The rise of the home studio

[Guy Rowland]

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?

[Jaap]

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.

[wst3]

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?