The Ever Evolving Studio

Let's talk about how the studio is shrinking. Plain and simple we can do more with less now and it will keep evolving. Our equipment list is shrinking because we use DAW's (now I still own a small four track Teac A-3340 reel to reel) I like to fatten up tracks with it once in awhile and it works great still. But my studio is more open less gear to clutter it up we have all shrunk it down to a laptop, an interface, a couple of mics for vocal and instrument recording, a pair of monitors and an external hard drive and that's about it. The amount of gear does not dictate the quality of the outcome it's the quality of the gear and the skills of the user. The racks of equipment have been replaced with excellent sounding plug-ins a lot of us are using the virtual mixing boards with in the DAW's software and electronic drums take up half the room as an acoustic set does. With all this equipment shrinkage I have had to add more acoustic panels to my three room studio every time you remove something your rooms sound changes because what ever you took out was stopping a certain amount of standing waves and your ears readjust and your noticing fludders and echos.

And I have noticed over the last couple of years we have adapted a new way of recording with smaller devices and online sequencers and beat machines www.musicanddjinstructionalmedia.com also even as I'm writing this article the laptop is being replaced by the i Pad and so the evolving continues. And with the advanced Handheld audio / video recorders that sound pretty amazing you can record on the go with very very good results and you can drag and drop, file transfer and direct to YouTube upload capability your project and start sharing whats not to like. If you've ever tried to incorporate a PDA or an iPod or other device into your work-flow you know that can be quite difficult to integrate and connect properly. There is a device called DIDock and it will allow you to hook up such devices and it even has balanced, transformer-isolated XLR connections and ground lift switches to insure buzz-free hook ups and it will charge your iPod as well and provides a headphone jack. Now if that's not shrinkage I don't know what is! Point being our studios our evolving and that will never change and quite frankly I'm looking forward to the up and coming years technology changes and see how far we progress which brings me to virtual instruments and how well these sampled instruments sound and the very small footprint they leave on your studio I have a really nice B3 organ plug-in and it only takes a forty-nine key keyboard how small is that compared to the real deal and the  sampling is amazing and is being done in some of the best studios in the world. Happy Recording.