Music Creation: Heating Up?
It’s clear that in the world of digital media, the content creators are back page news compared to the distributors and customers. Ask anyone the name of a music player and you’ll get a quick answer (most likely iTunes or Windows Media Player). Ask anyone the name of a music creation application and you’ll most likely get a blank stare.
There are a variety of really good reasons for this. First, most people aren’t practicing musicians. Why would they even care? Second, the market has long been dominated by Digidesign’s ProTools line. It is the industry standard.
ProTools, as well of all of its competitors, was built with the idea of porting the functionality of a real, live, traditional recording studio on a computer. The result: an application that is as difficult to use as a real, live, traditional recording studio. Would you know what to do if you were faced with this:
Me either. It’s pretty scary stuff.
Of course there have been marked improvements in software, but still, this is a “pro” app, meant for seasoned sound engineers. Those that know how a traditional recording studio works.
Here’s the catch in all of this: the number of folks who were trained in a traditional recording studio have diminished as fast as the need for traditional recording studios. What we have now is a bunch of home studio hybrids, with suboptimal equipment, conditions, and, most of all, suboptimal sound engineering skills. The best part is that this new hybrid can come to some pretty astonishing results. Music creation has become easier in the margins, and we can see that with all of the independent bands on myspace, broadcasting their independently recorded music. And keep in mind this is all happening with software that is really pretty hard to use.
Check this out. My hope is that this is the beginning of a revolution in musicians tools, making them (gasp) easy to use, up-to-date with the internet age, and taking the best part of our new socially networked society. Imagine the possibilities!
