Introduction by Larry Crane
(descriptive and non-Steve words in Italics)
John B. introduces Larry, “It’s a pleasure to know and work with him, Mr Larry Crane.”
much applause
Larry begins - “This is pretty surreal for me.
You know I’d really feel a lot more at home behind a console right now. You know about six years ago I was I had a computer that I didn’t use. I had a PO box that my ex-wife, well my then wife, she’s now my ex-wife, she wanted to close down the PO box cos we weren’t using it. I had 3 days off a week. I was working at a club as a cook and a waiter. I found myself just sitting at home just watching videos. I didn’t have a lot going on.
I used to write for magazines, ye know fanzines and stuff, doin record reviews and articles and that kind of stuff, and I wanted to do something like that. But you know it all seemed so fucking boring reading about some new kind of band. You know it’s always the same kind of articles over and over again.
And I realised that the fanzines that I kinda liked were these obscure ones like Knickjob or Craphound which was about cut and paste clipart graphics and all of them just sort of focussed on a nitch like that.
And I thought, “I could just do that with recording.” I could call and interview some people I know and admire and I could just do some small articles about records that are being made that you don’t read about the making of in certain other publications.
And I thought ‘that maybe kind of fun. I could use the PO box and finally hook the computer up to the internet.’ And well, here I am. (giggles)
Things kind of took off I guess. A couple of years down the line when John told us to go up from 2,000 copies to 20 or 30,000, whatever it was… pretty bizarre…
One of the things about this is the name. A tape operator traditionally, I think comes from England, when the analog tape decks were first being used at studios they were big clunky horrible machines, and they would be off to the side of the console basically. And there would be a person to run that machine. They would be like ‘Arm track 4’… boom…
….. (Mark stops recording cos it’s boring. Then Larry starts talking about Albini)
Larry Crane – I went to see Big Black in San Francisco and enjoyed the shit out of the show… I’ve enjoyed Steve’s records for years and the records that he’s worked on. And also I’ve enjoyed reading his opinions that have been circulated around the world in magazines and on the internet. I find him a very thoughtful and outspoken person when it comes to the art of recording. When I first emailed Steve I said , “hey man, come out. Be the keynote speaker at the conference.” And he said, “why in the world would you want someone who’ll disagree with what 99% of the people who’ll be at the conference are thinking and doing?” And I said “that’s exactly why.”
So Steve where are you out there? Come on up."
Steve Albini’s Keynote speech
Steve calmly walks to the mike dressed in overalls with the letter ‘e’ on the back (same overalls used by him and his homies while constructing Electrical Audio Studios, which they would wear for the following 3 days… pheeeeeuuuuwww!) and an Italian hat.
“Live Long and (rock) prosper fellow trekkies and members of Star fleet. Today I would like to discuss the discrepancies in Episide 23 (Clapping and laughing), ‘The Vulcan frame’ during which, as you know, Spock is … interned for the Vulcan ‘Knachtalfer’, in the pentangle mating season and ritual combat.
(I can’t make out all the words due to laughter)
His behaviour seems to violate the pure logic that is the foundation of Vulcan society. Some trekkers attribute this emotional outburst to Spock’s half human ancestry, but Gene (perfectly timed pause)…. Roddenberry, clearly paints Spock’s dominant characteristics to be Vulcan and Spock repeatedly confronts other Vulcans including the Statesman KaarHuun who’s personality seems ever more inflamatory than Spock’s.
(Everyone laughing…) Albini looks up…
This is the Tape Op thing isn’t it. Sorry. Wrong geeks. My mistake.
(Laughing subsides)
OK, everybody should look around and get familiar with everyone that’s here. Because here in this room is the future.
The old guard of institutional studios is suffering and collapsing. The record table house studios have all but disappeared. And there are some people who say that the very physical incarnation of the studio is being done away with.
These people are wrong but not mistaken. Records are being made in non-studio environments with increasing regularity. And with electronic, hip hop and sample based music, the existence of a physical studio is now probably irrelevant.
Current trends aside, I remain convinced that the future of
music, and I don’t mean the immediate future I mean the long term future,
recording will rely on the existence of studios full of equipment, that is
suitable for making records and staffed by people who know what they’re doing.
That’s us. We need to be
ready when studios are once again the place where records are made.
Most of us developed an interest in recording as a hobby or
as an out growth of being involved in music.
I know that’s true for me. It’s
safe to say that none of us saw recording as a quick and easy way to making a
lot of money. That said, some of
you earn a living making records, and some of the rest of you would like to.
More generally most of us want to do right by the people we work with and make great records. I am one of you. I started by screwing around with a 4-track, eventually opened a studio in my house, and now I work in a studio built by other people just like me …. by other people just like me, period.
(everyone laughs).
It’s like over the course of 20 years I’d died and gone to heaven. I have been trying to do all these things, that is do right by the people we work with and make great records, for 20 years through the most dramatic shift in recording dynamics in history and I have made some observations which may help explain my prejudices, which I will also share with you.
At the very least I would like to get us all talking about genuinely important issues, something bigger than pillar snare sounds and the original vintage black faced strat (? Techno-babble).
First we need to acknowledge that recording is not just
about sound. It’s called
recording because you’re making a permanent embodiment of a moment, a record
of it. You are making history.
This is a huge responsibility and I want you all to take it seriously.
