I used to be a recording engineer, kinda. I never worked for a company doing this kinda work, but I did record a several bands, as well as my own and my own bands’ music. Back in the day I used an analog four track recorder. It used regular cassette tape to operate.

It was actually pretty cool how it worked on regular cassette tape, but this is a topic for another day.

At one point in time my analog four-track quite working. I don’t know what happened to it, but it served me well for many years, so I didn’t complain.

After that I purchased a small Roland digital workstation console thingy. It could record eight tracks at once, allowed for plenty of bouncing and mixing down, had several effects engines in it, and so on. It was a really nice piece of equipment and it also served me very well.

At first I was blown away by the increase in audio quality. The digital workstation gave me much better results than the 4 track ever could, and yes that includes my recording skills’ improvements.

But after a few years I realized that all the music recorded with the digital eight track was missing something. Sure lots of the music sucked in the first place, but there was just something about the digitally recorded music that seemed to hurt the end product.

I think it’s the perfection of digital audio quality that was missing. My impression is that the analog sound worked best (yeah, for me and my situation, yours of course may vary) for my recording purposes. There was just something about recording in analog, with the tape hiss and the excess background noise, that just added to the character of the music. It just seemed overall better.

Of course, these days you can use effects to recreate or simulate an analog recording. But come on, isn’t this a bit ridiculous?! Why record digitally, then add in subtle analog sounds? Why not just go analog in the first place?

Yeah, there’s a good amount of arguments over why digital is better, especially when it comes to working with the audio, mixing down, processing, remixing, etc., but I still feel that analog recording is the way to go. Now Britney Spears needs not to use analog recording, as her music lacks something from its very fundament (great word!). But for the rest of us, who make music firstly due to intrinsic reasons and secondly for enjoyment’s sake, let’s just stick to analog, aka real!