Why MI Needs to Embrace Pro Audio

When MI retailers see guitar players or keyboardists as simply musicians in their stores, they're leaving money on the table. An industry that has long looked at its customer base as a set of vertical silos – musicians, composers who need automated musical instruments, home-recording producer/engineers – should be viewing them horizontally, as musicians who record the songs they write and as aspiring producers who recognize the economic and creative benefits of being a composer and a musician.

Home recording, whether it's on an iPhone app or in a $100,000 Pro Tools room with floated floor and walls, has become a unifying force in MI sales: guitarists want to be able to record their work and recordists are acquiring greater arrays of musical instruments to broaden the palette of what goes on in their high-tech caves.

Anyway, that was my small contribution during an informal focus group that NAMM president Joe Lamond brought together in Nashville during the Summer NAMM Show that was intended to find ways to deepen the connection between MI and pro audio. There were about a dozen of us in the break-out room in the Music City Center, noshing on a more-than-passable Mexican buffet before it got down to brass tacks. We were a journalist, several Grammy-winning recording/mastering engineers/producers, and representatives of pro audio manufacturers, all with diverse points of view. We all agreed, though, that the distinctions between those who make music and those who record it, who used to operate on very different sides of the glass windows that in recording studios separate the tracking rooms from the control rooms, have essentially disappeared. In fact, the conventional recording studio itself has become something of an anachronism, a development taken nowhere more seriously than in Nashville, which prides itself on being the last bastion of ensemble live music production.

But reality is what it is, and where some of the old guard may once have viewed the so-called democratization of music recording skeptically, they now advocate for those on the front lines of pro audio to take the lead in making what gets produced sound as good as it can. A member of the Recording Academy's Producers & Engineers Wing present pointed out how the Audio Engineering Society (AES) chapter there has been regularly reaching out to a younger cohort, one for whom playing and recording music are inextricably linked, trying to raise the bar for sound and production quality.

Our taco-fueled summit occurred within a larger context. NAMM noted in a press release that the Summer NAMM Show saw a 27-percent increase over 2013 in pro audio brands exhibiting at the show, continuing a trend that has seen the entire pro audio category grow by an average of 23 percent in the last five years. Yet it became clear in the conversation that many MI retailers still regard pro audio as an intimidating terra incognita, a rubric best left to the kids on The Big Bang Theory. The reality is, pro audio has become far more pro-sumer in nature than ever before. In the early days, you needed at least a general-aviation pilot's license to become expert on that classic cornerstone the home recording's tech pantheon, the Tascam Portastudio, the four-track cassette deck that essentially launched the category back in 1984. Today, USB-enabled microphones and instruments with iOS-compatible audio interfaces allow musicians to record nearly anywhere at the drop of their hipster hats. According to NAMM data, sales of software products like plug-ins and loops (a key indicator of digital recording usage), increased 29 percent in 2013 over the previous year.

MI retail needn't reinvent itself as a high-tech showplace to draw in musician/songwriter recording technologists – they're coming into the stores anyway, to buy instruments and accessories. But if customers are not also walking out with a USB microphone or mic pre, it's a lost opportunity. In fact, the physical inventory of music production is so minimal in terms of cubic volume and shelf space, average-sized stores would barely notice it among scores of guitar amps and hundreds of stomp boxes.

What MI retailers do have to ramp up is their knowledge base when it comes to audio recording. And there are plenty of ways to do that. NAMM has been making a connection between this mushrooming trend of personal music recording with propositions like the "H.O.T. Zone," the "Hands-On Training" seminars it's been hosting at the Winter NAMM Show for the past five years. The proliferation of recording technology academies, like the ubiquitous SAE and Art Institutes schools, can also act as a resource for knowledgeable sales people.

The integration of pro audio with MI has always been an organic one, driven by musicians who see the benefit of taking control of the production aspect of their careers, and by recording professionals themselves, many of whom began their production and engineering careers as musicians, and it began a long time before we had tacos in the convention center. But it's good to see institutions like NAMM and the AES acknowledging that and becoming proactive – and possibly even collaborative – about accelerating and guiding it. At the end of the day, that's just good business.