As of this moment, my apologies to Larry Crane, there are but 2 storage
formats which are worth considering as permanent or archival, I hate that word,
recordings. Vinyl records and
analog master tapes. Anything else
is like an ice sculpture or a design drawn in the sand and will eventually
disappear. We owe it to our clients
to provide them at the very least as an option an analog master.
Some of you will have objections to this line of argument and I would
welcome a discussion about it.
As a wonderful consequence of the aggressive marketing of digital recording technologies, older established analog studios have been unloading their tape machines at prices that defy belief. In the same way that many studios modernised in the 70’s and unloaded all of their outmoded doob (?) equipment at a fraction of it’s value, there are bargains to be had now that we wont see again in our lifetimes. Soup’s on folks, grab a spoon.
Some of you have already taken advantage of this sell off will and more of you undoubtedly will. Even if you have only spent a few hundred dollars or a few $1000 on a tape machine, you must be prepared to treat it like the expensive precision machine it was designed to be. Failing to do upkeep and maintenance on these beautiful machines is a sad cheapening of their abilities and if you’re not prepared to spend more than you paid for such a machine to keep it in good repair, I beg you, please don’t buy one, and let it deteriorate into a wreck. Get a ProTools rig instead. They’re disposable.
(Clapping)
If we shift topics to the business climate that we all operate in, now is a good time to introduce you to the Laffer Curve.
Up pops the curve behind him on a slide.
This was named after some smartass economist named ‘Something Laffer’.
The Laffer Curve
a visual aid pops up behind him on the ginormous screen...
(The curve should look smooth. I drew it by hand (i.e. mouse), so it looks a bit shit. Sorry. Colour scheme is pretty groovy though.)
The Laffer Curve was originally used to describe the effect of pricing on demand and how the two interact on the income of a merchant.
On the x-axis you see pricing of goods or services. Low prices on the left, at the right end are high prices. On the y-axis you see the net income of the merchant. At the lowest end of the price spectrum, you have something, let’s say apples, being sold so cheaply that no matter how many you sell that you make no money. At the other end of the spectrum you have apples, or studio time, that’s so expensive that no one will buy it. So you also make no money.
And the interesting thing about the laffer curve is that the merchant can make the same amount of money by having 2 radically different prices for his goods or sevices. On the left and right ends of the spectrum there are matching points, so for any given level of income you can have higher volume at a lower price or lower volume at a higher price.
This is important with respect to pricing studio time, time as an engineer, pricing materials and records that you sell. Movemebnts to the right of the curve bappen generally by the design of the merchant, that is you think your clientelle will bare a higher price for your goods or services and that increase in price does not effect the desireability of your goods and services up to a point.
Movement to the left, generally speaking are slower than movements to the right. For example, if you have a high set price and you decide that you want to lower the price, the world still thinks your price is high, despite the fact that you have lowered it, so you are making less money for the duration of the rest of the time the world cops onto the fact that you lowered your prices. Even if you move the price down lower, you wont get an immediate increase in income.
Si this graph is important because it is not just an economic model. It applies to a lot of different things with respect to studios and making records.
For safety’s sake it’s always best to try to price yourself to be on the left side of the laffer curve. You can justify that by saying that you’re making just as much money as you would be if you were on the right side. But it is easier to make adjustments to the right than to the left.
Because people have emotional responses to pricing, there is a risk to pricing you services, you studio and yourself to the right of the laffer curve. If you lower your rates you will be getting less money for sessions which you would have gotten anyway had you not lowered them. Movements to the left are driven by clients generally, and that happens slowly. Movements to the right can be immediate. You can basically decide to raise your prices from one day to the next. And see what effect that has on your clientelle immediately.
On the left side price is not an issue with your client, they are clearly willing to pay more. On the right side price is the only issue that affects your client.
(I'm helpfully putting in the curve again, so you don't have to keep scrolling back up and down.)
There are other applications for the laffer curve. If for the price increase you subsititute time and money that you spent in the studio on a given recording and on the income axis you evaluate the cumulative greatness of the recording that you do. Then you can see that there is a relationship between how much time and money you spend in the studio and how great the recording is. On the far end of the spectrum you’re spending time and money that you dont get much of a recording out of it, and on the other end of the spectrum you’ve spent so much time and money that there’s no way the record could justify the expense. So you can decide how good you want your record to be and then you can decide if you want it to be inexpensive or expensive.
The Q or bandwith of the curve and the amplitude of the curve with respect to greatness of recordings depends on the inherent greatness of the artist according to Jerry Lewis’ first theorem on the non-shineability of turds.
Alright, another application of the Laffer curve. If you substitute for the price increase, the available options that you have in the studio, in terms of track space, or instrumentation or arrangements or something like that, and on the income axis you substitute your confidence in decisions made, and the efficiency of the behaviour in the studio, you can see that if you have very few options, you do not have much confidence in what you do because you feel hemmed in by the limitations of the studio or the limitations of the project. And on the right hand end of the spectrum you have so many different snare drums to try that you don’t get around to trying anything.
So this is another case where psychological impede movement to the left, that no matter how good it sounds
(.... knackered.... too much typing.... will finish in a while. I think I deserve a round of applause (or money) for typing this much. Check in next time studio geeks for the rest of Steve's speech and Q+A section including one from J Robbins about drum tuning!!!!)