The Real Reason Why Analog Recording Is Better

we've all seen how there's tons of analog versus digital videos out there where people are debating which sounds better and I've never taken much interest in any of that because I felt like people were completely missing the point on why analog is better and it has nothing to do with the sound but it's something that took me years to understand now I started recording on taper run 1978 working my way through multiple multi-track formats until I bought this Tascam 1-in 16 track real toore in 1988 for my studio The Zone I used it almost Contin

L for 12 years and I worked on 2in 24 track machines at other Studios all through the 1990s but there were so many things that frustrated me about analog yes I know that recording a hot level of tape and getting that tape compression is cool and of course analog Smooths up those quick initial transients that are at the beginning of percussive sounds but still there was so much to hate about analog it's noisy yeah you could use Dolby or dbx noise reduction but that made it sound like there was a veil over the sound and

no matter what kind of tape machine I was using after I'd recorded something it would sound different than the way it sounded when I'd miked everything up and that was the sound I wanted so I'd have to counteract by eqing usually boosting some treble or mid-range but it was always a guessing game and each time you ran or recorded a new track a teeny bit of highend would get erased from the tape so if you're working on an album for a months by the time you got to mix down sounded worse also tape was expensive

I was spending $70 to $80 a reel which after recording alignment tones would leave me about 15 minutes of recording time which meant recording an album was a lot of money for a lot of reels of tape so when you could record and mix professionally completely in a computer I was all in more tracks instantly recallable mixes non-destructive editing I was so early into the game that I was among the first to record and mix billboard charting hits totally in the box and I stayed there for years it was a new frontier of technology and

efficiency but over time I felt like something was missing and that we're all being driven to this rush rush assembly line production I just wanted to get back to something that was creative and unique which is one of the reasons I started this YouTube channel but then two things happened I went and got my 1in 16 track reel to re from my other Studio The Zone where it been in storage for almost 25 years and I made a couple short videos about it as a curiosity from my past and then I figured I'd stick it

in the corner and my clients could look at it and go cool but those videos blew up which caused me to make more videos which caused me to dig through my old recordings and re-evaluate the past and I started live streaming some of my recording sessions which awaken something inside of me the energy of having an audience and creating music in the moment you see I got into music to be a performing recording artist I hadn't thought about being a producer or mixer except for my own music I was having a blast and I realized

that everything I created during the live streams was way better than the things I've been creating using the kind of workflows we've fallen into over the last 10 or 20 years years and all of that stuff got me thinking about commitment see nowadays if you stake a a take nowadays if you nowaday if that nowadays if you make a mistake you just hit undo but back then there was no undo you see when you would punch in a vocal or anything it meant that it was going to erase what was previously there now you could

always record your fixes to another track but since most of us were working on 86 track maybe 24 track you were going to run out of tracks you weren't likely to do that you could record your fixes to another track and bounce them back to the original track but that would add another layer of noise to the tape so you were less likely to do that as well all this meant that you needed to know what you were going to do and you needed to have your together but nowadays we have unlimited undos now don't

get me wrong I love my undos but I thought myself sometimes recording a part so many times that by the time I get it right it has lost all its soul and energy and after that I'm going back and listening to all these different takes and I'm putting off making a visual decision versus a clinical decision which just takes you away from the gut of the moment and takes time and energy away from getting to the rest of the song which just starts to affect everything else but working in analog force you to take your

art more seriously as a skill or a craft or a commitment because when you went to the studio there was a lot at stay it was kind of like going to a wedding or an important meeting or going on stage because recording was a performance another reason why analog is better has to do with longevity this is the first computer I recorded and mixed on in the studio I moved on to a standalone Akai 16 track recorder but after that it was just a series of new computers new operating systems interfaces it averages out to

about one new computer and all the crap that goes along with that every 3 years or so and there's been the unending and expensive cable upgrades some of these scuzzy cables cost me 90 bucks each I've got boxes of all the different types of cables we use to hook up our interfaces to the computers and there's the whole computer monitor connector Evolution I've got more USB cables than I've got missing socks we started on floppy drives and moved through a series of very expensive scuzzy drives my first 1 GB hard drive cost $1,000 and because

