The recording industry is young. Barely 70 years of real technological history, and in that time we’ve gone from wax cylinders to tape to Pro Tools to AI. Every one of those leaps followed the same curve, and in this episode Simon and Terry map it out: you discover a new tool, you fall in love and overuse it, and eventually you learn to pick your battles.
The overuse cycle is real, and it repeats. Beat Detective and quantising. Auto-Tune. The Aphex Exciter. Stereo wideners. Soothe. Every one arrived looking like magic, got slapped on everything, and then quietly got dialled back to sane levels. The producers who came out ahead weren’t the ones who avoided the new tech; they were the ones who learned exactly where each tool breaks.
Restraint is the craft. The guys make the case that good decisions in production serve an emotional function. Gridding a whole kit to the click can be exactly right if you want a track to feel robotic and locked, and exactly wrong if you’re chasing feel. The trap is reaching for a tool to fix a broken performance instead of enhancing a good one. As they put it, the smart move with anything new is to hunt for its shortcomings first, so you know how hard you can push it.
In this episode
- Tape vs digital: what we gained, and the workflow magic we lost (that 15-minute rewind used to be where epiphanies happened)
- Drop-ins and destructive recording, and why Terry’s gone back to a bit of tape-style punching
- Quantising, Beat Detective and groove extraction: when locking to the grid serves the song and when it guts it
- Auto-Tune, Soothe and stereo wideners: the classic “turn it to 9, then never touch it again” arc, and the mono-compatibility cost of fake width
- How capitalism drives gear design: offshoring, the consumer market, and “create the problem, sell the solution”
- Digital’s real superpower, being decoupled from physics, and the ML tools that genuinely excite them (TrackSpacer, stem splitters, intelligent resonance suppression)
- AI, Suno and homogenised songwriting, plus the MIT study on AI use and brain atrophy, and why they still write their own emails
A candid, road-tested conversation about staying curious about new gear without losing the plot.
