How To Be A Music Producer – Hardware Vs. Analog GearDo you want to work in the music industry? This article is part of a series designed to help anyone who has ever wanted to learn about becoming a music producer? This is a great place to start. The topic of this video is "Hardware and Analog Gear: Are They The Same?" We see a lot of confusion amongst our clients and students about the meaning of the terms "hardware" and "analog." And I think that's a fairly recent confusion, although they are technical terms, so I think there's always been a certain amount of confusion among the general public about what these things are and what they do. One of the problems I see is that people associate hardware equipment (things like hardware keyboards for example) very directly with analog equipment, although they're not necessarily always the same thing. For example when we talk about synths and keyboards, a common area where this confusion arises, people get mixed up. The types of synths available in the 1960s and 1970s were pretty much exclusively analog synthesizers. So, commercially produced synthesizers that were used in music production were analog in nature – this means there were no digital or computer components to the hardward. They were electronic devices that were capable of producing sounds and they had a very certain charcteristic warm, fat sound that is closely associated with all analog gear. Now on the other end, still using keyboards as an example, as we hit the 1980s and 1990s we saw a lot of digital keyboards. A lot of these were in fact computer based keyboards and in some cases they had very distinctive digital sounds. For example, FM synthesizers – the main exmaple of which is the Yamaha DX7 – were designed to do a very specific type of digital synthesis (additive synthesis). It had a very distinctive sound to it quite seperate from an analog synthesizer sound. Later on, to make things more confusing, as we get into the late 1980s and early 1990s we have things like wavetable synthesizers and analog modelling synthesizers which could basically create digital type sounds, or analog-like sounds as well. Often the analog-like sounds were not to the same degree of accuracy as the actual analog equipment. Generally speaking, they sounded more like analog synthesizers.
The important point is that a lot of hardware (the majority of hardware) is primarily just a computer disguised as a keyboard or other piece of equipment. They use a lot of digital techniques to recreate the sounds of everything from digital to analog gear. Many times, students and clients naively assume that just because something is a piece of physical hardware that it is an analog piece of equipment. That is NOT necessraily true. "Analog" describes a very specific type of sound reproduction that is based on NOT using computers but instead using primarily solid-state or tube electronics, depending on the device. There are many types of devices that are analog in nature. For example traditional analog guitar distortion pedals are an example of gear that is actually analog in nature. But this gets confusing because now there are distortion pedals that are digital in nature yet look very similar in design and form-factor to their analog counterparts. So it's important to understand that analog simply means a completely electronic process whereas digital involves a microprocessor (computer) and is using modelling software to simulate an analog sound but is not exactly equivelant. I think where this confusion becomes most amusing is when people read about the warm, fat sound of analog components and proceed to go out and buy digital hardware just because they are seperate physical pieces of gear. In fact they often give the same (and sometimes worse) sound quality as some computer software plugins. So please don't confuse analog with outboard hardware gear. Just because something is a physical piece of gear does not mean it is an analog piece of equipment. You have to delve a little deeper into the way the hardware produces it's sound to really figure out what type of equipment it is: digital or truly analog.
Audio Engineer Schools – Schools For Music Production – How To Be A Music Producer
