From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
A number of factors can be credited for the development of the independent, sub-indy, and "underground" music scene from the late seventies through the late eighties. Experiencing lean times from the excesses and bloated financial expectations of the early seventies, major record companies tightened their belts, investing in nothing but sure-bet megagroups or their clones. Free-form FM radio died and programming fell completely under the control of paid "consultants" who dictated what musical mush would yield the maximum number of listeners. Under these conditions, musicians even marginally outside the plain vanilla mainstream had no choice but to create and circulate their music via self-developed means and channels.
Equally significant during this period, technologies emerged which allowed musicians to create increasingly sophisticated recordings without relying on large commercial studios. Audio cassettes and recorders developed into a surprisingly high-fidelity medium and provided an accessible means of distributing independent music. Musician-produced recordings have since thrived in an environment of four-track cassette portastudios, affordable synthesizers with remarkably detailed sound, digital delay and reverb units, sampling machines, and of course the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). Along with digital audio technologies, the much-lauded phenomenon of MIDI has brought equipment costs down and allowed greatly enhanced compatibility between instruments, processors, and even recording machines.
Being an "electronic musician" and shameless tech-head, I might be expected to join the ranks of those praising such developments to the heavens. But since I consider myself a troublemaker first and a musician second, and considering the fact that there appear to be more than enough praise-singers here and about, you'll have to indulge my playing devil's advocate in the present instance. My task here is to examine the neglected underside of these developments.
What underside? Since hardware has only become "faster-cheaper-better," and standards for equipment compatibility and control have exceeded any expectations, one may well wonder what there is to bitch about. Ten years ago independent musicians certainly found life more difficult and more expensive. In the area of electronic music, synthesizers were only slowly coming to programmability; one might work for hours to attain a particular sound on a patch-cord-style machine, and have only a dim possibility of recreating it with any accuracy at a later time. Such synths were typically monophonic, time-consuming to program, bulky, and pricy. The workhorse home" multi-track tape recorder at the time, the Teac 3440, was considerably more costly than later portastudio-type machines, and of course additionally required an external mixing board. As far as the most essential sound processor--reverb--the situation was even worse; manufacturers continually struggled to produce the least crappy-sounding spring reverberation, few having much success, and not many musicians self-producing their recordings could afford the cost or space requirements of the much-preferred plate reverbs. In retrospect it all seems to have been unbearably difficult; every production was a challenge to one's resourcefulness and innovative craftiness. Many times things seemed held together with spit and exhibited a fidelity to match, by today's standards. But at least in the days of modular and other non-programmable synthesizers, we didn't turn on the radio and hear the same patch over and over again. The 3440 did and still does offer superior sound to any cassette portastudio. And as far as reverb units...well, that one is a bit tougher to justify, but let's at least say that the truly adventurous who built their own plates or pressed unoccupied bathrooms and stairwells into service certainly had something special to show for their efforts.
Today, of course, much higher sound fidelity is attainable, we have access to more, ah, beautiful sounds, the price of outfitting a home studio is within reason for many, and naturally of greatest importance these days--it is all so much easier. The current hot item is the "workstation," a piece of gear incorporating keyboard, multiple-voice synthesizer, realistic sampled instruments (usually including several full drum kits), delay, reverb, and other processors, and a digital multi-track sequencer/recorder. As the ads say, "Now you can get down to the real business of making music," the dirty job of creating sound and schemes for assembling it into unique music now out of the way!
But it seems that innovation is now an optional ingredient rather than a necessary one. Current digital wonders are relatively cheap and easy to use, but without the requirement of innovative approaches, many musicians leave out the innovation part altogether. The most frequent and damning criticism of today's "home studio" music productions is that they all sound so similar. With vastly increased possibilities, and manufacturers telling us that we are "limited only by our imagination," why does one hear so many independent cassette recordings that sound virtually identical?
The fact is that most of our expanded technical capability has come about through that mixed blessing of modern civilization, mass production. The palm-top digital reverb unit only exists because the potential sale of a hundred thousand of the little suckers subsidized the whole affair. (I own one myself, but what are the implications of a dozen or so sounds spread amongst tens of thousands of users?) Out of necessity large corporations design products for Mr. Average User--as average and bland as possible, in fact. But does that describe you and your music? If so, you've probably read too far already.
Perhaps most curious of all is that musicians not only accept this middle-of-the-roadism, but often don't even meet manufacturers' modest expectations of them. A common story in synthesizer repair departments is that units brought in for work frequently contain only the original factory preset sounds, the famously creative musicians never having even tried to come up with any of their own. And the manufacturers listen! Now we find, in many cases, newer models of equipment which, rather than employing more developed soundcrafting possibilities, actually revert to less capable (easier to use) versions, even of inferior sound quality.
I have met musicians who own home studios which almost literally contain "one of everything." And within each of the devices which are programmable, guess what you'll find? Yup--factory junk, milquetoast sounds for milquetoast music. My argument here is that one does not need to be a major stockholder in Yamaha or Roland to produce interesting, vital music. (They even dragged me into it for a couple of years, promising heaven-with-a-MIDI-cord-attached, but I got wise.) We don't need one of everything, we don't need stacks of MIDI synths and $10,000 samplers. We need innovation and original approaches. Don't use factory synthesizer patches; don't buy factory disks for your sampler--it was made to use your sounds. Look into "obsolete" gear like non-programmable synths, ring modulators, and analog delays. Use a transducer driver to run your voice through a suspended refrigerator rack on its way to your vocal track, put some alligator clips on your guitar strings, use a mixer to add more regeneration to effects than the manufacturer would normally allow.
What's most difficult to obtain today is interesting music. Been to a record store lately? I haven't found much. Oh, and one last thing: Anybody have a spring reverb for sale?
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