Processing audio tracks with gear I can't afford

G

gumplunger

New member
I had an idea this morning, and I'm wondering if anyone's heard of something like this already existing:

A website run by a company with a studio stocked with all the nice gear home recording enthusiasts dream about but may never be able to afford, where you can pay a small fee, say $0.50 per audio track or something, choose an audio unit (like an 1176 or vintage Neve compressor, or even an actual plate reverb) tweak your settings, and have the resulting audio track sent back to you. It'd let you use gear that you couldn't realistically buy to get some awesome tracks and the company would make money off all their gear (maybe the company would be a recording studio with a lot of gear looking for some extra revenue).

Anyone heard of something like this, or should I get to work on it?
 
It's a good idea from a business standpoint.

But ultimately, it's not practical in the least from an artistic or functional viewpoint.

The value in something like the 1176 has little to do with the compressor itself and much more to do with how it is used. Using the proper settings within the context of the track and within the context of the song, so as to achieve what is appropriate within the context of what you're doing.

Just running something through an 1176 isn't going to do you a damn bit of good, and without the proper settings, will do a lot more harm than anything else.

That said, there are a lot of stupid people out there who I can see actually spending money on something like this. So from a bu$ine$$ perspective, yea, I can see it working. For sure. You know what they say about a fool and his money. And the project studio market is flooded with idiots; just look at some of the geniuses on this board as exhibit A.

But I'm afraid you're going to up that 50 cents thing. :D Think about it. When you consider the amount of time it will take to download a track, run it through the processor, check the file for clipping and what not, save the file, and then upload it back to an FTP site ... check to see if the client received the file and if they're happy, etc. You'd probably be looking at close to 1/2 hour's worth of work, on average, per file. If you consider $1 per hour to be a satisfactory wage, then I suppose your pricing plan would make for a decent career (in a third-world country). :D
 
well for a start......

it would be impossible to guess how much compression or delay or what type of reverb and how much to put on a single track. And if you never used any of the gear before you can't exactly say....here's my bass track can you run it through the 1176 with X amount of compression with the threshold at X amount, ect......

:p
 
My thought was that the customer would be able to tweak the settings on the gear remotely and hear 5-10 second previews of the sound clip before they shell out their hard-earned quarters.

But let me worry about whether it would work, I just want to know if anything like this has been done before :)

edit: However, the idea of hearing something in the context of the mix is something I hadn't thought about yet, thanks for bringing that to my attention.
 
gumplunger said:
My thought was that the customer would be able to tweak the settings on the gear remotely and hear 5-10 second previews of the sound clip before they shell out their hard-earned quarters.
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That would be interesting. If you could pull it off.

It would be quite an investment, technologically and financially, to set everything up so that an LA-2A could be operated remotely, for example, ... but it would be interesting.
 
I idea of a customer remotely accessing the knobs of a compressor are (IMO) far fetched. And the whole "real-time" aspect is a bit hard to swallow. Consider it, all that high end gear would have to be customized to allow a dude on a PC to tweak it from miles away. And in order to have say 100 people use the same piece of gear at the same time, the "host" would have to have 100 customized highend compressors ready to accept a signal.

If it weren't computerized but still a real-time service, you'd have to have 100 dudes with 100 PC's downloading and tweaking 100 devices and uploading. 1 engineer is expensive enough. Paying multiple engineers would blow your .50 cents out of the water.

But hey, space ships were at one time incomprehensible. You should exhaust every effort and spare no expense to make it happen. Good luck!!
 
Yea, I guess the sticky part of all this is that once you set everything up to be financially feasible on your end, you'd probably have to charge customers something in the neighborhood of $50 / hour to use it (rather than 50 cents). And for that rate, there are probably studios in the area you could rent out for the day.
 
Adam P said:
It's called sending your tracks somewhere else to be mixed. (to the OP)
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The point is those short on cash would be able to be a little more DIY and still being able to use professional gear.

Also, I'm sure you're all familiar with the re-amping of guitar signals, what if you developed a method of re-preamping, where you could take the bare mic signal and send it off to be run through a 1073 and then sent back to you in a few minutes.

Yeah, I'm aware of potential pitfalls here, I just want to know if its an open market. As far as I can tell, it is. Sure it seems a little farfetched, but I'm going to look into it anyway. I'm at Georgia Tech, I'm sure I can find someone to build me a robot to tweak the La-2a knobs while I sit back and marvel at the wonders of technology. :D Or not. But you get the idea.

edit: Just so I don't seem like a loony, my initial thought is that it would operate in a queue fashion - you submit your request and it's sent back to you when it's processed, hopefully the system would be efficient enough that this wouldn't take long. As for the remote control of knobs, maybe I could get some underage migrant workers that I can pay in pie to look at a request, set the knobs, and hit "go". It ain't perfect, but I just came up with it this morning. Rome wasn't built in a day.
 
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