
Home Studio Setup Costs Compared – 1980s And Now - brudgers
https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/production-expert-1/2020/9/8/home-studio-recording-costs-compared-1980s-and-now
======
endymi0n
The oddest thing about this Cambrian explosion of possibility at dirt cheap
prices is what it did to my creativity: It actually hurt it.

I started just a tad later and fully digital than the gear in this article, so
the floppy discs I got Scream Tracker on with its included samples plus
whatever I could rip from a few .MODs I could get my hands on had to do. There
were four tracks. There were a hundred samples, half of which was obscure crap
(and even those found their use).

Building with it and making them sound awesome, plus discovering the amazing
tricks the OGs of tracker & demo culture did with their editors (sliding and
bending notes! dead stops in the middle of the sample!) was endless fun.

Nowadays, I get Native Instruments Ultimate — and despite sounding orders of
magnitude better, all I do is toying around. I always have the nagging feeling
there's gotta be one sound or effect in that endless library that's still
better than the one I'm using right now.

~~~
agumonkey
I see this pattern a lot I wonder if it's been named and discussed before.

I think creativity likes having small struggles and challenges.

~~~
PapaSpaceDelta
I think this (alleged) Orson Welles quote says it best: “The enemy of art is
the absence of limitations.”

(Information on the quote's provenance, for those who might be interested:
[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/24/art-
limit/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/24/art-limit/))

~~~
SloopJon
The similar quote I've heard is, "Form is liberating." I feel like I heard
this in the context of poetry in high school, but Google turns up a bunch of
references to _The Mythical Man Month_.

------
puranjay
You don't even need all the equipment listed in the article. I've been making
music for years with just my laptop, a cheap Focusrite audio interface ($150),
a pair of studio headphones (Sennheiser HD280), a cheap keyboard (Akai MPK
Mini) and copies of Ableton and Serum synth.

You can still spend an inordinate amount of money on hardware and software. If
I bought every plugin I really wanted, I would likely end up spending a couple
of thousand. Throw in a better audio interface ($500+), a good keyboard
($400), a pad controller ($200+), and a better computer ($1500+) and you can
easily add up to several thousand dollars.

But the point remains: it's absurdly cheap to start producing music today. You
can get near studio quality with gear that, outside of your computer, won't
cost more than $1k.

~~~
highhedgehog
Absolutely agree.

------
djaychela
I've been saying this to the people I teach for years... And bear in mind that
you can run multiple copies of an effect (providing your computer has the cpu
power to do so), whereas back in the day you would get only the physical
effect you actually bought. Mixdown with multiple compressors was just a dream
- typically you'd have a couple of good channels of compression, then maybe a
few more 'workhorse' units such as alesis 3630, and everyone else would have
to go without.

This also doesn't take into account the improvement of much equipment today. I
used to dream of a seck 1882, back in the day. I finally owned one about 10
years ago. It was bloody awful! Noisy as hell, and the EQ wasn't any good.
Never meet your heroes!

~~~
puranjay
It goes to show how good producers before the digital era were. Albums you'd
consider 20th century masterpieces were recorded on 4-track recorders. They'd
record a section, bounce it to one track. Record another section on the second
track, then merge the two tracks. And so on. Incredible amount of hard work.

------
ben7799
One thing that's easy to get lost with all this gear explosion is none of it's
really a good starting place without initial musical knowledge, which does not
come from fooling with recording gear or DAWs.

Because I was in computers first I was super attracted to this stuff and
wanted to make electronic music, even to the point of taking a college
elective on it back in the late 90s.

But it's all useless without knowing about chords & scales and harmonies and
all that stuff unless you're just going to follow recipes for creating EDM
from the web. You need the physical skills to play a keyboard or guitar or
anything really to be able to input data too.

The first piece of gear to get to start making some serious progress is
something like a very simple electronic keyboard/piano, a dirt cheap used
acoustic piano (free a lot of the time now) or a simple acoustic guitar.

Strip away all the options, learn then start exploring the electronic options.

Everyone loves to talk about someone like Moby but usually doesn't mention he
could sing, play piano, play guitar, and play bass before he started putting
samples together. Lots of musical knowledge before adding the electronics.
(His book is great by the way!)

~~~
m-hilgendorf
I strongly disagree, and I say that as a classically trained musician. You can
do pretty much everything with a mouse and (QWERTY) keyboard today. We've
worked really hard to democratize content creation and lower the barrier to
entry, we don't need to raise it by reinforcing the notion that you need a
physical aptitude for playing instruments to create art with sound.

