The Sound Board

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?

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.

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?

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...

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...

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Apr 15, 2026 3:37 am 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.

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!

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.