Notes on gear lust/stripped back studio
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2008 4:45 pm
Thought some of you might find this interesting:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun04/a ... ?print=yes
'Avoiding The Traps
Born in Venezuela, Miguel Depedro was raised in San Diego, California. By his teenage years, he'd developed a keen interest in recording and sound synthesis, and so he enrolled himself in studio courses at a local community college. "I had an awesome professor who played me stuff like Steve Reich and really influenced me and was a great guy," Depedro recalls. "Studio-wise, it was just an analogue quarter-inch eight-track, a Mackie board and eventually an ADAT, with some MIDI sequencing off to Mac Classics running Digital Performer. I had better stuff at my house, but the whole process of being in a studio and miking stuff and getting strange samples was really cool and influential. I quickly became an intern and would spend the night doing lots of crazy feedback and tape-loop experiments."
kid606.s
Like so many others from his generation, by the time Depedro was 18, he'd seized upon the mouse and keyboard as his primary instruments. "It wasn't till I got a computer that things really started to come together for me musically and I could catalogue and collate ideas and sounds and basically 'design' music like a designer would create something, rather then simply capture and record it," he says. "I learned tons about digital editing within the first couple of years of having a computer, which is what allows me to do things quickly now."
With an impressive back catalogue and a new full-length album (Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You) to promote, it's obvious that Depedro isn't at a loss for material these days. He wasn't always this prolific, though, a failing he puts down to a fascination with equipment for its own sake. "I was a serious f**king gear whore as a kid," he admits. "I lived off of buying and trading gear for years, searching pawn shops, thrift stores, newspaper ads, you name it. And then I'd just play around for the fun of it and never finish much."
Because he was more impatient and far less technically inclined than Depedro, Kidwell never fell into that trap, but he's seen others falter creatively because of gear lust, or — more accurately — because of the fear of failure that gear lust handily conceals. "There wasn't an electronic music scene in Baltimore, but pretty much everyone I knew who made music was stuck in this thing of like 'Aw, next week I'm getting this, and then I'm gonna make these tracks that'll blow your mind!' and the next week you'd see this person again and they'd be like 'Hey, do you wanna buy this thing I bought, cause I gotta get this other thing,' and they'd never make a f**king track," he laughs.
"So immediately, from the outset, once I got into software I said: I am not gonna be one of those techie gear nerd dudes. I write songs. I didn't get into electronic music because I wanted to innovate some new crazy s**t that no-one had ever heard before, but because I wanted to be the whole band myself. I didn't want to deal with some idiot with a bass guitar in his hand going 'Why am I playing this part like this?'"
It's a problem, he contends, that has been exacerbated by the wild proliferation of cracked software floating around on the Internet. Kidwell remembers touring with Depedro for the first time: "We were running into guys all over the place who wanted to talk about crazy software, and the software talk was even worse than the gear. At least the gear dudes had to work a job and physically buy something and physically have room for it. A software addiction, though — you could just get that shit pirated and then you've gotta spend six weeks learning it and then you get something else and you gotta spend six weeks learning that. Those people are in even more of a weird limbo purgatory of never producing anything listenable."'
The whole article is pretty good and worth reading.
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun04/a ... ?print=yes
'Avoiding The Traps
Born in Venezuela, Miguel Depedro was raised in San Diego, California. By his teenage years, he'd developed a keen interest in recording and sound synthesis, and so he enrolled himself in studio courses at a local community college. "I had an awesome professor who played me stuff like Steve Reich and really influenced me and was a great guy," Depedro recalls. "Studio-wise, it was just an analogue quarter-inch eight-track, a Mackie board and eventually an ADAT, with some MIDI sequencing off to Mac Classics running Digital Performer. I had better stuff at my house, but the whole process of being in a studio and miking stuff and getting strange samples was really cool and influential. I quickly became an intern and would spend the night doing lots of crazy feedback and tape-loop experiments."
kid606.s
Like so many others from his generation, by the time Depedro was 18, he'd seized upon the mouse and keyboard as his primary instruments. "It wasn't till I got a computer that things really started to come together for me musically and I could catalogue and collate ideas and sounds and basically 'design' music like a designer would create something, rather then simply capture and record it," he says. "I learned tons about digital editing within the first couple of years of having a computer, which is what allows me to do things quickly now."
With an impressive back catalogue and a new full-length album (Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You) to promote, it's obvious that Depedro isn't at a loss for material these days. He wasn't always this prolific, though, a failing he puts down to a fascination with equipment for its own sake. "I was a serious f**king gear whore as a kid," he admits. "I lived off of buying and trading gear for years, searching pawn shops, thrift stores, newspaper ads, you name it. And then I'd just play around for the fun of it and never finish much."
Because he was more impatient and far less technically inclined than Depedro, Kidwell never fell into that trap, but he's seen others falter creatively because of gear lust, or — more accurately — because of the fear of failure that gear lust handily conceals. "There wasn't an electronic music scene in Baltimore, but pretty much everyone I knew who made music was stuck in this thing of like 'Aw, next week I'm getting this, and then I'm gonna make these tracks that'll blow your mind!' and the next week you'd see this person again and they'd be like 'Hey, do you wanna buy this thing I bought, cause I gotta get this other thing,' and they'd never make a f**king track," he laughs.
"So immediately, from the outset, once I got into software I said: I am not gonna be one of those techie gear nerd dudes. I write songs. I didn't get into electronic music because I wanted to innovate some new crazy s**t that no-one had ever heard before, but because I wanted to be the whole band myself. I didn't want to deal with some idiot with a bass guitar in his hand going 'Why am I playing this part like this?'"
It's a problem, he contends, that has been exacerbated by the wild proliferation of cracked software floating around on the Internet. Kidwell remembers touring with Depedro for the first time: "We were running into guys all over the place who wanted to talk about crazy software, and the software talk was even worse than the gear. At least the gear dudes had to work a job and physically buy something and physically have room for it. A software addiction, though — you could just get that shit pirated and then you've gotta spend six weeks learning it and then you get something else and you gotta spend six weeks learning that. Those people are in even more of a weird limbo purgatory of never producing anything listenable."'
The whole article is pretty good and worth reading.
