Forget About Record Labels and Recording Studios… be a BedRocker
A few months ago, I met a guy who owned a 3-studio recording complex in Philadelphia during the 70’s. His motto, “Commercial music has sucked ever since the mob got out of the industry.” (Hadn’t heard that one before, but he may have a point.) Today, he can do more in one hour working in a dedicated 300sqft home-studio space than he could do in a week of tape-based recording studio work in the 70’s. And we can too !!!
These days, with a $300 home studio package, a fair amount of YouTubing, and free software, anyone with a computer CAN record, mix and master very solid music demos entirely from the private comfort of home.
Will they be “studio quality”? Probably not at first; but with time, maybe. (Anything worth doing usually takes time to do right.) Point is, the technical ability to do so is now within financial reach of any musician who has ever considered putting themselves out there by self-producing and releasing original music.
Yeah… Home Production IS Home Production
Speaking for 3ManCult, we’re not REAL producers or mixing/mastering engineers. We have around $1K total investment in our “recording setup” and we do not work in an acoustically treated space. Top that off with: we’re not professional musicians.
Net result, our self-produced music sounds pretty good in some ways, and pretty amateurish in other ways. And THAT is the core of the BedRock mico-genre: self-produce to the best of your ability, while (hopefully) getting better all the time and putting your own original music out into the world.
We can poke criticism at our recording and mixes all day long. Seriously… it’s a LONG list. But guess what? As we got more and more into this, we started finding “real” music on SoundCloud, BandCamp and other platforms that was (in our opinion) not even as good as our stuff.
That was a real paradigm shift: We had never considered the possibility that our music could actually be BETTER than some music already released on the platforms. So when the new year hit, we looked at each other after practice one night and decided: WTF… let’s put our shit out there too!
3ManCult will release 3 EPs during 2023. We’re recording clean-up tracks for the first EP now. Songs are set for the second EP. And the final EP will come from the experiences of the first two EPs.
As we begin considering HOW to do this (i.e. self-producing and releasing original music as unsigned, independent musicians) we fell into an entirely unexpected world of grass-roots musical self-promotion; which is VERY long story that I’ll be covering and revisiting in future posts. For now, let’s focus in on the music micro-genre for 3ManCult.
(We also began investigating new ways to release music outside of the music industry and on our own terms, which led us to Music NFTs™ but that’s another good story we’ll come back to later. For now, let’s just say releasing Music NFTs today would be like releasing a “magic CD” back in the 80’s.)
What is a Music Micro-Genre?
WikiPedia currently lists around 40 music micro-genres, and defines it as: A term used since at least the 1970s to describe highly specific subgenres of music, literature, film, and art. But we’re only concerned with music micro-genres for now.
Bed… Rock… Pretty Simple
The term “bedroom music production” has fallen out of favor in popular media, but it remains the most accurate description for how 3ManCult produces original music. Specifically, here’s how we do it…
- We record our jam sessions in a pretty good sized home office space that has practically zero acoustic treatment
- When we decide on what we like, we start cutting tracks individually, each member using their own preferred methods
- Personally, I record to and mix/master on a Windows10 computer, using MixCraft 9 Professional (DAW) and 95% freeware plugins
- I also use a Yamaha MG10XU mixer for our live sound and my own primary 2in / 2out audio interface (24bit/192k = plenty good)
- I record most instruments direct via the interface, or mic’d w/a MXL990/991 combo and various 57 clones
- For vocal mics, we record and perform with Shure SM58 and Sennheiser e835S
- I have exactly 6 guitar pedals on my pedalboard to handle acoustic and electric
- The drummer is setup in an extra bedroom at his home, multi-track recording his vintage Yamaha recording kit into a ZoomH8
- The bass player is setup w/ his own similar basic home-studio setup
- We trade files via the internet with each other and our mixing engineer
As you can see, we have decent equipment overall, certainly nothing fancy or over the top. And remember, we all have 9-5 jobs as well. But we’re doing this anyway!!!!!
