The Sound Board

Take a look at that advert.

Something snapped in me.

It's nothing to do with whether this is a good or a bad product. It won't be long before you can upload the worst mixed WAV known to man and it will come back sounding highly professional. There's no use complaining about such things, and how terrible it is that you don't need talent any more (or alternately that this new tools will never be a substitute for talent). That's not what bothers me.

What REALLY bothers me is the notion that all that separates someone from lonely obscurity and stratospheric commercial success is a plugin. Or DAW. Or suite of plugins. It's beyond absurd. As of last year, 120,000 new songs are released EVERY DAY. Take a guess how much your chances of having a commercial hit are increased by buying T Racks 6? If it's higher than zero, then you're kidding yourself.

Those of us of a certain age will remember well the fight to make stuff made at home sound passable. The revolutions of portastudios, midi, cheap digital effects, DAWs came and went and each time we were thrilled at tangible benefits. Well, we arrived at the high quality station probably about 30 years ago, and since then its just got easier and cheaper with little-to-no appreciable improvement in quality.

And of course the other revolution has been distribution. Getting a record cut and put into shops was an unobtainable goal until the late 70s when independent labels and a DIY aesthetic allowed the likes of Rough Trade to break the mould. But it was still hard, and relatively expensive. You really needed to win over one of the gatekeepers, a record company. Now it costs little to nothing to be on every music platform in the world. Takes about half an hour.

Half an hour to be lost in obscurity, buried under the weight of 44 million other songs released that year and rising.

Are people still persuaded by advertising like this? Yes, I think they are. Every time a new plugin comes out having modelled the desk from Sun studios or bottled the acoustic space of Abbey Road, we get a twinge. WOW! Do we on some level kid ourselves that it will make the slightest difference whatsoever? That the magic of that hallowed circuitry or walls will give us even one percent of the magic of Elvis or The Beatles? With a great GUI then yes we do. Otherwise we wouldn't buy them. It has long been my conviction that in a blind test with an existing competitor's product - which we probably already own - we couldn't tell any difference.

If you really want to make a hit, the last place you need to be looking at is what equipment you are using. It doesn't matter. General competence is of course important, but that's not dependent on magic plugins. You need - ideally - to have a killer song with a killer singer, arranged well. That improves your chances a thousand fold all the way to having very little chance at all. You then need a strategy, likely based online, that will get you traction. THAT is what music forums for commercial music should be discussing, that's the dark arts impenetrable to anyone over 25. And yet we endlessly discuss that last quarter of a perceptible percent on the latest mic emulation instead, all one huge displacement activity.

Of course if someone is hobbying or working in media composing things are different, though the imbalance in attention towards technical gear is still prevalent.

We have no excuses these days. If something doesn't sound good, the problem is almost always us, it's not we have the wrong plugins.

I've been whining about this mentality for a while, long enough that I finally stopped saying it out loud.

It is beyond ridiculous, some portion of their customers (a large one I'd bet) don't have a clue and they are throwing their money away on a lie. It is one thing to throw away money on a dream (as long as you stay reasonable), but junk advertising like this really is annoying!

As for the rest of your rant - you are preaching to the choir.

The big winners in the California gold rush weren’t the hopeful gold miners, they were the merchants who sold them picks and shovels.

Many more merchants making money than musicians in the music biz, and even a lot of them are struggling.

For all the good he accomplished, I believe that the blame for this lies firmly on Steve Jobs. Steve declares that EVERYBODY could be a good photographer, or film maker, or composer, or artist or (fill in the blanks) if they were only given affordable tools that weren't too difficult to learn to use.

Because Apple enjoyed financial success with that philosophy, others jumped on board, and now we have what we have, a culture where talented and not so talented people find it much easier get their creations to market, but with little payment in that market to be had.

Lawrence wrote: ↑Sep 06, 2024 1:30 pm The big winners in the California gold rush weren’t the hopeful gold miners, they were the merchants who sold them picks and shovels.

Many more merchants making money than musicians in the music biz, and even a lot of them are struggling.

I quote this daily! Applies to almost all the creative industries (very true in screenwriting).

I take your hint too - we've pretty much maxed out the shovel-sellers in the music business.