This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.
This time it is my former colleague, Richard Hunter. A Gartner Fellow, a member of Gartner’s CIO Research team, and the author of business books like “IT Risk” and “The Real Business of IT” (also by Harvard Business School Press, due October 2009).
As you will see, he is even more competent with his harmonica. The photo was from a performance at Centro Culturale de la Reina in Santiago, Chile
“I don’t have a hobby. I don’t have time for one. Gartner and my family keep me gainfully more than busy. But I have somehow managed to carve out a second career composing and performing works for harmonica.
I get a fair number of professional opportunities in that career, such as the various sessions I’ve done in the last few years for film and TV composer Brian Keane (as in Ken Burns’s “Civil War” series - the only composer nominated for an Emmy in every musical category in 2007). I’ve generated other opportunities by writing the world’s best-selling method for jazz and rock harmonica players (“Jazz Harp”, Oak Publications, NYC, 1980, now in its seventh printing), releasing two CDs of original compositions for solo harmonica, and licensing my various works.
But the second career isn’t about money. It’s about expression, and in the last 15 years technology has made it possible for me to express myself with amazing efficiency and effectiveness.
When I was in my 20s, I longed for a recording studio at my command. Without one, I could write music, but getting it recorded in a form suitable for public distribution was an expensive and time-consuming proposition. And a recording studio was indeed an expensive proposition in the 1970s. You needed a big room and lots of equipment for starters, and then you needed to know how to use it all—not just the musical instruments, but the recording gear.
All that’s changed now thanks to the personal computer. I have a studio in a spare bedroom that includes a computer, software like Cakewalk for composing, arranging, and recording, a Line 6 audio interface, a collection of microphones like the Audix Fireball V, a couple of MIDI keyboards, Digitech amp modelers (photo on right) and more. Almost everything in the studio either runs on the computer or interfaces to it directly. I have software that emulates traditional instruments like piano, drums, organ, strings, and so on, as well as software that produces sounds that no traditional instrument could ever make. I estimate that my entire setup cost me less than $10,000, which is roughly $2,500 in 1975 dollars; but a comparable setup would easily have cost me more than $100,000 to create in 1975, using the hardware devices that were all that was available at the time. In fact, “comparable” is misleading, because many of the tools now available in software (such as pitch correction or automatic rhythmic correction) weren’t available in 1975 in any form, and others extend the earlier tools in novel ways. For example, the “amp modeling” software that uses the computer to emulate the sonic behavior of dozens of guitar amplifiers and cabinets also makes it possible to carry virtual versions of all those amplifiers onstage at once—something that would have been physically impossible to do with the real things on all but the largest stages.
But the impact isn’t just about gear and the money for same. It’s about time and output. I can create fully realized works of music on my own, in my home studio, on my schedule. When I travel, I carry a stripped down version of my home studio on the road in the form of a laptop, a hard drive, a microphone, and a USB audio interface, all of which pack into a bag I sling over my shoulder. For capturing ideas quickly and easily, I have a small handheld recorder, the Zoom H4 (photo on left) that records better than CD-quality audio in stereo onto an SD card; it can record up to 19 hours of audio on a 2-gigabyte card, and it can record for up to 4 hours on the power supplied by two AA batteries. Last week, I recorded ideas for three original lullabies while I waited for a plane in Pearson airport in Toronto. All I had to do was turn on the recorder and start playing and talking. I’ve since transferred the audio to my computer (via the USB interface built into the recorder) and emailed the rough ideas to the guitarist that I’m collaborating with on this project.
Advances in technology have collapsed the space between collaborators, just as they have collapsed gear from a mountain of boxes and wires into a laptop. In the last couple of years I’ve done projects with producers and players in Milan, Austin, and Los Angeles—and I did them all in my home studio, except when I was traveling, on which occasions I did my recording in hotel rooms. For projects such as these the collaborators send me an mp3 via email or FTP, I load the track into my software and record my parts, and then I send my parts back. It’s easy, it’s almost as fast as being onsite in their studios, and the quality is more than good enough for my professional clients.
Even bigger changes are coming. Today, most musicians are limited to making music with whoever shares their general geo-location. Coming up: simultaneous live performance by musicians located in widely distributed places. When this technology is matured—meaning highly functional and relatively inexpensive, following the typical chip-based technology path— it will be a very, very different musical world when a musician located anywhere on the planet can play in real time with a musician located anywhere else on the planet, anytime.
Need I mention that technology also allows me to distribute them to the world at an effective cost of zero? If you’re interested, you can hear my music anytime at MySpace or at Taxi.com (the latter has much larger selection—Myspace limits to ten at a time).
For musicians at all levels, modern technology has made it possible to acquire extraordinarily powerful tools for composition, production, and distribution at a cost that’s trivial compared to previous generations of technology. It’s an incredible time for musicians, and I’m glad to be living in it.”
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