TRACKED, TUNED & BOUNCED using RECHORD.XYZ
Life is full of near misses and what-ifs – the single, fleeting moments when decisions made in that instant determine your entire direction of travel for years to come.
For RECHORD.XYZ, that moment came when we got asked – are we really building a Digital Audio Workstation? Known in the industry as a ‘DAW’ it was going to be a question we would be asked many times, in many ways, by many people, with many pre-baked opinions…
Our answer? A resounding no, why would we do that?
The world has enough DAWS, in fact the irony is that a DAW closes doors…There are hundreds already available, there are so many that a user is spoilt by a bewildering choice. If you want to be an audio engineer there’s bound to be a Digital Audio Workstation that’s tailored just for you… with the promise that it will open doors to the Industry… just walk on through…
That’s what RECHORD.XYZ’s Founder saw when he had to learn another post-production system to keep up with the latest studio operations and the bleeding edge of tomorrow, and he would know as the head of Advanced Media at the World’s largest Music Company…
Most DAWS are built for audio engineers by audio engineers. Some are built by software programmers paid to design a system that wants you to spend money on the illusion of creativity. That’s not what we’re doing. Just to be very, very clear… we are not building a DAW, we don’t want to build a DAW, we never wanted to build a DAW and we don’t want folks to think we are competing with all the myriad DAWS you can buy. If you want a DAW… go get one somewhere else.
RECHORD.XYZ is a simple 4-track recording studio in your pocket that’s been designed by creatives to be used by creative people or folks wanting to be creative. We’ve looked at what people do when they create audio… and we’ve focused on that, and only that – ‘what do people do when they make music? … what are the 1st principles of recording audio?’
We think musicians, audio producers and writers – as well as folks that want to just create something, have two simple choices. You can either:
1. Unlearn what you’ve been taught, or
2. Relearn what you already knew…
Unlearn what you’ve been taught….You don’t need a DAW to create, it’s complicated by design… they’re built so you need to spend more… more time, more gear, more plugins, more wires, more… more… more… money… they are over engineered by default, they want your undivided attention… they are very, very needy tools that are high maintenance… figuratively, literally, financially…
Relearn what you already knew…You need to remember the basics of making audio… The process is simple, you don’t need to overcomplicate you’re thinking. The analogue process of making audio – that forced you to think and design in a linear process in your mind, gave you the freedom of thought to arrange and compose without the noise of tools and digital functions, you did not need to outsource storage with unlimited digital memory – while also switching off your own mental capacity in the process… you could not rely on undoing all your work with bottomless revisions… you had to decide, you had to choose, you had to commit, you had to create in the moment… you had no digital get out function.
So no, we’re not building a DAW. And once we’d answered that question, answering a whole lot more became very simple and uncomplicated.
Do you need to be able to set BPM at the touch of a button? No, because the pace of any creative audio is a matter of rhythm, not necessarily confined to a mathematically defined decimal point.
Do you need a waveform? No, use your ears – not your eyes.
Do you need a metronome? Or maybe quantisation tools? (Once you look up what that means) No you don’t… unlearn what you’re told you need to know to be a creative, and relearn a sense of your own timing…
We believe our users need an uncomplicated tool to help them create audio quickly, wherever they are, using something powered by a device in your pocket. We’ve stripped it all back, we’re focusing on the simple things done very well. Bringing back the old processes with a few minor tweaks…
So what we’re reimagining with RECHORD.XYZ is what we call a creative audio workflow (CAW). An easy, three step process you can master in minutes without knowing a single scientific or engineering fact about how sound works. Go learn that if you want – it’s super interesting, but you don’t need to know that to make your sound… or any sound…what we’ve done is build a system so simple that while it gives you a powerful core toolset to play with, you don’t need to learn a thing to be able to play with it, you just need to play… mess around… experiment. It’s a perfectly natural human process, it’s not an artificially manufactured process… you play to learn… you play to create.
It’s a real time composer, a live capture device, a demo recorder, a good old fashioned tape deck on your mobile… a simple tool for tracking ideas and tuning audio inspirations you can bounce out and share.
That’s all it needs to be. It’s for established artists and aspirational artists and fledgling artists and anyone interested in audio recording… period. It’s about the ideas, the melodies, the inspiration…
TRACK. TUNE. BOUNCE. That’s it.
So no, we’re not going to give you 128 channels, 16 inputs or an audio engineering degree for reading the help files. Instead, we’re focusing on making RECHORD.XYZ do simple things really, really, well. It’s a 4-Track Recording Studio in your pocket. It’s about you… not us…
Because creativity isn’t complicated.
