I must admit that I've been somewhat of a purist when it comes to audio engineering. I wanted everything to sound real. I wanted the sound of a real drummer playing in a real room being recorded with real microphones. I wanted the sound of a real amplifier turned up to 10 with a real mic picking it up. I stayed away from autotune on vocals because music should be natural.

A Defense For Natural Audio Production

Looking back, my purist ideas had some merit. I was a teenager in the 1990s and my record collection is dominated with music from 1981 to 1996. The music that has inspired me and changed my life in many ways was made with real bands playing in real room. Singers weren't autotuned because Autotune had not been invented yet. The idea of sliding snare drums to improve the timing of the song had to be done with a razor blade. In other words, the music that got me into this whole music recording thing in the first place came from natural audio production.

Wait A Minute: I Have A Strong 80s Pop Influence

The delima in my head has always been between my rock roots which I've always pushed for very natural production and my routes in 20 year old pop music which have nothing natural to them at all. In fact, natural was never even something that this sort of music ever tried for. I hate music today for the most part so the last thing I want to be doing is creating some bland, stale garbage that just doesn't have any emotion in it. But if I look at pop music (because I've got to get paid and eat somehow) and use concepts the 80s (when I felt that pop music was a legitimate form of music) it makes total sense that fake audio production can inspire people. In fact, it appears that ?fake? audio production inspired more people (from 1981 and later) than the more natural recording process.