[Editor's Note: The Mantis Sessions is a three part series that will chronicle contributor Sean McKeown's first-time experience with Indaba and its online DAW, Mantis. This first part is meant to give you a look at Sean's background and feelings on the digital world's impact on music]
I'm not a tech guy. Though I can marvel at what's out there, I like a very basic setup when it comes to technology. I play guitar—one guitar, one amp, and a few pedals.
For me, using digital music software to record is just the easiest way to do something that I don't particularly like doing. Writing songs and playing songs is fun; recording songs is a cumbersome process that allows other people to hear your music.
The only digital music software I've used extensively is Garageband—and even then, not for proper release recordings. It's just a convenient way to layer guitars and vocals when I'm putting a song together.
Electronic musician friends of mine utilize software like Max/MSP, Protools, and Logic as their main instruments of composition. I marvel at how adeptly they can flit across the screen and build a song in minutes. And the hardware they use—especially mindblowing midi controllers like the Lemur—is incredible but confounding to me. For me, messing about with such things brings more frustration than intrigue.
Despite reluctances like my own, the proliferation of digital music software continues its huge impact on popular music. Regardless of genre, nearly everyone I know, from trained recording engineers to kids making hissy bedroom recordings, uses digital interfaces to record and mix their music. The ubiquity of this software has both spawned and brought to new prominence genres of music that use the computer as the primary means of production.
Many audiophiles argue that analog recording offers distinct aural benefits to both the listener and the engineer. But in an age when low quality demos stream from youtube and myspace, and audio recordings are played overwhelmingly on tinny phone speakers or cheap plastic headphones, the benefits of high quality audio are lost on many people. These days, many people are less concerned with fidelity and more concerned with their music being portable and accessible—a description that fits digital to a T. So to my mind, the accessibility benefits gained with digital music software outweigh the audio quality lost.
Recently I became aware of the fact that more and more digital audio workstations can be found online. When I looked into DAWs that operate online through web browsers, I found they were all fairly familiar—in that they resembled Garageband and its simple, clear layout and lack of frills.
Of the three programs I looked into—Soundation, Mantis, and FL Studio—I decided to go with Mantis. It was the program that most easily allowed me to do what I'm used to doing—creating demos by recording live instruments straight into the computer via microphone. But beyond that, Mantis's website was impressive, with several tutorials and a social media layout that encourages collaborating and sharing the music you make with other Mantis members.
As I mentioned above, digital recording has long been to me a utilitarian pursuit—little more than a tape recorder inside a laptop. But what if I considered recording as its own ends? How could these technologies affect the way I write songs? How might they facilitate collaboration? What can I learn from committing to working this way? I don't know if my answers to these questions will be universal, but I am definitely curious to see how I personally react to this kind of an experience.
So over the next few weeks, I will begin to explore Mantis and create songs using all of the tools they put at my disposal—including, hopefully, collaborating with some other community members on an original song. Who knows, if all goes well, the song may be called Love Mantis.
I'm not a tech guy. Though I can marvel at what's out there, I like a very basic setup when it comes to technology. I play guitar—one guitar, one amp, and a few pedals.
For me, using digital music software to record is just the easiest way to do something that I don't particularly like doing. Writing songs and playing songs is fun; recording songs is a cumbersome process that allows other people to hear your music.
The only digital music software I've used extensively is Garageband—and even then, not for proper release recordings. It's just a convenient way to layer guitars and vocals when I'm putting a song together.
Electronic musician friends of mine utilize software like Max/MSP, Protools, and Logic as their main instruments of composition. I marvel at how adeptly they can flit across the screen and build a song in minutes. And the hardware they use—especially mindblowing midi controllers like the Lemur—is incredible but confounding to me. For me, messing about with such things brings more frustration than intrigue.
Despite reluctances like my own, the proliferation of digital music software continues its huge impact on popular music. Regardless of genre, nearly everyone I know, from trained recording engineers to kids making hissy bedroom recordings, uses digital interfaces to record and mix their music. The ubiquity of this software has both spawned and brought to new prominence genres of music that use the computer as the primary means of production.
Many audiophiles argue that analog recording offers distinct aural benefits to both the listener and the engineer. But in an age when low quality demos stream from youtube and myspace, and audio recordings are played overwhelmingly on tinny phone speakers or cheap plastic headphones, the benefits of high quality audio are lost on many people. These days, many people are less concerned with fidelity and more concerned with their music being portable and accessible—a description that fits digital to a T. So to my mind, the accessibility benefits gained with digital music software outweigh the audio quality lost.
Recently I became aware of the fact that more and more digital audio workstations can be found online. When I looked into DAWs that operate online through web browsers, I found they were all fairly familiar—in that they resembled Garageband and its simple, clear layout and lack of frills.
Of the three programs I looked into—Soundation, Mantis, and FL Studio—I decided to go with Mantis. It was the program that most easily allowed me to do what I'm used to doing—creating demos by recording live instruments straight into the computer via microphone. But beyond that, Mantis's website was impressive, with several tutorials and a social media layout that encourages collaborating and sharing the music you make with other Mantis members.
As I mentioned above, digital recording has long been to me a utilitarian pursuit—little more than a tape recorder inside a laptop. But what if I considered recording as its own ends? How could these technologies affect the way I write songs? How might they facilitate collaboration? What can I learn from committing to working this way? I don't know if my answers to these questions will be universal, but I am definitely curious to see how I personally react to this kind of an experience.
So over the next few weeks, I will begin to explore Mantis and create songs using all of the tools they put at my disposal—including, hopefully, collaborating with some other community members on an original song. Who knows, if all goes well, the song may be called Love Mantis.
