So I figured I'd build a studio

I've been seeing a lot of great music out there recently and not much of it well recorded or productized.

Dear Musicians - in order to survive in this cruel world you will have to make money. To make that money you will have to have something to sell, and that will be your music.

People may not buy your CD's, they may only download your music, and they may be unwilling to pay for it. Too bad, that's the lead-cost of being a musician in the post-mp3 era. This doesn't mean you can't make money, it just means that making a record is just a price of entry.

You're gonna need something to send the club owner/promoter/agent/manager who wants to book you to explain to them what you do without listing your influences and sounding ridiculous.

Sometimes you can wander in with a guitar and give them a few numbers, sometimes that won't do.

And if you EVER want to get radio play, you will need a high quality recording prepared for radio.

And record companies seldom do that for you anymore unless you're already a super-star. This doesn't mean you can't get radio play, just that you need to be able to produce a record worth playing on the radio. That's both artistically and technically.

In short, if you want to get to first-base with music, you're gonna need to record.

The good news is, it's really fun, and the tascam porta-studio is a great place to start. Practicing recording is a great idea, just like practicing performing is a great idea and both get sharpened by the effort.

It is not, however, a great place to try to finish. A -very few albums- have made it to airplay from a porta-studio, and even fewer to critical success, and even if they were using a porta-studio for recording, they weren't using crappy mics and crappy sounding instruments in crappy sounding rooms. Notable's - Springsteen's Nebraska (portastudio with a neumann mic's and universal audio preamps and vintage martin guitar CAN sound really good!), Primus's first album, John Frusciante's first two albums. But that's it, really. Nobody else, really.

Another piece of good news - recording high quality stuff is not impossible, at least in Ashland now, for a reasonable amount of money, that's why I'm starting this studio.