In the introduction to this series, I remarked that the new Holy Grails of pop iconography (the up-side-down Stratocaster of Jimi Hendrix; the circular array of Neil Peart’s drum-set) are increasingly less tangible. Rather, they have become pieces of software, algorithms lacking a specific, corporeal form.
You wouldn’t need a roadie to cart around these new Holy Grails–a hard-drive with available disk space would do just fine. Yet it cannot be overstated that such software is of supreme importance to the music industry right now. The listening public’s ears, over time, have been trained to accept the digital framework that now powers a record’s creation.
Given this new reality, it’s slightly ironic that the world of audio software runs rampant with algorithms seeking to emulate the Holy Grails of yesteryear: drum sample libraries, bass replications of all kinds, modelings of speaker cabinets and amplifiers—credible digital emulations of previously physical entities now exist; indeed, they are taking over the industry.
It’s ironic, but not hard to understand, given today’s economical times: more than a few producers have told me they now need to argue for the inclusion of real drums on a song—they are forced to justify the cost of hiring a drummer and renting a fully outfitted studio.
Likewise, more than a few bass players have admitted to me that they’ve become replaceable: any keyboardist with the right software and a working knowledge of bass idiom can now fit the bill; to these bassists’ ears, any sonic difference between their instrument and the emulation of it can either be massaged successfully in the mixing process, or ignored within the sonically mushy environs of the typical concert experience.
All of this spells exciting times for today’s audio engineers/producers—the people who make your music, people proven to spend their discretionary income on tools of the trade; now such people have a lot more Holy Grails at their disposal.
All of this, in turn, could mean big money for software companies (as well as those who decide to invest in them): pro-audio entities stand to turn quite a profit—that is, if they can overcome the twin obstacles of online piracy and relative obscurity.
To be sure, there are a plethora of top-notch software companies—Waves Audio, UAD (a devision of product lines within Univeral Audio), PSP, URS URS +0.26%, IK-multimedia, iZotope, Fabfilter—yet it’s tough to think of a pro-audio entity sporting as recognizable a spokesman as, say, Apple AAPL -1.03%’s Steve Jobs, or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
And if we could imagine such a person, he or she would inevitably carry the same vaguely hawkish air, right? The same wily nerdiness that engenders standoffish social awkwardness, right?
Wrong.
One software company, quickly rising to the top of this business, sports quite a recognizable spokesman, a fellow as synonymous with his own product as Steve Jobs was with Apple.
But, as you can plainly see, this is no hawkish, socially awkward nerd—at least, not in outward appearance and affect:
Meet Steven Slate, one of the most successful tycoons in this new goldmine of pro-audio software, and what is more, one of the audio industry’s most identifiable personalities—a man who puts just as much energy into marketing some of the world’s best digital signal processing as he puts into crafting an April Fool’s joke (a few years ago, he filmed a promotional YouTube segment demonstrating methodologies behind his “fart expansion pack;” when he released the video, some people in the industry didn’t realize he was joking).
Here’s a good Steven Slate story for you, one that pretty much captures his style:
On a Saturday evening towards the end of June, Slate gave a rather unconventional acceptance speech at the Pensado Awards. First he thanked his staff. Then he moved on to an email he received from a fan—a little note which, he said, had moved him deeply.
“‘Dear Steven Slate,’” he read from the iPhone which had materialized in his hand, “‘I hate your f–king face.’”
The audience started laughing, and Slate continued to recite his “fan” mail: “‘Your plugins suck, your hardware sucks, your videos suck, your face sucks, and your voice sounds like a washed-up strip club announcer…now update my plugins to AAX* you big dumb Jersey Shore-looking loser.’”
At that, the crowd’s guffaws rose two octaves in pitch, but I’d wager seeing Slate make fun of himself constituted only half of the reason for such a titter; this, it seemed, was more like the laughter of recognition.
Steven Slate might not be a known quantity to you as a consumer of pop music, but to the people who produce the music you buy, he and his company are a force to be reckoned with: drum replacement software (covered here), digital emulations of analogue methodologies (more on that later), tools for studio workflow efficiency—Slate’s company is at the vanguard of all these technologies.
Yet because of the style and gusto with which he stumps on behalf of his products, there is perhaps no more polarizing figure in pro-audio than Steven Slate.
Here is an innovator of technology (his drum samples have been “easily recognized as the best in the industry”), a democratizer of product (his products sell for far less than his rivals’), and a driving force behind the change of sound within pop music (more on that later)—wailing his guts out as if he were Chris Cornell (I personally endorse such tactics, while others on the comment section of this video do not).
This is in character for a man who freely admits that “I secretly just wanted to be a rock star, and so now that I’m not a rock star, I have to sneak little bits of moments into these videos.”
Yet it is specifically this kind of boldness that lends Slate his love-him-or-hate-him vibe: few can deny the existential greatness of what he’s doing (existential in terms of the intrinsic enormity of his achievements, regardless of moral judgment); many can–and regularly do (he’s professed to getting at least one vitriolic email a week)–judge the style with which he pushes his products.
“Early on in the company,” Slate told me, “we started putting me out there as the face, and it was kind of a natural thing for me, and so, you know, it is what it is…When people love Slate, they love me, when they hate Slate, they hate me.”
It’s an easy dichotomy to understand when you contemplate the realm in which Slate rose to industry prominence: the complicated, often ideologically-charged world of sample replacement.
Slate first “got into this whole thing”—the business of drum replacement—“because of Nirvana Nevermind,” he told me. “Nirvana Nevermind had this really awesome drum sound, and I started making drum samples solely for the reason that I just wanted to sound like Nirvana Nevermind!”
