Analog Man

Analog Man

Joe Walsh’s song aptly named ‘Analog Man’ is a whimsical view on how complex and possibly convoluted our digital world has become.

Lyrics...

Welcome to cyberspace, I'm lost in the fog
Everything's digital I'm still analog
When something goes wrong
I don't have a clue
Some ten year old smart ass has to show me what to do
Sign on with high speed you don't have to wait
Sit there for days and vegetate
I access my email, read all my spam, I'm an analog man.

The whole world's living in a digital dream
It's not really there
It's all on the screen
Makes me forget who I am
I'm an analog man

Yeah I'm an analog man in a digital world
I'm gonna get me an analog girl
Who loves me for what I am
I'm an analog man

What's wrong with vinyl, I think it sounds great
L-Ps, forty-fives, seventy-eights but that's just the way I am
I'm an analog man

Turn on the tube, watch until dawn
One hundred channels, nothing is on
Endless commercials, (endless commercials), endless commercials

The whole world's glued to the cable TV
It looks so real on the big L-C-D
Murder and violence are rated P-G, too bad for the children
They are what they see

The whole world's living in a digital dream
It's not really there
It's all on the screen
Makes me forget who I am
I'm an analog man

Yeah I'm an analog man in a digital world
I'm gonna get me an analog girl
Who loves me for what I am
I'm an analog man

I’m in the process of learning how to use a new DAW right now. I have chosen to attempt to conquer the mighty ‘Reaper’ DAW.

Reaper is known for it’s ability to be able to be configured in pretty much any way you want. In other words, whatever you desire for work flow, Reaper is able to be configured to do it in the way you want it to do it. Well enough. That was all it took for me to give it a try. That and a number of online stalwarts that had nothing but praise for the program.

O.K. I’m going to keep this in one post though I know it is long.

So let me take you back in time when I first started recording. I had a tape machine (in my case it was eight tracks) a sound board that my band used for playing shows and a delay and a rack mount spring reverb unit.

I had a few dynamic microphones, a pair of cheap headphones, a pair of JBL 4312’s and a Peavey eight hundred amp that the band used to power them. And that was pretty much it.

I learned how to patch the mic through the sound board and feed a channel of the tape machine. I learned how to interface the outputs of the tape machine back to the sound board so I could play back and hear what I had recorded. It did take a bit of experimentation to learn about signal to noise and distortion. It took a bit to just learn how to ‘hear’ those differences. But the difference was once I knew how to get a signal into and out of the tape machine, I was recording.

If I didn’t like a track I recorded I simply had two choices. Record over it or save it and use a new piece of tape and record a new version. Simple. As time went on I became fairly proficient at ‘punching in’ so I could just re record a small portion of a musical track. This punching in was in ‘real time’ and once it was done there was no getting back to what you had before. If you blew a punch, oh well.

So, just to mix things up a little bit, coming back to the present, in most DAW programs you can re record something multiple times without losing what you recorded before. It layers or stacks the different versions so you can go back and listen to each of them over and over to decide which one you like the best.

So in the tape days a decision had to be made. You liked what you recorded and moved on or you re recorded it. It was simple, logical, easy. There were no thirty two different takes and the endless (may I say tiring) BS of trying to figure out which of the thirty two takes is better than the others. If ever there was a situation that required pain relievers, that is it. With tape,you recorded the tracks to the best of your ability at the time, mixed the tracks down to two track stereo and that was it.

If you read the accounts of some of the great classic tracks, you’ll read things like ‘made decisions on the fly’ or printed the effects while recording. These were all things early analog engineers did while making those great records. Look up ‘classic tracks’. They couldn’t come back and recall tracks, they made decisions on the fly, and it worked when those in the room knew what they were doing.

Having multiple takes to choose from and working with musicians with OCD gets a bit tricky. Analog fixed that. MAKE A DECISION.

So, in my case, I went from analog tape to stand alone hard drive recorders (we’ll talk about those at another time) to using Pro Tools vs 7. This is the pro tools I still use today believe it or not. But the mac G5 computers that I run it on are getting hard to find and no one will fix them. Thus my decision to start the process to find a new recording program (DAW) that I can use with my everyday PC laptop.

Going back in time once again, When I started using Pro Tools I instinctively used it like I had used my old analog tape recorders. The screen looked like a sound board so I was somewhat familiar with what was going on there (called the mix screen) and there was just one other screen that I toggled to and from and that was the screen that showed the actual wave forms of the audio or the notes of the midi tracks.

(note: I used to sync up keyboard synth/sequences with my audio tracks to allow me to get multiple midi tracks added and synced to my tracks that were on audio tape. So that in and of itself was a bit of a hurdle to get figured out, but alas, that’s when I was young and was up to spending eighteen hours a day figuring stuff out.)

So in Pro Tools I found something that was fairly recognizable from a usage stand point, I could see and manipulate individual tracks, and it was all in one basically small package.

The way I morphed into using a DAW was that I would originally record a track, and if there was a part I didn’t like I would simply high light it with my mouse, and re record it. Much like a word processor, if for some reason I didn’t like the new version, I did have the ability to ‘undo’ it and go back to the previous version. I didn’t have that with tape. I didn’t need untold multiple versions of a take. I liked it or I didn’t.

I could also move pieces of music around in time so if a track was played and it sounded good but was just a bit behind the beat, than I could ‘nudge’ that slice of the track ahead in time by a few milliseconds. The beauty of that early version of Pro Tools was that it acted in a way that was intuitive to anyone who used a word processor. Yes, there were quirks, but once you figured them out, you were on your way. One of the biggest, (and I can’t emphasize this enough) and most coveted by products of working in a DAW was/is total recall. I could stop a project at what ever point, go to another project, save that and come back to the original project and be exactly where I was when I last stopped.

