Computer Recording
I often get asked whether I think computer recording is all it's cracked up to be. No, I don't. I think computer recording is WAY WAY WAY better than it's made out to be. The simple fact is a creative person who truly wants to make a powerful musical statement has never had such incredible tools. While maybe a guy playing simply little folk songs may not want to mangle, reverse, distort, and add who-knows to his music, the fact of the matter is computers offer outstanding possibilities that don't exist in standalone recorders now and certainly didn't exist back in the heyday of analog studio recording.
For example, back in the days when they wanted to add a certain kind of delay to a track, they would physically run the analog tape around mic stands. This may be great for those millionaires, Queen, but I don't know of any local band paying by the hour that has the dough for that kind of fun. Yes, it may have been a fun group effort to add magic to a vocal sound, but this wasn't practical unless the label was paying for the studio AND the drugs.
Not only does computer recording offer limitless creativity, it offers virtually infinite tools. For example, just yesterday I was running live sound on a console that would have been considered very nice back in the days before computer recording at home. Very nice! I'm so spoiled by computer recording software that I was having a hard time. I'm used to having a 4 band fully parametric EQ on every channel, group, and aux send. I wanted to put a high pass filter on the aux sends to pull some boom out of the monitors. This was simply impossible. The console couldn't do it without routing to an external EQ which I did not have. Yuck! The recording equivalent to this would be rolling off the low end before sending a vocal to a reverb. This was just one of a zillion things I hated about using an analog console!
The beauty of digital recording is it has dramatically raised the standards of audio recordings done in a home studio. Back in 1991 or 1999 if you wanted to make a recording at home, you would sound like a total joke. It wouldn't even be listenable in most cases. (A few guys managed somehow). Computers have made it possible that a person with limited audio engineering can capture his music, get some help on Bash This Recording , make some alternations, learn some lessons, and in a fairly short period of time come out with something to be proud of. This simply wasn't possible with the tools of a few years ago.
It's no secret that much of the hype that surrounded analog tape machines was focused on the tip top Studer analog machines that cost the price of a house. Your typical analog tape machine affordable to a working-class dude was certainly not of this quality. Not even close! It would be like if the only computer recordings that sounded good were robo high end Pro Tools HD rigs which cost in the ballpark of 20 grand for a typical setup. That's not the case at all anymore. The differences between a Pro Tools HD rig and a typical $250 audio interface are going to be indistinguishable by anyone other than the most critical of ears.
Simply put. Computer recording is awesome!