In fact, when Slate came to LA in 2005, he would sneak into Grammy parties to offer CDRs of his drum samples to well-regarded audio engineers—a story he relates in another interview.
He circulated these samples, he told me, in order to land a job assisting well-regarded engineers in the industry.
A lofty plan, but it backfired in a way that set his ultimate career path in motion: “They got the drum samples, and all they wanted from me was more drum samples.”
So more drum samples followed.
But if these drum samples constitute the mountain into which Slate dug his foothold, it was definitely “Trigger”—a piece of software designed to play his samples—which catapulted him to the summit.
To be sure, many drum sample libraries existed before the era of Slate Trigger. They just took too long to implement efficiently on a day-to day-basis. That’s why I can make a distinction in eras—an epoch before Trigger and the one we are living in now (“AT,” so to speak).
I need not bore you with the technical details of why drum replacement took so long to implement before Trigger. It only suffices to say that there were many technical details—scores of them, sometimes—and depending on the platform you entrusted to perform these details, your system could often crash in the process (I’m looking at you Logic Pro 9).
Trigger, instead, relied on an idea so obviously brilliant that, once accepted, it was brilliantly obvious: you don’t need to see the engine to drive the car—that’s what the hood’s for. What if you could put all those pesky technical details under the hood? What if you could just give drivers something they could truly, almost mindlessly, enjoy?
(To be fair, WaveMachine Labs developed a similar concept in a plugin called Drumagog before Slate did–however, it wasn’t quite so user friendly, it’s phase alignment could be off at times, and its triggering was prone to latency–a deal breaker when you need samples to blend in perfectly; as such, one could consider Drumagog the Alfred Russel Wallace to Slate’s Charles Darwin.)
People have wanted to augment their drums with samples for at least three decades. Trigger simply spread up the process: with the widespread proliferation of Trigger from roughly 2009 onward, Slate transformed a labor-intensive, time-consuming endeavor into something that could be done with, quite literally, five clicks of the mouse.
This streamlining had a vast impact on the industry’s use of drum replacement all-around: instead of employing the practice judiciously—when necessary, or when time allowed for its implementation—sample replacement could now be utilized by anyone with two hundred dollars and a modicum of free time.
Effectively, Slate’s Trigger gave the practice of drum replacement a big kick, allowing the technique to transition from “nuclear option” to “go-to trick.”
This is obviously a double edged sword, and one that Slate has recognized: a lazy but wily engineer could manufacture an excellently homogenous drum sound in a matter of minutes, but a truly innovative engineer could transubstantiate literally any sound into “little perfect snippets of drums” for any creative reason under the sun.
I have already argued that such easy access to drum replacement changed the course of modern rock. But here’s the nutshell of that argument: rock records from the underground to the indie to the mainstream started to sport a palpably more expensive drum-sound.
In the hands of the canny and creative, this became a sizeable advantage, but in the hands of the lazy and deadline-pressed, this became a crutch; a question that seems to follow Steven anywhere he goes is a variant on the following: “Do you ever feel like your success…has resulted in making pop music, especially in rock, even more homogenized, and as such, has had some kind of negative effect?”
His answer to this question is always diplomatic. In one interview he said, “The tools are here to help…I do think there’s a lot of things I hear in this industry where people abuse the powers of some of these tools, but I think that there’s also a lot of engineers who use these tools to make amazing pieces of music that they maybe would not have been able to from their bedroom [in the past].”
To me he echoed this sentiment, calling his software “just another tool in the box”, and encouraging people interested in the art of engineering “to go beyond just using the sample replacement”—to spend time developing the craft of recording and engineering drums.
But his deferential and humble answer doesn’t change the truth of today’s mainstream hits, particularly rock-inflected tunes similar to the number one single in the country right now: Slate’s drum samples can often be heard all over the Billboard charts.
“Sometimes I can hear it pretty good,” Slate told me over Skype, “especially some of my first samples, which are kind of my babies.”
Think of how high a watermark this is for a boutique software company—imagine if Slate’s company didn’t charge you for the use of his software, but rather, claimed royalties for the use of his samples.
It’s not quite that much of a stretch to imagine—he’s selling audio by the pound after all, audio that is of a pristine quality, and therefore, could ostensibly have value as intellectual property.
When I put the question to him over Skype, he thought about it, then replied: “If I got a royalty for every time someone used my drum samples, we’d be having this Skype interview from my yacht in the French Riviera.”
As you can see, the proliferation of such technology would make Slate’s company a bit polarizing, even if it had only stuck to the world of sample replacement.
But a few years ago, Slate decided to grow his brand. “Doing drum samples and virtual drum instruments was fun,” he said, “but I just wanted to expand on what I could achieve, and I did that through the means of very important partners.”
Very important partners indeed: Slate may have changed the reality of drum replacement technology through his own spearheaded efforts, but when it came to phase two of his operation, he snagged himself one heck of a collaborator: Fabrice Gabriel, a man who’s algorithms are some of the most respected in the industry.
To read more about this exciting partnership—one currently changing the face of audio production—follow me here, to part two.
*AAX refers to a platform newly established by Avid for their 64 bit plugins; the usage of AAX within the quote is a bit of a MacGuffin—the point is someone who espoused vitriol at Slate also asked him a favor at the same time.
Correction: previously, this article erroneously categorized UAD as a company. It is, in fact, a product line within a larger company, called Universal Audio. The correction was pointed out by Jeff Hollman, and I thank him for his judicious, gimlet eye.
