remember more fondly than the others. Great times, all of them.
And unless my slowly aging mind is playing tricks on me, I don't feel that my creativity and inspiration is declining either. In fact, I think my music has been steadily, if perhaps too slowly (my one regret), gotten better and definitely 'much more me', year after year.

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[Guy Rowland]

That's great, Piet.

I think I always had a keen sense of the limitations though, always frustrated I didn't have a Lexicon or Fairlight or whatever. I'd read Sound On Sound, I'd listen to anything coming out of ZTT records and know that the gear I had couldn't remotely compare with theirs. But that was just plain dumb of me. No, I couldn't do THAT, but I should have been much more focused on what I COULD do. I think - with hindsight - I was tending towards making worse versions of things I admired. Which was, as I say, plain dumb.

So much great music came out of that era from people who were just using and abusing the kit and making it do things it wasn't designed to do. Turning bugs into features. The dance music of the late 80s was really lo-fi but while much was painfully derivative a lot was innovative, using their ramshackle home studios as instruments in the way you do, perhaps. The best used those tools to make totally new things. And, funnily enough, nobody remotely cared if the technical quality didn't sound like it came out of Sarm West. It sounded just great to them.

I think I've learned that kind of lesson far too slowly in my life. I think I've learned it better in my writing that my composing to be honest. Stop doing worse copies of other people's stuff.

[Mike Greene]

I'm in the same boat as Piet, where I was amazed by what I did have, and never felt lacking. My first drum machine (Roland 707) ... wow! My first sequencer (Roland MSQ-700) ... double wow!

Even my first sampler, a Prophet 2000, had an insanely low memory, but I don't recall wishing I had more time. Most of my samples were snippets from records or invented percussion (spoons, coke cans or whatever I could smack), or ultra simple melodic instruments, like one of my favorite basses, which I made by sampling a low guitar string, mapping it lower, and rolling off the highs. I really miss those days.

I still love listening back to a techno-dance track I did in the style of Paul Hardcastle's "Nineteen", where I used a couple samples of Ginger from Gilligan's Island that I recorded straight off my VHS. At that point, my gear wasn't high end (P2000 instead of Fairlight, Roland 707 instead of LinnDrum), but I could still do whatever I wanted, and felt like I was only limited by my own imagination.

Granted, when I'd record demos on my Fostex X-15 cassette 4-track, we'd still need to go to a "real studio" to do better versions, but I'm not sure I'd have wanted to skip that step, since I always felt like I was in a magic place when we'd go to the big boy studios. Those sexy consoles with all those knobs, those enormous speakers ... there was no way I could replicate that in my little apartment.