For those of you who never worked on a large analog mixing console you just can’t imagine how much of a God send this was. Every thing is saved… EQ’s, effects, mixes, automation, everything.

Another powerful feature of a DAW is pitch manipulation. I’m not talking auto tune here. Say that a musician records a track (mostly I manipulate only vocals when it comes to pitch) and the track is good, it is in time and has the emotion, everything except the singer is a bit flat coming into a chorus. I high light that part of the track crank the pitch up a few cents and I’ll be darned, the track sounds perfect. I’ve become fairly proficient at doing this. In some instances I can change the pitch within a part of a word.

The way I like to work now a days is to get the singer comfortable, have her/him sing the song three or four times straight through, then take a break while I’ll quickly go through the takes and see if there are any things the singer might be doing that I can’t fix. If not we move on. If so, I’ll explain what I need and we’ll record a couple more takes. This makes it fairly enjoyable for the singer and cuts down on the nerves factor that can come for some folks when recording.

So, all of this is nothing new to any of you old jockeys out there who went from analog tape recording to recording on a computer. Some of the old school guys still use big format consoles like Neve and SSL that they use as the centerpiece of their now digital studio. Old habits die hard.

I record, monitor and mix in the box as they say. I do everything from the computer keyboard, a mouse and video monitor. A big plus is I only need a room about the size of a large bedroom to work in. I don’t do bands for the most part.

So, coming ahead in time back to the present. I’m learning Reaper. It’s very powerful but does hardly anything in the way I am used to. As I confront these endless roadblocks, ( I tend to learn something like this by just launching into a project with it, and every time I try to do something and can’t, I find the answer and move on) my hesitation is not that I can’t learn how to use Reaper, but if I don’t use it repeatedly I tend to forget how I did certain things.

As I’m writing this I’m in sunny (well almost) Florida on a few week get away. I bought a cheap keyboard and brought a audio interface along thinking I could spend the evenings or late mornings learning this program.

No way. I ended up being a carpenter for a week and a half. I get tired.

As to working with analog tape and using a DAW like an analog studio, you do better if you’ve logged a few hour in the studio and realize what you can and can’t fix. In some instances (back in the old days) the producer would make the artist or band do a number time after time, some times dozens of times to try to get the sound and feel right. So after the band started to get the song down without any mistakes, then the producer would try to cajole a certain feel from the band. Speed up a bit, slow down, louder or softer whatever it took to get the emotion to register with the listener.

To be honest, I hypothesize some of these producers you read and hear about were full of crap. But, the crap would sometimes work. And some of them had huge homes in the hills of LA… More than I can say for me.

So my mantra has always been good pitch (that includes instrument tuning) and good timing. If you have those two things you are way ahead of the game. Then, at least in my book, you play parts that can be played well, are simple, and hopefully memorable. Simple and perfect is better than complex and sloppy.

Drum fills that aren’t quite in time, guitar solo’s that don’t quite hit the notes, harmonies that don’t quite harmonize are all things that may be tried but at the end of the day you gotta make the big call…

Does it cut it? Don’t be afraid to say NO.

I’ll explain how I developed my studio chops. I compared every mix I ever did early on with the latest best artists latest releases out there that were in a relative same genre. Stuff from the best artists and the best studios. You have to be honest with yourself and your music. You somehow have to let go of the fact that your song was done by you and you are proud of it. You gotta be clinical and say ‘what does that song have or do that my song doesn’t.

Does my mix sound wimpy? Does it sound amateurish? Is there the same punch. Snare drum. Kick drum. Vocal sound. What are they doing that I am not. Don’t make excuses, either you are there or you’re not.

For years I did this. And at some point I started to say, well, as far as I am concerned my production sounds at least as good at the top tier artist I’m comparing it to.

Not long ago I bought a live version of a famous southern rock band whom I shall not name. It had a couple of songs on there that I liked the original versions of so I thought I’d give it a listen. Threw it on my studio speakers and couldn’t even finish the first song. Garbage. Both the performance and production were cringe worthy. I can only guess that this album must have satisfied a contractual agreement for one last record. Hmm.

There are wiz kids out there who can take a program, like Reaper, learn in in no time and use many if not all of it’s functionality. They know the terminology used, the way the program structure is laid out, all the nuance.

They create music in a different way than me, they don’t have the restraints I inherently have. My bad, their good.

But the core of good listenable music will always be the same.

So I will have to learn Reaper while still using the old Pro Tools. I have a large project that is coming up in a couple of months that I will use the Pro Tools system on. We will record many new songs and in the mastering stage we’ll end up adding maybe eighteen songs, all to be released on a (cough) CD.

The biggest issue is that I’m not only an engineer/producer but also an artist. So I have a ton of unfinished songs/ideas started on the Pro Tools system. I don’t see a elegant way of transferring the info from one to the other, though I hold out hope that I’ll also figure that out. I’m sure there’s a way.

Changing the way you work after years and years is hard. Some of you will say all this is silly, just freaking learn the new program, keep the other one for what it is and move on. I’ll just say that when you are 60+, maybe we’ll have this conversation again. Also, when it comes to getting real emotional tracks without things like auto tune and quantizing every thing I would think us old timers might still have a spark left. I don’t make my living in audio any more. I do it as a side deal. I’m in Florida. And I’m still learning Reaper.

But I’m like many of you out there. It’s hard...

Cause I’m an analog man.