of that we backed up onto DVDs every day I've probably got thousands of these later on we moved to AIT digital tape backup systems and their proprietary tape drives but before long hard drives became a lot cheaper so we started backing up onto those but then they would upgrade the connectors which meant we had to upgrade our cables which meant we had to upgrade our computers a lot of the enclosures would fa fail so we started swapping out drives but many drives died and now all of this stuff is Obsolete and some of this music

will never be recovered there was no longevity on the other hand my 16 track reel toore which still runs all the connectors are the same connectors we use today standard XLR connectors and my T 33 40s for track re to re recorder which I bought used for $800 when I was 15 years old in 1978 it uses standard RCA connectors now these were not considered by any means the best tape recorders for the time however they are robust machines designed to last a lifetime this thing has been sitting on a Shelf at my other Studio

of the zone for almost 30 years and I brought it up here I guess a year or so ago and plugged it in and it turned on and I grabbed all these old tapes I've listened to most of these These are mostly from the late '70s and 80s there's a few here I'm not sure if I've gone through I think it's this one I've not played yet it's from high school it's probably 1980 1981 oh and I did not store these Tales out back then I didn't know what that was at the time so if

anybody's wondering why I'm doing it this way I didn't know about fast forwarding your tapes when you were done and storing them Tails out there are a couple songs in here I kind of know they are I don't know if I'll listen to them there's one in particular I'm interested in see I think this is [Applause] [Music] it this is me my friend Drew Allen and our buddy Harry Joiner jamming in my parents basement this [Music] is this recording is 42 years old I may be listening to this 32 years ago maybe at the latest

this tape is running incredibly smoothly as I was re as I was fast forwarding it out here it was completely smooth there's no stickiness coming off some tapes do get sticky uh the aex tape that I have that I actually use for most of my career it'll get sticky and it starts to degrade but if you bake it there's a process called baking and I actually made a video about that it'll um bind the tape together so you have a couple weeks and you can transfer it into the computer but seriously 42 years I can

retrieve this stuff I can play it back there's nothing wrong with this tape right here try that with a computer and a hard drive of course I guess it's kind of ironic that I'm recording it into the computer to back it up silly huh but to me the thing that made recording in analog so much better came down to process how we record it each day and these two things that we would do over and over again that I don't think people really think much about but had a huge impact on our state of minds

and that would be rewinding and changing reels of tape you see nowadays if you got to go back and re-record something or do a punch and just repair one section there's no rewind time so you can hit stop let's do another take and instantly be right back to where you were before and start recording again yeah I think you can punch it out here we go and do it again yeah that was great give me another and do it again I like that one give me one more and again here we go and do it

again but when you were working on analog tape rewinding back to the beginning of a verse took a little bit longer and if you were going back to the beginning of the song there was enough time to catch your breath get a drink of water collect your thoughts and if you needed to jump to another song you'd have to wind the whole reel off the machine clean the heads which you needed to do in between every reel and then load a whole other reel on all this took some time today we don't stop but this

non-stop workf hasn't actually added anything to the quality of my work and it's contributed to a lack of perspective which just leads to creative dead ends and a lot of wasted time so years ago I started taking lots of teeny breaks throughout the day and I found that by just stepping away for a few minutes or walking out of the room or going outside not long enough to get out of the vibe but just long enough to reset my ears would make everything clearer when I hit the space bar again and now that I think

about it maybe I've been trying to recreate the time that we would need to rewind and change reels I mean it doesn't matter how fast or efficient you are with your work and you know if you lose perspective why we're doing this I mean it is art it it won't matter the process does have a huge effect on the outcome of your work so what is the real reason why analog is better well obviously it's not about the sound for me cuz I'm going to find a good way to get the sound it's really about

the workflow and the commitment to a quality performance it's also about having that creative space just a little extra time to think which is huge but it's also about the machines and the infrastructure analog is a reliable and wrong system they still work you don't have to keep replacing Parts over and over again but if you think about your computers and your operating systems and the software how much money have you put into that how many times does it have to be redone and and how many times does it go bad it's just actually not

that reliable and I feel like we're building a house of cards and not just for the music industry but our whole society I'm not sure we're necessarily headed down the right path in so many ways but me I'm just going to keep creating my music and I hope you will too thanks for watching Remember to subscribe and be [Music] unique freak it out with Billy