This a very interesting subject, so I hope others will join the discussion.
For me the most important is the music. Basically because my miss and I are both musicians. And also because (allmost) everything we do in the studio is in function of our live acts.
Playing live, we have learned something. People want to amuse themselves and they don't care if that piano sound you use is just a gm piano our a $$$ 5 GB acoustic piano library. That can sound a bit extreme as a statement but I've made the experience...
<STORY>
A couple of years ago we where on holiday with our camper on a camping facility. Of course we allways have a minimum of music gear with us, because we allways play together, even for fun. A certain afternoon, we where rehearsing outside a couple of tunes and we had very fast an audience
Following that the rumour spread around and the owner of the facility came to ask us if we couldn't do an improvised dancing evening for them, they where even willing to pay for it.
The problem was that I only had a limited set of material with me. I had my laptop with a collection of midi backing tracks, my EZAG midi guitar and the lady had here WX11 with the VL70m and here voice of course. Playing the midi backing tracks trough the internal MS wavetable synth of my laptop wasn't an option because of the bad quality of the integrated soundcard of the laptop. So, I send the backing tracks to my EZAG guitar, who has a standard Yamaha OPL soundcard, I could play bass at the same time, still using the internal sound of the Yamaha and my lady could play here wx and sing. Everything was send to the mixing desk of the entertainment room and we where lucky that it had an inbuilt fx section, so we had reverb.
As you see a bare minimum setup !
Well we played the whole night and let people dance and amuse themself until early in the morning.
<End of story>
This is a good example to proof my statement. If the swing is in the act and people amuse themselves, you've got a winner.
It is also the reason that we created this forum and called it the music auditorium. When we started here, we knew there where allready a lot of forums that concentrate on technology, kvr just one example...
But we wanted a forum that talks about the music you make, let you collaborate with other musicians and get comments on your MUSIC, and not so much about technology. Alltough that some inside comments and tips & tricks are allways welcome
I myself was just tired to see, on very good songs, just one comment as in 'the drums could use a little bit more reverb...'
I know that not everybody will agree with me, but honestly who cares about the reverb on the drums. That guy just made a great song, very beautiful and great arrangement, post it and get a response 'more reverb on the drums'
.
Part of my point is propably that I'm not the youngest... i've started recording on a 4track tascam with cassettes
and we where having fun and where proud of what we did.
So to me it's all about the music. For me, a song has to tell a story trough the composition and the performance of an artist. An I have a hard time to listen to songs with only 2 or 3 notes in it and 50 filter sweeps or what so ever
Which doesn' mean that I don't like electronic music as long as it is well made and it tells his story, and I'm very glad we have very good electronic artists here.
This (long) explication doesn't mean that I'm not interested in production. As proof, I did an official sound engineer course and have my proper studio. At the moment I'm doing the production of CD for a Canadian artist which will be released as charity CD. But the main thing I've learned in that course was that in a home studio you can create 'good' demo material, but if you plan to release that next $$$ hit, well you'll need a professional studio and a mastering studio.
So, my statement is, if you are a musician, concentrate on the music
Feel free to not agree, this isn't a forum statement , only my personal opinion