The origins of a home recordist

I've been recording music at home for years. I started with Cubase version 3 on a PC that had substantially less processing power than my mobile phone does  now.  Initially  home recording from me was a way of producing demos for bands I was in for less money  than I was spending at professional recording studios. The reality is that I have probably now spent more money buying computers, mixers, microphones, monitors, software and software upgrades over the years than I would have likely spent on studio time. In fact I suspect using a reasonably priced well run professional project studio would have saved me money in the long run and likely produced demos of a higher quality. Even so I have absolutely no regrets. Yes maybe I could have paid my mortgage off a bit quicker but I have had a fantastic time produced tracks and I am very proud of and whenever I have an idea for a new song I can just pop into the spare room and start recording.

Over the years my home setup has gone through a number of incarnations. Starting out as a lowly 66 MHz PC, running  Cubase and through many upgrades to a large hybrid digital/analogue setup. Now I am once again back to a single computer, this time an iMac running everything natively.  I now do nearly all of my work in Logic Pro, which I switched to from Cubase just over a year ago but that is another story  for another post.

The massive explosion of computing power we've seen over the last 10 to 20 years has completely revolutionised the recording industry.  Not long ago the cost of setting up a half decent recording facility was astronomical, excluding all but the very wealthy and the professional studios run by record companies et al. These days for an investment of under $2000 you can put together an exceptionally capable system. Unfortunately what money cannot buy other skills and  ears  required to produce a great recording ( at least so far that is one thing that the power of computers has not made obsolete).