If you were born after 2000 then there are some music production technologies you have missed. We look back through rose tinted spectacles at 5 technologies that had us all maxing out our credit cards to buy.
CD Burners
There was once a time when you’d mix a track for a client and then have to burn it to a CD, or to be more accurate a CD-R. They weren’t cheap either, starting life at around $35,000 CD burners didn’t go sub $1000 until around 1995. Later on they started to arrive as standard on computers.
In the early days burning a CD-R for a client could prove troublesome and there were plenty of people who ended up with wasted CD-R media that hadn’t worked the first time around. I made plenty of drinks coasters trying to burn CDs.
Some studios set up CD-R burner stations, often consisting of a PC tower with several drives in one machine offering multiple, better than real-time copying. It meant that small batches of CDs could be made for clients. Printing the CDs was another laborious task, some used stick on labels that printed using an inkjet or if you really had the cash, special CD printers were manufactured for the task too.
Of course if you wanted to burn a CD for manufacture then it had to be Red Book standard.
You might miss CDs, but it’s unlikely that you would miss using a CD-R!
DAT Machines
Before the days of bouncing the audio of your mix to your internal computer drive, a multitude of different mastering devices were manufactured to ensure the highest quality digital mix. The most synonymous and affordable, relatively speaking, was DAT, which launched in the late 1980s.
DAT stands for Digital Audio Tape. Based on Sony’s PCM audio format it offered studios the chance to create high quality mixes. The machine most likely to be found in most studios was the Sony DTC-1000ES, which retailed for around a £1000 http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/sony-dtc-1000es/2521
DAT was a standard for many years and enabled studios to mix and archive using small tapes. This small size meant storage and shipping was easy. There wasn’t a band on the planet who didn’t love opening a jiffy bag with their band’s mix on a DAT tape ready for the mastering engineer.
Sampling… the hard way
I remember the first time I started up an Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard. First I had to slot in a floppy disk to load the operating system, then I had to load another disk, perhaps two to load a piano sound. It was 8 voice polyphonic, had a maximum of 128kb of ram and a maximum sampling rate of 32kHz.
Of course if you had limitless amounts of money then your weapon of choice could be the Fairlight CMI or the Emulator, but for mere mortals choose products like the Akai S900 or Roland S10.
Sampling in the early days, be that with AKAI S900, Ensoniq, Roland or Yamaha samplers wasn’t the easiest job. In the early days samplers were mono and had very limited memory. The task of capturing sound was plugging in an instrument or microphone, pressing record and then editing the sample to play. If you wanted a sample to have any kind of sustained length then you needed to to loop it, on the early machines that had very limited looping and crossfade options, this was often hit and miss.
Compared to today’s computers, sampling took time and skill.
Once you had the sound in the sampler then you had to play it which meant using MIDI...
MIDI… the hard way
For most people today they don’t really use MIDI keyboards and controllers, they use USB controllers that then pass note information to the DAW. DAWs then record that information as standard MIDI data.
When MIDI first arrived in the early 80s it gave those using synths and other electronic instruments a standard for connection. For those of us used to recording audio as a signal, MIDI was like magic. MIDI records the data, which means anything can be changed after the event.
However, as with sampling, using MIDI in the early days of recording took some time AND money. Early MIDI studios were based around a keyboard, a MIDI interface and the software to allow you to record the data on your computer. There were also hardware based MIDI recorders such as the Roland MC500. Of course, given that you were recording data and not audio, you needed more than one keyboard, or you needed a multi-timbral sound device that could play more than one sound at the same time.
In 1985 Atari launched a computer with MIDI in and out built in, two models were available, the 520 and 1040ST. Around the same time several companies like Roland and Yamaha launched multi-timbral sound expanders, the Roland MT32 and Yamaha FB01. The combination of an Atari ST and multi-timbral sound expander made recording with MIDI more affordable.
Combined with software like C-Lab Creator (which later became Logic) and Steinberg Pro 24 (which later became Cubase) MIDI enabled musicians to make powerful recordings and edit to their heart’s content.
Now all this is possible right within the DAW with free stuff. Once it was only possible using MIDI, a lot of hardware and a ton of cables.
Bouncing… the hard way
In modern recording bouncing is a term used to describe creating a mix of the track from your DAW and saving it to your hard drive.
However, when we had the limitations of track count on tape then bouncing meant something very different and was a necessary evil. If you wanted to record a band on a 4 or 8 track machine then it didn’t take long to run out of tracks.
Bouncing meant some clever maths when recording to ensure that as you built up the track that you would have enough tracks left to record everything else. Here’s a puzzle to demonstrate the issue. You have drums, bass, two guitars, keyboards, vocals and backing vocals, you also have 4 tracks to record them with. How do you record and bounce to get all those tracks down, also making sure the two guitars and keyboards are stereo? Sounds like the audio version of a Rubik's Cube doesn’t it? That was the reality of recording in the early days of studio recording and the early days of home recording.
There were no second chances and no fixing it in the mix, you were recording and mixing as you went to get all the tracks down. Plenty of us did it and got some amazing recordings bouncing tracks around tape.
In the modern age of limitless digital tracks in DAWs, bouncing as many of us know it is no longer necessary. Be thankful.
Summary
Well there you are, 5 technologies you may never have used and may never have to. In many cases you should thank your lucky stars you don’t have to!