Technology is a Beautiful Thing
The free music school, which is the main component of my current venture (a musical education non-profit on the island of Roatan, Honduras), just finished its first day of recording for a Christmas CD. The CD, once completed, will be sold to raise funds for the school. The first recording day went well, though it was long and filled with all the myriad, inevitable technical difficulties one must expect from a new project.
I must admit, I was somewhat fearful as I went to begin mastering the first recordings. We used a firewire mixer to record the music directly to our computer’s hard drive. The results were incredible.
Before I even touched the audio, the recoding software’s automated cleanup removed ninety percent of the extraneous clicks, shuffles, taps, coughs, mutters, slaps, pops, rattles, and distant car horns that had invaded our not-so-soundproof studio environment.
We managed to produce virtually professional quality audio files with less than 2,000USD in equipments and software (excluding the Macintosh personal computer which was already in our possession) and we did it in a decidedly third-world setting. We did all this without a single day’s professional recording expertise.
This is, I should point out, a result that would have been utterly impossible only a few years ago. Using the finest and most expensive equipment on the market, results like ours could not have come about even so recently as 1999. (I know. I tried.)
The point I am trying to make is: keep an eye out. As your business grows and expands, it is likely that you too can benefit from the blinding advances coming about in the audio and visual arts. From radio ads to TV commercials to print page layouts, professional results can be had using increasingly powerful, user-friendly tools for a fraction of the costs you might expect.
2 Comments
Blair
November 6th, 2006 at 3:18 am
Because this is about recording, I have to argue it somehow, but I just can’t. You’re absolutely right. Although I’m curious to how professional you got with 2k… With the possible equipment choices and combinations, I can’t put it together.
In audio especially, there are very low-cost ways of doing production (I avoided the word ‘cheep’ though it could apply). Once you feel the need to get those extra tweaks, most technology can upgrade to bigger and more expensive packages. Open-source software may seem like a good idea to start with, perfect your own skills and bring in business. Then when you have outgrown the simplicity, it may be time for a product more sophisticated and a little more costly.
Some media is great to produce privately, and some is not.
However, the lower cost of these products has enabled the startup of small new media production companies who won’t charge your first born child just for a radio spot, and have enough of a background to get a better bang-for-your-buck. They might be able to make lower-caliber equipment/software do much more than you ever could for just as much a fraction of the cost.
Evan Prieskop
November 7th, 2006 at 6:14 am
I did not want to dazzle non-technical readers with the specifics of our setup, but since you asked…
We purchased 6 Shure SM57 microphones (not the premier instrumentation mic, even in its price range, but with an unrivaled reputation for durability – a reputation that attracted us in light of our rough environment). These ran less than 200 USD each, including the 75 foot cables.
We ran them through a brand new Presonus Firepod 8. At only 399 USD, it was the cheapest pre-amp we could find capable of both fire-wire output and accepting more than four phantom-power enabled, XLR mic inputs.
We did all the recording, mixing, editing and mastering on a Mini-Mac with Garage Band software (I didn’t include the price of the Macintosh computer itself in my 2000 USD quote as it pre-existed the recording and is used for many other things)
Finally, we are using Itunes to burn the CDs on plain old re-writables with fancy labels printed up by a specialized, CD lablemaker.
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