Total Art Soul - for artists

Hey, i am currently reflecting on the versatility of  modern music technology & recording systems & felt i should share how advances over the years have made such a difference .. particularly to my life.
When i was 20 i was fortunate enough to have trained in Sound Engineering at Logorythm Music in London. This covered all aspects of actual recording of musicians & instruments with microphones onto 2 inch multitrack tape. Modern samplers as we know them had yet to be invented. I myself only had a Yamaha DX7 synthesiser, a sequencer and a 4 track tape machine. In those days, keyboards were only capable of producing one sound at a time so i would have to record one part and then start overlapping sounds onto the multitrack tape at home, bouncing down & slowly losing quality of sound as i went. Great for demos but a professional studio was required for anything serious & at great cost .. Then came the sampler. I remember my first Akai s900 which was amazing but only had 11mb of memory i think. I do remember that if i put two cymbals with a long decay into the sampler then all the memory was gone ! But somehow i struggled along with noises & sounds making rhythms and adding guitars and vocals live... but then again hiring a studio to get it all onto tape. 
Looking back .. it seemed a labour of love just to get a couple of well recorded tracks together ... unless you had large sums of money to purchase the more advanced systems that Professional studios used  & to buy several synthesisers !

I can remember vividly the power that the multi timbral keyboards gave me as a musician, when they were developed. I bought a Korg M1 which allowed me to sequence 8 different sounds to play different parts at once .. and with the introduction of the Atari computer with Notator & Cubase editing software, & samplers that had huge amounts of memory .. i could now put together entire tracks at home, triggered live by the computer & without actually recording or committing anything to tape. What a difference this made & more importantly .. this system was relatively inexpensive .. in the region of £5000 as opposed to £30.ooo upwards. Studios were still required but all the pre production could be arranged and finished at home so all studio time was devoted to getting everything recorded and then concentrating on the mix.

Today.. it just seems to be  incredible. I cannot imagine how different things would be if i had my current system at the age of 20 !! I use Apple Mac with Logic Pro Audio & a MOTU audio interface which allows me to record anything i want .. including the facility to record 8 different things simultaneously .. with unlimited memory space. Endless amounts of keyboards & synths that can all be accessed quickly & played simultaneously or layered. I can compile entire albums at home and mix & master them onto CD .. and even distribute them around the world via the internet .. without leaving the room !! It is incredible how things have advanced but i am still very grateful to have had the experience of learning how studios work, using real instruments and recording with real equipment (as opposed to virtual synthesised equivalents). It has given me the knowledge of how music & sound works, something that youngsters today i feel may skip. They can just put something together without learning an instrument or crafting a skill in music. I just hope they appreciate how lucky they are to have all this technology at their fingertips at very affordable prices. I myself, am still in awe of what my system is capable of doing & thoroughly enjoy being able to express myself musically at home, with such ease and with so many endless possibilities. We are now creatively free !!! :-)