Music production on the digital frontier – for everyone!
By Abhijit Asad
Finding amazing music online is one of my favorite things about the internet. Although it started as a video sharing platform, YouTube has proven itself to be a veritable treasure trove for even the most obscure music genres, with songs getting uploaded as one-picture videos (typically the album art) by fans and musicians alike for free listening. The experience is only made better by the fact that YouTube’s own algorithms automatically make genre-savvy suggestions for other videos based on what you watch (or in this case, listen to), which makes discovering great new music even easier.
Anyway, I’m digressing. A few days ago, I stumbled upon an outstanding atmospheric album called ‘Unity’ by a Russian band called Skyforest (http://skyforest.bandcamp.com) and was completely blown away by its amazing compositions and unbelievably high quality of production. Long story short, I tracked down the mysterious band leader B. M. after a semi-long chase through the bowels of social media and was astounded to subsequently discover that Skyforest was actually the solo project of Bogdan Makarov, a Russian multi-instrumentalist fresh out of his teens.
A rather reclusive young man, Makarov hates being in the limelight so much that he has no intention of ever performing live (despite having the skills to play everything on his own), and very few people are aware that he is the same ‘B. M.’ who has been spawning such ethereal music across a wide gamut of genres over the years. He has no lust for fame or wealth and releases his mind-blowing music on the internet for people to freely download and enjoy. And he is far from the only one of his kind. There are many musicians out there who have been spreading their brilliance across the web from the remote sanctuaries of their minds without feeling the need to perform before an audience or even show their faces.
But surely something that sounds so good requires the support of a proper professional studio behind it? I asked Makarov about his setup, and the response floored me – every single one of his songs is mixed and mastered at his rather average home, on a rather average home computer, using rather average-priced off-the-shelf gear bought from rather average music stores. Nevertheless, there was nothing even remotely average about his cinematic sound.
For one thing, the advent of modern technology has made solid and high-quality recording gear affordable for users of all financial abilities, and it gets even better when combined with the high-end yet affordable and easy-to-use DAW (digital audio workstation) software that users can get. As long as you have good ears and a halfway decent hardware setup, it is now surprisingly easy to achieve CD-grade audio quality even on home recordings. Gone are the days of wheezy multitrack tape recordings and messing around with scissors in a studio. Splicing and editing digital recordings and applying effects has never been easier.
The whole process is made even more exciting with the prospect of the computer being capable of playing the role of actual samplers, synthesizers, and effects processors, which were previously left to expensive studio hardware. If someone wanted to add reverb (a kind of decaying echoey effect) to a recorded track, instead of recording the track in a large hall or routing the track through an expensive reverb unit, simply load up a reverb effect in your DAW and run with it. Even most trained ears fail to tell the difference between the emulated software effects and the real thing.
Sampling and physical modeling has made a great number of instruments available in software form to aspiring musicians, who can now whip up tracks featuring the sounds of exotic musical instruments with ease, or add realistic-sounding instrumental backing tracks to their compositions without requiring a single actual instrument to be played in reality. That amazing drum line you heard in some random song might just be nothing more than excellent programming with meticulously ‘humanized’ notes.
Speaking of which, want to feed notes to your software synthesizer by playing something like a piano? Get a MIDI keyboard, hook it up to a computer, play it, record the notes to your favorite synthesizer. Or are you a rock guitarist who wants a raw analog sound? Simply plug your guitar into your sound card and use a physically modeled amplifier simulator (software, of course) to coax the perfect tone out of your guitar without requiring any expensive amplifiers and stompboxes. It just doesn’t get any better than this for the financially constrained musician. Even the amount of free music production software and plugins available on the internet is simply astounding. In fact, for certain genres of music, such as electronica, it is entirely possible to produce entire albums on a computer without using a single real instrument.
Even musical input options are far more interesting now. Instead of restricting yourself to standard keyboards, fretted instruments or percussion pads, you can now go for strange grid-like sequencers, touchscreen-based interfaces (many musicians now use iPads as regular features of their instrument arsenal) and so on. Some of these options have even been married to other instruments — just check out the RGKP6 guitar by Ibanez which comes with a Korg touch controller that lets you play with its sound in wondrous ways in real time, helping you to create sounds which you would never dream of hearing from a standard electric guitar.
While you still need to have innate musical talent if you are to touch hearts with your melodies (it is unlikely that software or hardware that can grant musical talent to its users would emerge anytime soon), it has never been easier to produce professional-grade music with minimal hardware while sitting in the comfort of your home. So if you feel like it, go out there and grab yourself some decent gear and play around with a few DAWs. Who knows, maybe you’ll turn out to be the next Bogdan Makarov!
