Be Old School

Imagine you're Jean-Michel Jarre back in the 1970s, writing Oxygène. Back then, there were no home computers, on DAW's, no softsynths, just a pile of electronics capable of making sound. And those synthesisers didn't have presets like modern producers are spoiled with. If he wanted a sound in his recording, he had to make it from scratch. If he wanted two Minimoogs playing at the same time, he'd have to actually have two physical Minimoogs.

Now suppose you're a producer in the 1980s on a budget. Suppose you have just a Minimoog and a Jupiter 8, and an 8-track reel-to-reel tape recorder. If you want two Jupiter 8 sounds playing at the same time, you had to set it up for one, play that in, then set it up for the other and record that. And the Minimoog, to use an example, didn't have presets. If you wanted to store a preset, you did it very old school: you wrote down the settings. If you wanted to recall presets quickly, well your preset bank was that lump of grey matter in your head: your own memory. The limit to the number of presets you could have in your Minimoog soundbank was limited by how much space you had in your head, and in your notebook.

The thing with this approach is that it was far more labour-intensive, and far more brain-heavy, and far less forgiving. If you were playing a Minimoog, there was no Midi, you had to play it in time. If you made a mistake, you had to have another go, just like any musician in a studio recording multiple takes until they get it right. The thing with this is that it trains your brain in a way that modern production simply doesn't. And the magic of having trained your brain is that you can then just think things, and your brain knows how to turn them into reality. You think of a Minimoog sound, and you instantly know the settings. You think of a melody, and you know exactly which keys to press on the keyboard. Recording music longhand becomes as natural as typing a letter on a typewriter, and the cost of mistakes meant that you would learn not to make them.

That last point needs emphasising: if we permit ourselves to make errors, we will make errors. If we permit ourselves to go back and tweak the odd midi note in our DAW project, we won't learn to get things right first time. If, on the other hand, at least for the learning process, we become as error-intolerant as the reality of the 70s and early 80s was, then we have the potential to learn not to make errors. It is also like playing computer games in the 80s: to get through the game without losing all your lives, you had to learn many precise patterns of joystick moves and button presses, with the correct timing, and execute it all to near-perfection. Else you lost your lives and it was game over. That latter example, old school gaming, leads into another related thought on learning production: speed running a game. The idea here is that you learn all the 'moves' needed to reproduce a tune, and do everything from scratch every time, as if you didn't have that magic Action Replay box that let you save your game state to disk and reload it later.

We are spoilt with modern technology, and the trouble is exactly that: we are spoilt. We don't learn to be anywhere near as good as we need to since, given all the luxuries of modern technology: there simply isn't the impetus, the unavoidable necessity, of learning to get things right; there simply isn't the cost to making errors that forces us to learn to produce results reliably. We become like little children randomly futzing around with their toys, and then we look at those who've learned the hard way like they have some kind of magical talent. That magical talent isn't the musicianship, it's the being able to put up with learning things the hard way, over a long period of time, through discipline, diligence, battling through frustration, and practising stuff over and over again until it's perfected. That is what traditional musicians had to learn to do, and it is something we should strive to do ourselves: don't just be a 'bedroom producer', strive to Be A Musician.