Future Music 2: Technology and Music

This month, AMD is powering triplew.me – in the second installment of Future Music, Luke Oram finds out that they are bringing the power of the recording studio to a whole new generation of music makers.

“There will be a time...when you will be able to use a laptop to create a song that sounds as if it were recorded by a band in a studio, and no one will be able to tell the difference.”

- Moby

It’s been a short 40 years since the first reel-to-reel 4-track recorder was made available, ushering in the era of the home studio.

Since then, the game’s been changing in leaps and bounds - clunky and expensive analogue track recorders were fast outdated by the computer age, which gave birth to inexpensive recording software, which eventuated in easily accessible Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).

It would be fair to say the age Moby predicted is well and truly upon us - and he would know; his 1999 album Play was a multi-million seller, and it was created entirely on the recording program Cubase in the comfort of his own home.

There are hordes of artists who have become avid home technologists when it comes to their music - and it’s not just amateurs making hobby music on their PC’s either.

Since creating the seminal Nine Inch Nails album Pretty Hate Machine, Trent Reznor has been a fierce advocate for what he calls the “limitless potential” of home recording. Nowadays, Reznor uses the popular home recording software Pro Tools almost exclusively for his music - and this goes to show just how far Future Music has come; an internationally renowned industrial music icon is creating his albums on the same software as you.

The advances in computer technology have also had major implications outside of the studio and the home - and this is where the marriage of music and machine gets really exciting.

“The future is fusion”, a company like AMD proudly boast - although primarily providers of the back ‘engine’ of technology, the company are at the forefront of helping musicians get the most out of Future Music.

It’s fitting that one of AMD’s prominent partnerships is with Dweezil Zappa, son of famed rock pioneer Frank Zappa. Zappa senior, besides reinventing almost every genre of popular music, predicted the digital music era almost 20 years before the rest of the world, prophesying the trading of music through phone & cable TV.

These days, his son continues his legacy, traveling the world on his seemingly endless “Zappa plays Zappa” jaunts, recreating his father’s timeless works. Dweezil, like his father, also has a foot in the future, revolutionizing the way that his ZPZ shows are communicated to the audience.

With the help of AMD and their aptly-named “Room Service Rig”, Zappa records his live shows on a portable rig, mixing them in hotel rooms and tour buses and making pristine, studio-quality mixes of the gigs available mere days after the performance.

Of course, the ‘pro-bootleg’ concept is not a new one - Pearl Jam got a leg up on bootleggers years ago by recording every gig of their 2000 Binaural tour and releasing them officially. The difference with Dweezil Zappa being the ability to carry a full recording and mixing rig on the road, recording and mixing live shows to a professional standard - essentially enlarging the concept of the home studio a thousand fold, allowing the crowd to put away their videophones and own a flawless recorded memento of a Zappa gig mere days after being there. A similar AMD rig was also used by Eric Clapton to record his infamous guitar gathering the Crossroads Festival.

What makes all of this even more exciting is that the same technology used to power Dweezil’s Room Service Rig is available at your local computer outfitters – and at the fraction of the cost of studio time.

This whole technology thing will always have its detractors – the purists and the analog defenders; but the fact is, technology is bringing the recording industry to your bedroom, breaking down the barriers between the studio and a whole new generation of artists, which can only be a good thing for the aspiring bedroom songwriter.