Your DAW Is In The Cloud

It used to be that you needed pretty close to a million dollars to own a studio, and that was mostly for the gear. "Big Iron" consoles and tape machines were the norm and they cost big dough, not to mention all the outboard gear and wiring that you needed even before you got into the acoustic treatment of the room. But soon enough, the prices started to come down. First it an inexpensive  4 track, then 8 track, then 24 track tape machines that were a fraction of the price of a pro machine, but they still weren't quite up to the quality of the gear used in "real studios."

Of course that all changed with the digital age, as the gear got less and less expensive and more and more powerful. Suddenly just about anyone can have more power in their bedroom than The Beatles ever dreamed of having at Abbey Road. But it still involves at least some nominal cost.

So how does free sound? I was just turned onto something called the Burn Studios Audiotool, a free cloud-based music production studio for your web browser. There's a library of audio samples, a host of virtual devices including drum machines and synths, and a bunch of templates and tutorials to get you started. Of course you can only make MP3s or ogg files, but that mattered mattered all that much to a lot of people lately anyway.

This isn't the way I'd like to work, and pros will always want to have the best, but Audiotool just shows you how far we've come in the musical instrument and pro audio business. Let's hope that some kid with no money gets his chance because of tools like this. Check it out at Burn Studios Audiotool. It's fun.
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