The computer can be an entry point for one's journey just the same as an
acoustic guitar or piano. You can use that as your platform to learn theory as
well as (if not better than) a piano or guitar.

But to get elitist for a moment, there's no better way to learn music aside
from private lessons. That's true of any instrument, including the DAW.

~~~
ben7799
I don't know if you can really have the perspective on this if you were a
classically trained musician. You already knew all that stuff inside and out.

I think a lot of music produced on a qwerty keyboard eschews huge amount of
music theory just because it's produced that way.

My perspective was from the other way.. trying to learn it all playing with
DAWs and other tools (admittedly a long time ago) and failing. Nothing about
these tools will teach you why certain notes sound good together or why
certain chords sound good together, etc..

For sure lots of electronic music just tries to skip all that completely
though, or follows super strict genre rules where if you follow them it all
comes out OK.

But we mostly agree though, the lessons are what make the difference. When I
tried to learn this though there was zero accessibility of local teachers who
would have taught through a DAW or something like that though. Finding a piano
or guitar teacher was something available everywhere.

------
wodenokoto
I think it is worth mentioning that home studios has been quite viable for
more than 2 decades. Although no doubt it is cheaper and better than ever.

Moby recorded and produced his super hit album "Play" in his bedroom in the
late 90s.

[0] Studio pictures:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/bnpmza/mobys_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/bnpmza/mobys_home_studio_while_recording_play_which/)
[1] Wikipedia article on play
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_(Moby_album)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_\(Moby_album\))

~~~
lifeisstillgood
(loved this in the Wikipedia above)After his album just prior to Play bombed,
and he considered quitting music, he says:

>>> "I got one piece of fan mail from Terence Trent D'Arby and I got a phone
call from Axl Rose saying he was listening to Animal Rights on repeat. Bono
told me he loved Animal Rights. So if you're gonna have three pieces of fan
mail, that's the fan mail to get."[5]

~~~
picklesman
I highly recommend listening this this episode:
[https://gimletmedia.com/shows/heavyweight/brholm](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/heavyweight/brholm)

~~~
codetrotter
Thanks for the recommendation, just listened to it after reading your comment
and I second that.

------
armandososa
Unlike other things that have been democratized by modern technology
(photography, video, coding, publishing) success in music is still heavily
dominated by pretty much the same big gateway keepers as it was in the 80s.

Yes, you could absolutely make a top-40 quality recording with just an iPad
but your chances of being popular approaches zero unless you're "discovered"
by a label. And yes, you could increase your chances of being noticed doing
all kinds of personal marketing (were it helps being an attractive
20-something), but your music will never make it on it merits alone. Thus,
home recording will stay as a very expensive hobby for most of us and nothing
else.

~~~
thisisbrians
I disagree and think this is changing rapidly, especially in the
electronic/EDM scenes. In these arenas, a lot of careers blossom from
SoundCloud, YouTube, and having other artists/DJs pick up tracks and play them
in their sets. Marketing is still a factor but matters a lot less (many
artists even wear masks/helmets). A quality track can (and many have been)
made with just a laptop. Martin Garrix released his first hit "Animals" at age
16/17 after one his remixes was picked up by another DJ.

Additionally, music discovery has fundamentally changed because of streaming
services like Spotify, as well. Just a couple of days ago there was an article
on the front page of HN about how the top 40 tracks on Spotify make up a
smaller percentage of the streams than even a year or two ago. Discovery
features allow tracks to rise on their merit/listening stats making marketing
much less important than it used to be, across genres.

With that said, it's still hard to make it. The barrier to entry has never
been lower and thus there is a tremendous amount of competition and talent to
contend with now. The determining factor for winning these days seems to be
the ability to consistently and reliably release quality tunes over and over
again.

~~~
obstacle1
> Marketing is still a factor but matters a lot less (many artists even wear
> masks/helmets).

Marketing doesn't matter any less now than it did back in the day; it's just
something the artist is expected to do themselves, rather than something to
outsource to a label.

The helmet/mask thing _is_ marketing. It's a gimmick and is half of what built
the original hype for guys like deadmau5 and marshmello. It was really novel
to see a guy spinning records in a mouse costume, at one point, and that was
the reason _masses_ of people discovered, rather than just a few.

