Analog vs. Digital Recording

            The music industry is currently going through a transition between analog and digital recording.
Over the past month or so I have been blessed with the opportunity to work at the beautiful Conway Recording studio and this experience has opened up my eyes to what exactly is going on inside the industry today with some of the best music being released today! Traditionally I believed that high end studios such as Conway would do all their tracking to tape using live instruments running through the best outboard gear and the whole nine yards to get the absolute best quality recording. To my surprise it wasn’t that at all, that is the way records were traditionally made prior to the digital revolution.

            I was surprised to find out that today’s top 40 hits coming from Conway rarely need much musical instruments, in fact, most of it is done almost entirely in the box (the computer)! We have teams of song writers come in crank out the music using their virtual drums, synths, guitars, etc. and then they call in the artist to lay down the vocal track through an extremely great vocal chain and presto you have a hit song! This is great news for us here at BSSB because that is just proof that you don’t need a giant million-dollar studio to record a hit song, but what does that mean for our ears. I still believe songs recorded to tape using live instrumentation have a more organic feel that to us as humans allows us to actually feel emotion in the music we listen to. The texture that tubes in our analog gear add to the music makes the music sound natural versus all digital and cold. I stand firm by the opinion that music recorded through analog mediums sound more natural than digitally recorded music, how do you feel?