I love that Sound City doc - watched it a bunch of times.
I was a studio engineer the same time as you, predominantly in a studio in Sheffield. I was blessed for the fact that the studio had an epic live room, fabulous collection of mics and outboard, including some mental compressors from Tubetech and E.A.R. - all recorded to 2 inch via a Neve that we had dismantled from its previous home in CTV and rebuilt and installed over the course of a month or two.
Around the time I moved on, Logic Audio was really coming into its own, particularly the plugins available. I remember seeing an AC30 plugin (we used to have a lovely AC30 in the flesh) so I figured "this will be *", but it wasn't - times they were a'changing :)
I was a little sad because I loved the all the moving parts and collective effort/experience that it took to build a record, and watching it all disappear inside a box seemed to steal some of the magic. That of course is just the opinion of a tech guy - for the guys on the other side of the glass, it has been a game changer democratising access to making records. (Not that it stopped some people at the time - I remember the massive A&R bun fight over Gomez when they appeared - they very shrewdly managed to get an excellent deal, together with advance and then promptly went back into the tiny studio they recorded the demos in and put that out - it did sound great to be fair)
Sort of back on topic - never got near Amigas. Before Macs becoming ubiquitous it was all Atari STs ...
I was a studio engineer the same time as you, predominantly in a studio in Sheffield. I was blessed for the fact that the studio had an epic live room, fabulous collection of mics and outboard, including some mental compressors from Tubetech and E.A.R. - all recorded to 2 inch via a Neve that we had dismantled from its previous home in CTV and rebuilt and installed over the course of a month or two.
Around the time I moved on, Logic Audio was really coming into its own, particularly the plugins available. I remember seeing an AC30 plugin (we used to have a lovely AC30 in the flesh) so I figured "this will be *", but it wasn't - times they were a'changing :)
I was a little sad because I loved the all the moving parts and collective effort/experience that it took to build a record, and watching it all disappear inside a box seemed to steal some of the magic. That of course is just the opinion of a tech guy - for the guys on the other side of the glass, it has been a game changer democratising access to making records. (Not that it stopped some people at the time - I remember the massive A&R bun fight over Gomez when they appeared - they very shrewdly managed to get an excellent deal, together with advance and then promptly went back into the tiny studio they recorded the demos in and put that out - it did sound great to be fair)
Sort of back on topic - never got near Amigas. Before Macs becoming ubiquitous it was all Atari STs ...