Op-Ed: Want to record your own music and looking for software? Good luck

I’m a musician, not an obsessed computer technician. All I was looking for was something where I could just plug in a mike and play, and do some editing. Little did I know how obscure that concept is to the software makers.

The musician’s industry standard is Cubase, an expensive, but reliable, well known bit of software. The media standard is Pro Tools, also trusted, which includes some special hardware. There are variations on Cubase, including a sawn off version now available with some Yamaha hardware. All of which is very nice, but really, you don’t want to be guessing what’s going to happen when you record. If you’re a fussy, neurotic bastard when recording, like me, you don’t want to be buying Post Production Trauma, either. So, being cheaper than dandruff, I went looking for freeware. I found something which looked good called Audacity. My security software wouldn’t let it in. It killed the .exe file, so there was no hope of running it unless I reconfigured my various layers of security. The previous configuration took two hours…and involved a remote configuration... Hmmmm…. Went looking for something easier. I found pages upon pages of all the things I could do, how many Ghz of RAM I needed, everything but the developer’s birth certificate. What I did not find, and to date have seen no indication of ever finding in the blurb, anywhere on Earth, was what I wanted. For a while there, I wasn't even sure about that. Did I want (twitch) a special sound card which looked like a prosthesis (convulse) for a sexually underachieving dinosaur? How about (grimace,gnaw) an impeccable set of statistics (howl) to go with that? I did manage to wheel out my one Gaelic curse in the process, so I was at least by now feeling vindicated. Not much else was getting done, though. What horrified me was the copy. I was looking for the words “record direct” in some known language. My mother was a copywriter. I write copy. If there’s one thing you need to know when writing copy, it’s who your market is. In this case, the market is musicians, and if you need an interpreter, forget it. Sell used cars instead. Musicians are arguably the laziest, most obsessive, selectively focused group of people on Earth. That’s why we’re called “cultural”. We expect other people to get our diseases for us. We even occasionally have some vague idea about doing something sometime, and expect other people to naturally provide the materials, understand what’s wanted, and give discounts. So detailed analyses of the most important breakthroughs in computer science and digital sound aren’t likely to get much attention, unless we can apply verbs to them. Say things like “Record”, “Mix” “Edit”, or anything which might appear in a conversation about recording, we’re there. Provide endless detail on the relative merits of a string of numbers, and we are definitely not there, and have no intention of being there. There’s a reason for that. I can get a very good sound out of a tape recorder. It requires one or two takes, and about 5 minutes per track. Somehow I find this better use of time than spending days learning how not to get the sound I want. Time matters, when it’s time spent not recording or doing other production work. By this time I’d realized I’d always wanted to shoot, flay and vivisect anyone who uses the word “solutions” in any context whatsoever. Then I realized that if I spent all that time frivolously editing the human race, however necessarily, I wouldn’t get much recording done. I have at least hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of production coming up, and I’d have to change clothes eventually, too. I’d also have to pay for the bullets, arrows, catapult boulders, BB balls, flintlocks, machetes, ICBMs and other esoterica. Somehow I changed my mind. Another revelation. There’s a shop which sells music software, less than a block away from my place. I’ve been shopping there for a decade or so. I scampered thither. Awfully decent of me, really. Sure enough, there they were. Another collection of packages, full of blurb which could possibly prevent consciousness in rocks, but not much else. Pricey, too. I talked myself into one package and out of another. I found a software package, despite the science of shop displays which is supposed to prevent people from finding what they want, in the software stand. There, guilelessly, it seemed, was a small paragraph and a picture of a keyboard and a mike: “Record direct using a microphone”… This process took a total of 5 hours. It also happens to contain some SONY software I’d been looking at on a US site. I’d only spent about two hours on the SONY site. It even works with my video camera. Did I see this on anything but the box for this software? Nope. Was there any suggestion of ever seeing anything resembling this information anywhere else? Nope. If you guys ever want a copywriter for your musical stuff, let me know. Until the idea of explaining what software packages do to musicians finally occurs to someone, I would suggest sign language. Just hire someone to hang around on a site demonstrating and maybe foaming at the mouth to show a bit of empathy with the customers. I shall now proceed to destroy whatever remains of Western musical culture, with my new software. I feel better now...