At the first recording session I had for this project, I had the help of three other Drexel students. One, a friend in my major, who played the violin, “A”. Then, a Music Industry Production (MIP) Student that helped book the studio, “V”, and finally, another MIP student who ended up helping us out by chance, named “T”. In addition to my classmates, I had support from an audio engineer and percussionist named “L”. However, when we arrived at the studio, the sight we initially saw proved a bit too fitting for a project trying to explore the potential of things that are broken.
Image Description: An expansive console, adorned with a piece of paper, appearing to have been scribbled upon hastily, reading: “Out of Service”.
My first reaction was to find the humor, the irony, perhaps, in the situation. But then I began to feel the preliminary signs of panic trickle in. Would this mean we couldn’t use the studio? The logistic nightmare of finding another day where we were free, booking another studio, and transporting all the instruments there began to haunt me. However, I was soon told by V that we should still be able to use this studio. I won’t pretend to fully understand, but what I did know was that the workstation would still serve the purpose it needed for my project- it just couldn’t do much else.
This inability to do much else, I found out, was a shame. That workstation was the kind of creation that made one who knew it go “They don’t make them like this anymore.” At least, that was what L said.
As L and V toiled away at figuring out exactly how the workstation was going to aid me in my project, they came across a bit of a problem. It should have worked, but, what was it they said?
“Routing problems,” was the phrase I remember them tossing back and forth to each other, like a game of monkey in the middle in which I, the monkey, was only growing more confused. Routing problems, and other phrases like, “patching issues,” or “we’re not getting signal from the console.” Somehow I found myself alone in the booth, simply talking to no one, and about nothing in particular, in order to test whether the source of the issue was the mic, or the cable, or something else I couldn’t begin to imagine. The thought occurred to me briefly that this was just some elaborate joke, but L and V were nothing if not determined, helpful, and communicative throughout the whole process.
Some twenty minutes into this ordeal, I began to linger on that phrase that L had said, “They don’t make them like this anymore.” It seemed odd that an invention which inspired that kind of respect was somehow outdated. I asked L what he had meant by that.
“This gear is literally priceless,” L said, seemingly continuously amazed that the studio we were in was equipped with this kind of console, which I later learned was an SSL 4000+g. He insisted there was this quality, this sound, that each analog console had, and that this particular one grew to be so revered during its peak years ranging from the late 70s to the early 2000s, that there have been attempts at recreating or capturing that “quality,” which modern digital workstations no longer have.
We spoke a bit about that, and I reflected on my own limited experience working with electronic music. As someone whose background had been mostly acoustic, with physical instruments and live concerts, the idea of electronic music and digital audio workstations were foreign to me for many years of my musical development. That changed when, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was forced to figure out how to record myself on the horn for school (a uniquely difficult challenge since the horn’s bell faces backwards, and the sound typically thoroughly bounces around before audiences hear it- but that’s a tangent for another time). This exposure to thinking about sound electronically led me down the rabbit holes of learning about experimental music, contemporary classical, sound design and scoring for entertainment, and eventually to some of my favorite musicians and composers now.
But, because of this roundabout way of getting into electronic music, I had initially been skeptical of it. After all, I was used to the frustrations of controlling acoustic sound, the physical considerations I had to take into account such as the aperture and embouchure I created with my mouth, controlling the air in my lungs, coordinating my fingers with the scales and notes of the horn. It seemed like cheating to just use these perfect, yet unnatural “emulations” of sound that I associated with electronic music. These ideas of “quantization,” which could retroactively eliminate imperfections, or “auto-tuning” rather than spending a ridiculous amount of time getting my horn in tune, all made me skeptical about getting too invested in music created this way. I’m not sure why, but it was like I had been intrinsically opposed to the idea of perfection, despite my own perfectionism being the leading cause of my frustrations with myself as a musician.
Even though those initial generalizations about electronic music had been mostly set aside over the years, at that moment, I was still kind of surprised at the point L was making. I wondered about how someone like L, who’s professional career was wrapped up in the technological and digital side of music (what I would have originally considered the antithesis to “natural,” “imperfect,” music) would still gush over that analog “quality,” which to me seemed to be essentially an imperfection that audiophiles chose to see as a blessing instead of a curse.
As I considered the contradiction in my head, the guys, having recruited the help of T, who had been working on his own projects in a nearby studio, continued to troubleshoot the console. Sounds of their voices scratching through the cables, of the explosive, starchy spikes of static coming through the console intermittently, the laughing, the cursing under their breath, I wondered if this experience also was somehow not just fitting, but better, because of this broken console.
It was about 50 minutes into this when A jokingly whispered to me if they should just try turning the thing off and on again. We laughed for a moment, but then a weird expression came across T’s face, who up until now, had been very calm and supportive throughout the process. He looked slightly upset at the idea, and softly said, “I’m gonna… crash out if that fixes the problem…”
(For the next part, either listen to the audio snippet or read the audio description below!)
Audio Description: A and I talking to ourselves, trying to stay out of the way while the others solve the issue with the console. She floats the idea that we should try and turn it off and on again, and one of them agrees to try it. A few moments pass as the system boots down, everyone exchanges similar ideas that this probably won’t work… but if it did… what would that mean for the hour we had spent toiling over the most basic problem in all of tech?
The faint notes of a keyboard from the sound booth are heard in the silent lapses between our expectant chatter. Then, all of a sudden, they blast through, perfectly clear. We erupt into laughter, V begins to speak into the mic from the sound booth excitedly, “No fucking way! Did it work? It worked?” We all nod, unable to form the right words yet. Slowly, we accept what has happened, each of us finding the humor in it despite all that occurred in the past 50 minutes.
It ultimately was probably the best way this all could have started, I think. A broken project, a broken console, and working together to realize that even when something appears broken, or outdated, or useless, that there will be people who find a way to work through it, to find a use for it. I didn’t dwell on it too much in that moment, after all, we had lost practically an hour’s worth of recording time and there were still samples to be created. I shifted my focus into thanking everyone who had helped, and scrambled to figure out how to get the first batch of samples recorded with our limited time.
In honor of that process, I’ve made a few samples from the process of “fixing” the console (in addition to the samples we created that day in the studio). These “bonus” samples were just recorded through my phone, but, who knows? Perhaps thirty years from now, people will be trying to emulate the “quality” of an Iphone 11 microphone.
Reprise project 
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