Philoking.com

Wow, that’s a heck of a topic for me, the biggest geek, biggest gadget head and most electronically obsessed person I know. I have a point with this though. Those of you who are into music are surely aware that the once lofty recording studio is going down to the power of digital audio workstations and the power of recording software. ProTools dominates the studios and anyone not hip to the DAW is considered a dinosaur.

I have been kicking with ProTools and more recently Apple’s Logic for probably 7 years or so now. I started with a DIGI001 on a G4 Mac and have never looked back to tape. Honestly I have never owned a tape recorder because when I was biggest into recording when I was younger I couldn’t afford one. My first recording system was a sound blaster sound card recording into an old program called SAW.

These days I am as digital as ever and I still haven’t gotten the sound I want. I had been toying around with this idea for awhile, maybe my beloved Ibanez just didn’t have the ass end I wanted and no matter how powerful Logic got, I just couldn’t add it in digitally. So I decided at the music store that I would do the unthinkable, I would consider the purchase of a Les Paul, not a real $3,000 Gibson Les Paul, but a more economical Epiphone Les Paul of the sub $800 variety. I played a few, decided they didn’t play like the planks of wood I always thought they were, and I brought home a beautiful honey burst Les Paul Standard that is just plain beautiful.

Tonight I started laying down some tracks and I have to say, this beauty was the difference. The meaty heavy hooks I have been trying to capture that weren’t translating to the recorded medium are now there, they are fat and they were mean.

The point to the story is that you, as well as I, many times make decisions to make shortcuts in some places to try and fix it later digitally (I find this to be especially true with digital photography) and sometimes the right guitar, the right lens or getting a real flash instead of the cheap copy makes all the difference in the world.