It's nineteen eighty-something, and I'm begging my Dad (yes begging him) to lend me, his 18 yr old son, around £1000 (about £4000 now) so I can buy the Tascam 244 Portastudio. I remember the discussion to this day; I told my Dad I needed a Portastudio so I could write songs and get a record deal. He argued that I should earn money by writing songs so I could afford to buy it, talk about a catch 22! Anyway, I annoyed him enough that he finally gave in and I blew over £1000 on a four-track cassette-based recording studio for demos.
For anyone who's never had the joy of 4 tracks on cassette with which to record and mix killer demos, set aside it had two-band parametric EQ, the worst dbx noise reduction on the planet and no built-in effects, that wasn't the greatest challenge. Four tracks to record drums, bass, guitars, keyboards and vocals were where things got tough. You could pass a maths degree figuring out the order in which to record and bounce to end up with all the tracks you needed... and don't forget as soon as you bounced stuff the performance and sound were set in stone!
Over the months and years I built up the studio with other things like an Accessit Compressor, Great British Spring Reverb. Monitoring was taken care of with a pair of used KEF speakers and a Sony hi-fi amp; I had a second pair of speakers from Tandy, the old Realistic Minimus 7, made from metal. MIDI helped as time progressed in the form of a Yamaha DX7, an Atari ST and a Roland MT32, driven by C-Lab Creator. The Roland MT32 was stereo out and gave seven channels, of multitimbral playback, with one reserved for drums.
Compared to today's gear, none of the early stuff I recorded demos on came close when it came to features or quality, it was certainly more costly to create a studio.
I got a publishing cheque last week for songs written on gear decades ago; it seems the limitations of the gear didn't stop me getting down good songs, ones that make money.
Which leads me to the title of this article - the best recording gear in 2020? It seems to be a question asked time and again in forums, Facebook groups and anywhere someone can post. What's the best DAW to use? What's the best mic to use? What's the best plugin to use? You fill in the blanks. In 2020 the answer is simple... anything. Everything is amazing and costs far less than it should do, even the free stuff is better than the stuff I blew several thousand pounds on. I would go as far as saying, name me an iconic track that's often cited in recording legend and I'll bet the gear we have is higher spec than anything used on most of those projects.
Here's the point, if you have a great song and great musicians, any of the gear you can buy today is going to be more than enough to get great results. If you don't have the song and the talent, then there's not a product on the planet that can fix it.
Our obsession with gear has distracted many of us from the songs and the talent. In doing so, we are trying to ice a cake that doesn't exist.
Instead of filling forums and Facebook with gear questions, seek knowledge. That's something else we have today we didn't have in the 1980s, instant access to a multitude of talented producers and engineers willing to share their experience and knowledge. People like Vance Powell, Mike Exeter, Andrew Scheps, Romesh Dodangoda and many others who I see daily sharing their knowledge on HOW TO DO IT.
There's very little stopping from you making a great song sound fantastic, except perhaps focussing on the wrong things. Produce or consume, the choice is yours.