Dated someone like 20 years ago and she knew my friend and I made music “in the studio.” First time she came over she really wanted to see it, so I show her the room. It’s before I had tons of outboard gear and synths/drum machines, so it was just a mic on a big boom, a computer, and some monitors. Her reaction was, “oh.”
She then proceeds to be extremely weirded out by a big antique chest that I had. “You could fit bodies in there and I don’t like it.” The relationship did not last long.
…and is that how you disposed of the body?
I have my music things set up in the living room, right next to our couch. It isn’t a lot: an OT, DN, Peak, a guitar and some fx pedals. No big keyboards or stacked racks or anything. Most of the people who come over know that I make music and don’t really pay attention. Some of them refer to the machines as a space station because of all the buttons, knobs and blinking lights.
i don’t show off my studio much (outside music-related forums), so people don’t react — that simple 
THIS.
We cyclists have similar memes. Imagine a guy like me with those 2 hobbies. It requires a financial scheme similar to narco trafficants to make it appear like I am a normal being to my partner.
Are you piling up for the flea market? “Everything for 10€ / piece” “What is this?” “I think it’s called a Machine Drum or something – old shitty digital drum machine – you can have it for 5€”
I’m really surprised you treat your OT in such a way. I know your knobs and crossfader are already worn to the metal from your rough carpenter hands, but this is just disrespectful 
I rarely let anyone into my covid-free lair these days. The closest I’ve gotten to showing my music space is through pictures and texts.
My friend’s response: “do you eat the beets after you make them?”
When asked by my parents what I’m up to this holiday, I sent them this pic:
My mom told me “don’t electrocute yourself on all those wires.”
What an adorable sounding woman
Sounds cozy
“what the hell are you doing?” 
(from my older brother)
Also, my father said it looked like medical equipment and reminded him of being in the hospital.
To be fair, my modular system does have a pulse sensor…
I’d love to have a pulse sensor react to a really banging set and amp up the clock/bpm
That’s a good one! Could be my mother 
Here’s my anthropological take on how folks react to modern day music studios. I’ve thought a lot about this and came to the conclusion that whatever they say is correct.
tldr This is a product of capitalism as consumers can be hyper-alienated from the creation process from various angles. Music production is a unique enterprise in the sense that we, the producers, are prisoners to various economies/marketing/branding-tricks that come when you enter big music scale. Most normal people understand music production through the lens of big music.
This is a crude set, but there are largely 3 classes of people: Creators, consumers, and shut outs.
Creators can be consumers but not shut outs.
Consumers can become creators but can be shut outs.
Shut outs will never be creators without a radical intervention because they are shut out for economical/political reasons.
In the past music production was understandable. Music is something everyone has listened to from the beginning of time. John the caveman used to physically hit something and sound would happen. Music was physical, direct, and understandable.
Economically, creators depended on the patronage of immediate consumers/sponsors. Making a musical instrument is an intellectual enterprise and requires a higher cultural form of investment and security. What i’m trying to say is that society could continue producing bombs and grenades, but instead some folks chose to create and invest in instruments. To get here we need cultural safety nets in place, loads of capitalism/warfare. You also need a market, willing to purchase these cultural creation machines and a market to sell the products of these machines to the masses.
As technology and capitalism become more efficient i.e. you can have an entire music studio in your pocket this ‘physicality of connection’ becomes highly abstracted vs. the physical past.
What do you mean you can play a 100,000 sounds?
What do you mean you can bend and mangle time?
What do you mean you can sidechain compress, limit, and distort sound?
All of these are highly technical abstract concepts that 99% of people will never have to really reason about nor will they care too. It’s like asking someone to discuss the merits of this spaceship wing design. This person has to make a mental quantum leap to even begin to fathom the idea of the ‘studio.’ Explaining the studio to other creators can be easier but can still be problematic due to economies i.e. do you really need that $25k AD/DA convertor wouldn’t the $25 offering from Walmart suffice? Then your friend muttering that you make shite music and it sucks anyways.
economies of the 3rd world at home music producer
Listening to music is kind of like watching a movie. Movies are temporary worlds. Then, the end credits show that it took a lot of humans to make this temporary world. If you study cinema you’ll see that there are very different economical bases in which movies are produced.
Big mega million hollywood movies require tons of capital and people. But let’s focus for a second on movies created in a different economical basis: 3rd world cinema.
3rd world cinema is architected not to use much capital, to be underground by design, and to tell radically different stories than what big hollywood is able to. To survive, Hollywood must tell certain culturally viable stories because of the economy hollywood operates in. Remember, big hollywood needs to appeal to the masses otherwise your big studio will go bankrupt. You can have fringe events like sundance where experiments happen, but again these require ‘patronage’ from immediate consumers/sponsors.
On the flip side you have apps like instagram that democratized people’s understanding of photo taking and the discrete processes there. Yes, there have been attempts to instagrammatize music production i.e. these gimmicky apps. But if you’re seeking more control of your creative expression you’ll realize that the digital moog, while it sounds great, just is missing some element of physicality/realness that you get with a real analog moog (I wonder what Walter Benjamin would say about this haha). Or if you really want to capture a musical idea you’re going to need to invest in a DAW and now you’ve already left that normal instagram user space.
Unless you are a signed artist and have access to a team of marketers, audio engineers, artists, that $25k AD/DA converter I mentioned etc you are in the 3rd world of music production.
You can spend $100 on a bike, $1,000, or $10,000. But unlike a computer, a bike doesn’t become more efficient. We have the same problems in music hardware with high end devices, the efficiencies dwindle at higher price points and/or become so complicated that you need to visit the factory and talk to the lead engineer to know the real difference is. We have achieved a lot more efficiency due to broadcast (radio/spotify/beatport), computers. If you are on a huge label like Sony music you are the big hollywood. Yeah, kanye’s studio might look simple but is using the state of the art/best of breed equipment if he wants too and has an invisible team supporting him… kind of like the big movie.
Whatever the normie says about your studio is correct. You have essentially taken the engine out and you’re showing them the gasket, the oil pan, the intake manifold, the camshaft… Some people have compared my studio to a space ship. They are correct. I might make a profit I might not. I don’t need to because I’m not at that stage where i’m too big to fail. Big music might not give a rats ass of what I’m making because it just doesn’t scale up to their requirements in the current cultural zeitgeist.
When you are a home producer that big movie set is sitting there in front of you through the series of midi cables, mixers, recorders, microphones, digitakts, cdjs, etc.
Home producers are simply in a totally different economy than big music that doesn’t line up with how consumers are sold modern day production practices. Remember, kanye’s studio is clean and efficient… kanye is selling kanye, he is the product at this point. oh he is just rapping into a microphone I understand that! But in reality, there is the whole music world she bang the producers, samplers, compressors i.e. but none of that is focused on b/c 99% of folks do not care. Yes, there are the weirdos out there who care, because we are weird, we are the makers and creators, we are the Elektronauts.
I agree with you. But not on this one. Go to your local bicycle dealer and ask him for his lightest and most expensive bike. Then compare it to his cheapest and heaviest. Then we talk again about efficiency and how less weight / bigger wheels etc. impacts that. I wish I had a 10,000€ carbon bike that only weighs 6 kg.
I think it’s more about the ratio "added price/utility’ that tend to decrease than the overalll utility, indeed.
I should clarify I mean efficiency in with relation to Moore’s Law.
Edit: Yeah what d0nk3y said.
I sign a few autographs, take some pictures, and shuffle everyone out so I can get back to spitting out hits.
That’s not true for Stimming’s Instant Mastering Chain box — the more expensive that one sells for, the better it sounds — objectively so.
