Like seriously there’s hundreds, do artists know exactly what each one of those function as?
I’ve never been inside one but there are of course images online of music artists in these studios etc
In: Technology
The reason for all those controls (duplication of all of them for each channel, and a channel for each microphone, instrument and other input means, say 10 controls x 72 channels equals 720 knobs, switches or sliders) has been explained in great detail.
What about the musicians sitting there? Do they know what all those control do? Most often they’re just sitting in the “sweet spot” for the mixing console monitors speakers to hear what the engineer hears and provide their verbal input. Sometimes, after multiple times in the studio, they start to contribute not just by commenting, but by adjusting things themselves. But the overall mix and the basics to ensure good sound quality is still the engineer’s responsibility. More rarely, the musician becomes a fully-fledged engineer themselves and goes deep into that side of the recording process.
With the recent rise in professional-quality home studio equipment and software, many younger musicians automatically include studio recording engineering techniques as parts of the creative process, and don’t see singing or playing an instrument as a separate task from engineering, in which sampling, layering and editing micro-takes together are an integrated part of building the whole track. Interestingly, it was the Beatles (especially Paul) who really started to break the wall between the musicians and the technicians, and who used the studio gear in creative ways with tape looping and so on. (Yes, of course there was earlier work done like slap-back echo etc., although that was usually the engineer playing around, not the musician.)
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