No idea who steve lacy or kendrick lamar are, but this was a good read. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/steve-lacy-iphone-producer/ I used to make guitar + singing recordings. I had a small amount of recording gear, but I've thought for a while that once I get back into it (when the kids are older) I should see how far I can get with just my phone. It's kind of a drag to make a recording when you have to set up all this stuff

(disclaimer: I went to school to study Sound Engineering, which certainly gave me a bunch of weird biases that don't reflect the actual music world) I feel there's an important distinction between songwriting and production, and while the two have significant overlap (both in how people use the terms and how they practice either), it's worthwhile to think about them separately. I think you're right--it's a pain to have to set up a ton of gear to do your own guitar+singing recordings, and you'll save a ton of time and effort so long as you don't care that much about being instantly radio-friendly. But having a ton of recording gear is awesome when you have a bunch of people in a room and you want to make their ideas happen--i.e, "producing" in the traditional sense. I actually really like living in that space, too, where your ideas aren't the main course but all the garnishes that make it come alive and feel complete. I like recording someone who is good at singing and then spending 3-4 hours in the studio editing with fun plugins to take a performance from good to great. And there's a lot of creativity and technical knowledge in that, too--even if you're not literally singing a song or playing a guitar. I'd also note that Steve Lacy has a swathe of mixing and mastering engineers behind even his earlier tracks (the article tells how he was plugged into an existing music collective), all of which I'm sure brought a tonne of gear and recording expertise to the table. I'm sure a lot of his success also comes from his ability to be a great Recording Engineer that happens to use nonstandard gear. The iPhone itself seems... fairly secondary in light of all of that. There's also a real camp of people who embrace the songwriting/producing-in-parallel--usually dumped under the Electronic genre. Steve Lacy is an incredible songwriter and instrumentalist, for sure, but if you're setting out to be a Liquid Drum 'n Bass artist, I'm not sure that emulating his setup is such a good idea.

This was really insightful, thanks! I'd love to get back into making music and learn more about editing/producing. I think it'll work a lot better if/when I have a house and have enough space to leave all the gear set up and plugged in somewhere... do you still do recording/production often? any tips for getting started? 🙂 My setup currently consists of an acoustic guitar (it's an electro acoustic actually but I always thought it sounded weird plugged in) and a couple dynamic mics. I have one of those box things where you plug the mics/guitar in and it hooks up to your computer... don't remember what those are called. And then I'd use audacity for recording. I vaguely remember audacity crashing a lot which was annoying. I think it'd be fun to try using a couple more instruments too, e.g. I could bust out the bongos lol. I was also learning alto recorder for a while as a "clarinet lite", since I currently have zero time for all the setup, maintenance etc that clarinet takes... I love the recorder since it only cost 30 bucks (approximately 100x or so less than the clarinet ha ha) and I thus feel no obligation to take good care of it

aaghh I keep trying lol

hilariously I don't yet see a "allow message" button, still looking...

would be really funny if it's disallowing the word "bikeshedding" (i promise there aren't any other bad words 😅 )

you'd think under the "actions" menu there'd be, I don't know, a "this message was not in fact spam" button

welp I accidentally overwrote my clipboard so it may now be lost to time 🥲

nah I got it

you're a hero!

still don't know how to unblock messages, I tried giving you a "member" role, don't know if that'll do anything