Martin Garrix had to find, reach out to, and collaborate with hundreds of
unknown artists before he built his network big enough such that Tiesto
'discovering' him was a possibility.

There are hundreds of thousands of people producing EDM and releasing it on
Soundcloud/Beatport/etc. A tiny fraction of those people will ever get more
than 10 listeners. The ones who do get listeners will hustle like hell to
build up their network and broadcast their channels -- i.e. market themselves.
Marketing is still the only way to get people listening to your stuff, quality
tunes alone won't get you there.

------
S_A_P
Its one thing to have gear access, but the second you think "I could make X if
I had access to Y" you are already thinking about it wrong. If you want to
make music and you are driven to do so you will use what you have to make what
you like.

Early hip hop records didnt use samplers, they used pause tapes at least for
the demo process. (see ATCQ People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of
Rhythm)

Early electro/house/hip hop used unrealistic sounding pawn shop gear (that has
since become rare and sought after)

The beatles had crap guitars and played anyway.

I have a pretty sizable home studio and it definitely helps me craft sound,
but it is just a tool not the reason...

~~~
yummypaint
I once heard the advice "Consider buying gear once you're productive. Don't
buy gear to become productive." Once one has the bare essentials it's very
solid advice. Having a dozen well-understood parameters to play with is often
more useful than a hundred poorly understood ones, which can quickly become
paralyzing.

I feel like the older model of accumulating physical gear helped put some
limits on how complexity grew in small studios, but that has all been upended
by software. There is definitely a balance to be struck between the
capabilities of the setup and what will actually result in the best creative
output. Creativity often thrives within constraints, and it can paradoxically
become harder to work with objectively better equipment.

~~~
gebl
I'm not a musician, but a photographer. I think the gear craziness is probably
similar across both areas. I've adapted the don't just buy gear, get out and
do stuff to "Don't buy gear until you have a particular problem that gear
would solve. If you can, borrow gear to validate." Because, lets be honest,
sometimes the gear actually helps - but unless you have the problem it helps
for its gonna sit in a corner.

~~~
grugagag
Sometimes people hope the gear would help their creative problems and keep on
buying new gear but the satisfaction is short lived.

------
margo209320
I agree that the price / functionality ratio is much better in modern times.
But a significant drawback, which I didn't see mentioned, is that most of
those nice hardware buttons, knobs and sliders are now tiny, obscure controls
arranged on a multitude of hidden screens on that tiny laptop display, which
you have to awkwardly operate with your virtual mouse pointer. Usability in
fact suffers a lot if you go "all software".

~~~
rimliu
There is a plenty of hardware controls you can buy for your DAWs.

~~~
margo209320
I know. But then you are buying hardware again. And the good quality stuff is
expensive.

~~~
coldtea
Still much cheaper than in the 80s/90s.

You can get analogue polysynth for sub-$500, moog mini clone for $250, a great
16 channel mixer for $200 and so on...

~~~
highhedgehog
> a great 16 channel mixer for $200

Example?

~~~
coldtea
I had a Behringer Xenyx a few years ago that was better than anything I had in
the 90s. And not to the stereotype of the "cheap" Behringer quality, they're
up to par these days.

(Sure, it's no SSL/Neve, but better than any demo/home studio had in past
decades - I remember the days of Fostex/Tascam 4track cassete tape
recorders/mixers).

~~~
highhedgehog
Check the Behringer X Air XR16/18 out too, it seems great (more expensive
though)

~~~
coldtea
Thanks. Wow this even has MIDAS pre-amps, heard about those from some premium
devices.

------
eggsnbacon1
As far as "studio monitors", you should know that a quality set of over ear
headphones has better sound reproduction than any speaker. I used to be
involved in the pro audio scene, until I realized this.

Its impossible to eliminate echo and stereo bleed with speakers. If you try to
EQ a room using mics you will see this clearly. You might get close building
an anaerobic chamber, but headphones are still better.

If you're on a budget don't waste money on expensive speakers, just use
headphones

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
Cross ear perception of the other speaker is actually desirable, unless you're
specifically mixing binaural for headphones. Crosstalk is key to localizing
the apparent acoustic image in front of the listener instead of "inside the
skull."

If you mix purely on headphones, you can just put a quick filter inline that
does a reasonable job of simulating it. Without this you'll have difficulty
mixing things well for playback on speakers.

~~~
blub
What filter do you mean? I'm aware of hardware which simulates it, but it
costs around 2000 EUR.

