A Change To Digital Recording

When you think of music recording what comes to mind? Perhaps a fancy studio with a lot of high-tech looking equipment, a giant board loaded with hundreds of buttons that do God knows what, and some giant headphones lying around.  While this may be a more accurate picture of what music recording is today we need to take a step back and look at where all this new technology came from. 

Edison's Phonograph

The first invention that could record any given sound was call the phonautograph which worked by sound waves hitting a membrane, attached to a pen, that vibrated causing the pen to inscribe the characteristics of the sound wave onto a palate.  While this device was revolutionary, it did not allow for instant playback of the recorded sound.  Thomas Edison took this concept to a whole new level with his invention of the phonograph, which brought recorded music to the public.  Through the years, recording got more and more advanced as new technologies kept rolling out such as electrical recording, magnetic recording, and multi-track recording made famous by legend Les Paul which allowed for multiple sounds to be recorded at the same time.

Nowadays music production is more digitally produced than ever before. Most often times the analog production is still made first but it is then transferred through MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) cables to an analog to digital converter where it is then transferred through cables to the Musical Instrument Digital Interface on your computer where sounds are all digital and can be manipulated at your command through the various different tools that digital production provides. These digital production tools include: synthesizers, equalizers, reverberation, delay, and sampling. The main digital interfaces/software that are available to society right now are Apple Logic Pro 9, Cubase 4, FL Studio 9, and Reason 4. The fact that these digital interfaces are available online and at local software stores near you has changed the whole concept of how music is made all around the world. High-priced studios are no longer the only means for production. Instead you have these interfaces available that make producing music easy right in the comfort of your own home.