My interest in home recording started when the first TEAC open‑reel four‑track machine came on the market. It then evolved via eight‑track, half‑inch 16‑track, one‑inch 16‑track, ADAT and finally to a DAW, which in my case ended up being Logic Pro after I was weaned on an Atari running C‑Lab’s Creator.
At the end of my open‑reel days I had a mixer that ran almost the full width of my garage studio, with up to 64 inputs available at mixdown. Even though I had a third‑party automation system installed, it didn’t really provide the facilities or mix recall I needed, as it only offered level automation and involved a lot of messing about with timecode. At the time I used the studio both for my own work and for paying clients, and when someone came back a few months later wanting to make a small change to a previous mix, getting all the mixer EQs and outboard settings to match was a real challenge — especially if I’d swapped out some of the outboard gear in the meantime.
For me the benefits of complete and accurate session recall far outweighed any small compromises.
When I first moved to a DAW, I tended to treat it much like a tape machine on steroids, so I still kept some of my old outboard gear. Very soon, though, I came to realise that whatever the perceived differences between physical hardware and the better software emulations, for me the benefits of complete and accurate session recall far outweighed any small compromises. As an engineer friend of mine used to say — and he worked for some of the highest‑profile musicians around — there comes a point where you have to ask yourself, “Will it affect sales?”
I’ll still use hardware pedals when recording some of my own guitar parts, and if I’m after a genuine amped sound, I still prefer to mic up a real amplifier rather than rely on modelling plug‑ins. But I’ve put my collection of standalone mic preamps back in the cupboard, as I found that the preamps in my mid‑priced audio interface were perfectly capable and very clean. It’s true that hardware mic preamps can sound quite different when driven hard, but much of that character can now be recreated using plug‑ins such as PSP’s VintageWarmer or United Plugins’ Front DAW.
Although I didn’t choose this way of working to save money — despite my Yorkshire heritage — it does show that musicians working on a budget can achieve seriously professional results with a fairly modest DAW system. If someone asked me to make an album using nothing more than GarageBand and its stock plug‑ins, plus a budget audio interface, it wouldn’t present too much of a challenge. What makes a far bigger difference to the end result is the quality of the monitoring (whether speakers or headphones), choosing microphones that suit the job, and paying attention to some basic room acoustic treatment. And when it comes to recording vocals, a thick duvet is worth a dozen expensive mic preamps!
Fortunately, capable loudspeakers and headphones are now very affordable and, once you get much beyond the £1000 mark with monitors, the law of diminishing returns takes over remarkably quickly. If your mix sounds good on a well‑chosen pair of nearfields and also on a decent set of mid‑priced headphones from one of the established brands, the chances are it will sound perfectly good once it’s uploaded to a streaming service.
What was once my ‘grown‑up’ 16‑track studio has now been replaced by an M2 Mac mini, an eight‑input audio interface (that can be expanded to 16 when needed) and my trusty Event Opal monitors, which have just celebrated their 17th birthday. It suits the way I work because I tend to keep multiple projects on the go, revisiting and refining them several times before they’re finally signed off. By keeping everything in the box, I know I’ll always be able to pick up exactly where I left off, without having to leave my creative headspace to start patching in outboard gear. Of course, this is simply my own preferred way of working and you may have a completely different and equally valid approach!