~~~
SNACKeR99
See the plugins here, for example: [https://www.pro-tools-
expert.com/production-expert-1/2016/5/...](https://www.pro-tools-
expert.com/production-expert-1/2016/5/3/do-you-mix-on-headphones-take-your-
headphone-experiences-to-the-next-level-with-these-smart-monitoring-plug-ins)

------
bazzargh
Or alternatively, back then entry level was the Tascam 244 Portastudio, with
whatever instruments/mics you could find at a pawn shop. Reverb? Sing in the
shower. Way less than 10k.

And a lot bands did this...
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portastudio](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portastudio)

One guy from our school did build a home studio like they describe, but only
after getting a record deal and a pile of cash.

~~~
compiler-guy
First album I ever worked on was on a 244. It felt amazing to use.

------
habosa
Really great overview, there are so many pieces of gear that are very hard for
a layman to understand. Their descriptons can be self-referential. I've been
getting into audio / synthesizers a bit and it is _such_ a hard world to get
your head around!

It's remarkable how hard it is to get audio _into_ a computer compared to how
simple one imagines it should be. Understanding audio interfaces, mixers,
power levels (mic/line/instrument), cable types (TS, TRS, 3.5mm) is not rocket
science but it's a bit shocking when you see how hard it is to record anything
besides your computer's built-in microphone.

And then there's the whole world of MIDI. It's at once an amazing standard and
a confusing dinosaur (more the former) which is, again, shockingly hard to get
started with as a n00b. When I started out I assumed I just needed a cable
with USB A on one end and MIDI on the other end ... hah!

All that said: this stuff is really fun and it gets cheaper every day
(although your wish list also gets bigger ever day). Companies like Behringer
get a lot of flak for being cheap but they have made it so so so much cheaper
for the casual person to get the hardware they need to try things.

~~~
compiler-guy
By today's standards, Behringer is very low end.

But the Beatles recorded their demos and even some early albums on far, far
worse equipment. I therefore conclude that Behringer gear is perfectly
acceptable for me.

~~~
dugditches
Sure it might be 'worse' equipment. However experts were operating it.

And then you further get into an analog vs digital discussion. And that they
were recording on 'the best' analog equipment of the time.

------
codeulike
I'm sure there's lots to be said about how the uquity of music production
equipment (i.e. a laptop) is turning laptop-produced music (electronica, hip
hop etc) into the new folk music; music made and circulated among small groups
of people.

And the whole idea of 80-style music "industry" with huge stars and huge
physical distribution networks and huge amounts of money being made by a tiny
proportion of people was probably just a technological oddity that was never
going to last more than a few decades.

------
trabant00
> There’s not much to say about the Yamaha NS10M that hasn’t already been
> written. Suffice to say they have become the stuff of legend, but not
> necessarily because of the sound quality. It was often remarked when people
> asked why people mixed on NS10s that if a mix sounds good on them it will
> sound good on anything!

That's how most monitoring speakers and headphones sound to me. But they are
still very popular with people who only consume music because "professionals
use them so they must be the best".

~~~
marcan_42
You don't buy studio monitors to fill a room with sound and casually listen to
music. You buy studio monitors to sit directly in front of them and get an
accurate image of what a track sounds like.

------
rotexo
On a somewhat related note, here is an excellent short documentary on the
making of the score for John Carpenter’s Escape From New York:
[https://youtu.be/NBw4OXM6ad4](https://youtu.be/NBw4OXM6ad4)

It is particularly interesting to see how MIDI completely changed the game.
Getting everything synced in the pre-MIDI age sounds like it was more
involved.

------
whatch
How does one start creating digital music (today)?

I've got a midi keyboard to practice singing and there was free light version
of Ableton included. I guess it is in the same category as PreSonus and
GarageBand from the article. I studied music ~10 years ago but have no idea
how to start creating digital music.

How and where do I start if for example I like ATB (DJ) and would like to (try
to) create something similar?

~~~
thisisbrians
Ableton is great, especially if you are tech-oriented. I suggest you follow
along with a couple video tutorials introducing the basics of Ableton to get
started. You can make something decent-sounding with just a few tracks and
loops. The basic concepts should apply across DAWs. Have fun, and good luck!

