If "recording schools" these days are just rooms filled with 50 computers each with their own M-Box, is this teaching a marketable skill when every kid with an interest in music production already has this equipment at home? What is "marketable skills" in this industry anymore? Is anyone actually making music in the old style professional studios or is it all basically home studios now? I had a Domino's pizza delivered last night and the delivery guy inquired about a record I had pinned to the wall behind me and I mentioned I had recorded it and he immediately started telling me about his progressive rock project so I decided to show him my control room and when he came in he looked at my "Muscle Shoals" MCI mixer like I had reanimated John Lennon or something. He totally freaked out and I don't deserve that kind of accolade, like, I don't deserve to be immediately associated with some hyperreal-ized nostalgic notion of a past era's greatness, but I think even with or perhaps more so because of the proliferation of "virtual" vintage processing, a studio that actually has like physical objects in the room that process audio, like objects that aren't some graphic design on a computer monitor, it has this basically religious aura to it, and anyone who likes a style of music which isn't dependent on the most modern digital technology (i.e. is performed with human hands and throats) immediately connects to the presence of actual equipment. I really feel like it's becoming a black and white issue, because, if you take a post-modern look at it, all this glut of recordings being made processed by software emulations of "classic" analog hardware, it's creating an entire aesthetic era of "fake vintage", and EVERYONE knows that. Reality is disappearing, because (according to Jean Baudrillard) the thrill of the "Ecstasy of Communication" has overcome the "Theater of Alienation". Complexity itself is being violently eroded by the promise of an answer to every question by Google, where soon there will be no more nuance of the spirit bewildered by what could only be called God. I am so thrilled to live in the era that I am living in, but I am also so glad to be able to afford to take a non-traditional approach to creating art that I devote my life to, and to have fellowship with so many (older) men who can enable me with their time-worn knowledge as they live desperately on the last hinge of any hope that the dream that set the direction of their careers is still valid, is still important towards realizing some physical manifestation of a truth we can believe in and cherish.
Nicholas