by Mathieu Benoit » Thu Nov 03, 2011 1:53 pm
I was in the car this morning with my girlfriend when I was test driving the mix I did last night for Dylan's song "Sway". She loved it and said it sounded as good (if not better than) as other things that I had done myself before, then asked the next obvious question: Does he have expensive equipment too? I said no, he's got a couple of decent microphones into some pretty basic preamps that are likely built into his interface. She replied with, "Why do you guys need so much stuff then?"
Well that's a loaded question... haha.
I had to explain to her that if we wanted to be taken seriously as a commercial facility people expect us to have a certain range of equipment to cover our needs which are much greater than that of the solo act in a project studio. We also charge hourly so much of our equipment is there to help speed up the process as well as being able to facilitate recording many things all at once without sacrificing quality. It boils down to client driven expectation, and efficiency really.
I also explained that if someone wanted to be taken seriously as an engineer, they should be able to make it work even when the equipment and/or environment isn't ideal. But these are completely different rules of engament.
I explained to her that Dylan tracked thing well without the limitations of his preamps and captured great performances, the rest is fairly straight forward.
Her point still stands though, Dylan recorded a great vocal without have a multi-thousand dollar mic in his cabinet. Could it have been better? Coulda, shoulda, woulda... Who cares.