~~~
whatch
Thanks! Can you recommend some tutorials/channels on youtube by any chance?

~~~
thisisbrians
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H83TxBL3yOE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H83TxBL3yOE)

followed by

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Zcy8Uu4dw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Zcy8Uu4dw)

------
Daniel_sk
Some of you maybe remember old DOS game audio setup, the MIDI section usually
also had the Roland MT-32 as option. Most of the MIDI of older games was
actually recorded on MT-32 and you could hear the music in the original glory
by using this device. It was expensive back then and still is - because of
collectors and retro gamers. You can even connect it with DOSBox. Later DOS
games used General MIDI (MT-32 was before MIDI was standardized) and there
were more synthetizers to choose from, but a good pick is Roland SC-55 or
SC-88VL. The music sounds phenomenal through the Roland, for example Monkey
Island:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20)

------
dspig
Some old friends there!

"the Sony DTC1000ES was mixing heaven. It offered 2 tracks of of 16bit @ 48kHz
recording and was the ideal machine to master to for those who were preparing
tracks for CD pressing."

Note the pictured machine has the HHB modification to run at 44.1 kHz to make
it actually useful for CD mastering.

~~~
jiofih
I was under the impression mastering at 48khz and then downsampling to 44.1khz
afterwards resulted in better quality due to reduced aliasing.

~~~
radiowave
The trade-off is that sample rate conversion introduced its own artefacts,
though we have much better algorithms (and of course more CPU power) for it
today.

I'm not sure that aliasing was in itself a big problem, you're perhaps
refering more to the audio artefacts introduced by the anti-aliasing filter.
But in any case this wasn't even the biggest problem with converters back
then. IME, quantization distortion was a much bigger issue. You had to watch
the signal levels really carefully - too loud and you'd get absolutely brutal
distortion (sometimes including wrap-around, where the value reported by the
A/D converter goes instantly from maximum value to minimum value), too quiet
and everything turns into a grainy-sounding mush.

The world changed in the early 90s when delta-sigma (aka "oversampling")
converters came along, pretty much solved all these issues, and so allowed the
price of decent converters to steadily fall, as normal semiconductor
manufacturing economics kick in.

~~~
marcan_42
These days the benefit of 48kHz is that you get twice the frequency headroom
vs 44.1k (from 20kHz to Nyquist), which means that any processing steps using
oversampling and antialiasing filters (which you should be using) will either
sound better, use less CPU, or both, since the filter has to be only half as
steep on 48k.

But that's for intermediate processing, once you have the master you can
convert to 44.1 one final time and that's that. One final sample rate
conversion with modern algorithms will not introduce any audible differences.

------
waingake
I read somewhere that Nirvana was given 60k to record Nevermind, at the time
they were a very niche college radio band, not expected to be a big thing.
Someone did the ROI on that, so yeah the flip side is that you also had the
chance to pay for all that gear :)

~~~
nemo44x
Nirvana is often thought of as sloppy, slacker, etc. but they took their music
very seriously. When getting ready to record Nevermind, Kurt Cobain had the
band rent a rehearsal space in LA for 3 months and practice every day - it was
a full time job. Kurt in particular played, recorded, and wrote nearly every
day for years so although he was a creative genius he also put in the work
finding the sound and style he wanted to perfect. And he did.

There’s a lot of nice stories about in the year leading up to the release and
this is just before he got into heroin. Pretty much after the release he
started using heavily and all his hard work was given over to it.

~~~
soperj
where can you find some of those nice stories?

~~~
nemo44x
“Serving the Servant” by Danny Goldberg is a good start. He was Nirvana’s
manager during this time and was close to them.

------
snvzz
>suggested midi keyboard

Uses non-weighted keys. Nobody should have to ever suffer a non-weighted
keyboard.

~~~
bregma
Yes. Semi-weighted is my minimum. 88 keys if I have a choice. Less than 66
keys is like playing a 2-string guitar.

Just like my computer keyboard: mechanical, clicky, and with sufficient travel
and resistance to let me know a key has been pressed.

~~~
bluGill
If you are trying to play piano than yes. However pipe organs have never had
88 keys. Weight on pipe organ keys varied (some of the old organs with pure
mechanical actions were much heavier than a piano, while modern - for 1920 -
keyboards are unweighted). Key size was often smaller than a piano keyboard as
well.

------
poof_he_is_gone
The only issue with this article is that they are leaving out microphones.

------
jeffbee
Their 1980s rig has analog compression and limiting but their new one doesn't.
A small but relevant detail.

