Collaboration

Collaboration

When you look at the careers of successful producers. You will notice that they don't do everything themselves. And in fact the greatest producers in the world are master collaborators. Look at Quincy Jones for example. Quinten Jones is one of the greatest producers of all time. He is very capable capable of doing everything himself. He is a musician that can play many instruments. He has a composer that can write music for many styles. For example he was the person that wrote the music for Duke Ellington and Count Basie.

Quincy Jones he wrote soundtracks for film and television.

He's a very fine musician.

And when you look at his career with Michael Jackson you can say for example that he collaborated with an army of talent. This includes the recording engineers the mix engineers all the musicians all the background singers and in this sense Quincy Jones was able to scale his talent and by the magic him Magic in power of collaboration he was able to amplify he has creativity.

It's super fun to do everything ourselves. Look at this song by Stevie Wonder. Superstition. He played the drums, bass, all the keyboards, all the vocals, the only thing he didn't do is the horn section.

Look at Mike Oldfield, when he was 19 years old he recorded tubular bells. He played every instrument. He played a full orchestra of instruments.

But then when he went on stage he had a higher musicians to play the parts. And as his career evolved he went back into the recording studio and hired musicians to play certain parts and his music went to a higher level.

Back in the 90s. We would collaborate by shipping 2 inch tips around the world from studio to studio. Back in those days a multi track tape recorder cost somewhere between $50-$85,000. For one tape recorder capable of 24 tracks, and one of those tracks was reserved for 70 time code to synchronize the tape recorder to drum machines and many signatures, so really we only had 23 audio tracks.

The way we would collaborate back in those days was by literally shipping these 2 inch tapes around the world. If the studio was within drivers distance we would ask somebody to drive it in their car. When artists were collaborating they would take their 2 inch tips and bring Bring the tapes with them

When I first started working with MC Hammer, he had a truck deliver all of his 2 inch tips, about 102 inch tips, to my studio and I put them in a vault and we worked with us to and steps

When we collaborated with the East Coast with New York City or Miami or Nashville, we would ship the 2 inch tabs to the studios. When time is of the essence, we would ship them on an airline counter to counter. That means that we would deliver the 2 inch tabs to the airport to the airport and the tape would be handled with great care and delivered to the destinations airport and then the clients would go to the airport and pick the tape up at the airline counter. That's called counter to counter

The master tapes, would become very very valuable. The only way we could make a back up of the tape would be to make a copy of the tape. The copy of the tape would be a second generation copy. The copy of the original analog 2 inch tape will always be lower quality, second generation,. . Means that the copy of the tape would be noisier, have distortion, and it would also have a little bit less high end, it will not be as bright and is open and as much air, and that would be a little bit more bass, because tape always boosts the base. That's called a head Bob. An analog tape machine adds bass this can be a good thing and a bad thing.

The magic of plug-ins, we have plug-ins that can emulate tape machines. 10 machines are beautiful, but they change and distorts the original signal. Wow and flutter is one of the byproducts of tape recorders which basically means that the pitch is speeding up and slowing down a little bit and it's basically smearing the sound a little bit. It's very similar to the way film will take an image and render it in a way that's a little different than reality. And it's one of the reasons why when video recording first came out, it looked very cold and sterile and film had a very lush beautiful dimension.

Nowadays, there are plug-ins that can emulate the look of film with video. And they are plug-ins that can emulate the sound of analog tape. This is an

Collaboration Circa 2000=

By circa 2000, the main way that we collaborated for music and film production, was communicating over email, communicating over the phone, and sending MP3s as email attachments and sending hard drives via FedEx. We didn't have dropbox or Google Drive yet, and Internet speeds were really a little bit too slow to send gigabytes of contacts

Collaboration Circa 2020=

One of the silver linings of a global pandemic is it encouraged if not required the rest of the world to get caught up with digital collaboration. People learned about zoom. People learned about cloud storage. People learned that their Internet speed was very important.

It's not possible to send terabytes of data over the Internet at lightning fast speeds.

There's still a limit to what can be sent over the Internet. Sometimes it's a literally faster to send a drive from the West Coast to the East Coast with a courier service. Because to try to send that information over the Internet will take days or weeks.

As our digital media assets grow, and the value of these assets continues to grow, backing up our digital media has never been more important. There are services there are companies that offer the service of backing up your data. For example back blaze, crash plan. Interestingly, when we first start backing up our digital media assets, our data, these back up services offer the option to do the initial seed back up using drives with a courier service. For example, when I first started backing up my data to back bless, the estimated time for the initial seed back up to complete was going to take about two months.