Assuming I understand his view correctly, I think the OP has a good point, if not eloquently stated. I started a thread a few weeks ago on
volume automation & sound texturing/layering, which essentially made the same point: one of the big things that separates a "home" recording from a "pro" recording is layering of different textures and sounds. Now, like you guys said, much of the material posted on here is "guy with a guitar" singer/songwriter-type-stuff, which usually doesn't call for a million orchestra/synth/anything parts. On the other hand, I feel many of us (myself included) have been focusing so hard on closing the gap sonically between pro studios and home studios, that we may have lost sight of one of the things that made so many of our favorite albums so great: experimentation! Things like putting a keyboard through 30 effects boxes into a guitar amp set to 10, or 1, or whatever. tecording some outdoor ambience and throwing it behind a track to give it some "air"; just finding cool, previously unheard sounds and putting them into songs to create a
sonic landscape.
These are things that most of us don't do (as far as I know), and I really feel that we're missing out on the very reason home recordings have an enormous advantage over million-dollar-budget studio productions:
freedom. Freedom from label deadlines, freedom from worrying about making your money back, freedom from fan expectations, and for the majority of us: freedom from having to rely on a known formula to ensure financial compensation from millions of CD sales to the general public. If we don't strive to set our productions apart from everyone else's, we are in fact contributing to the general blanding of the music of this time period, just as bad as the millions of bands out there trying to exactly mimic their favorite bands to try to ride the coat-tails of their success, instead of forging out and trying to find their own sound. Sure, it's easy money, and for those of us relying on our studios to eat, it's sometimes a necessity to take it in the ass and record a bunch of talentless know-nothing 17 year olds with their parents' money and dreams of getting on a major record label. But keep an eye out for those few bands that want to find a new sound, or at least your own productions, and take a day or two to experiment with some crazy shit.
If nothing else, it'll take away from the monotony of editing incredibly shitty drum takes. And considering the amount of completely generation-lossless storage most of us have, keep the samples for another production months, or years from now. It's sort of similar to movie sound FX clips, where the bigger studios amass millions of sound clips to choose from for any particular event.
Anyway, that's what I think.
