RECORDING Field Notes – State of the Art(ist)

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before…

…and I’ll just bet you have. It’s the story of yet another new technology threatening to take over the music industry.

The first time I experienced this tale was in 1984, during my early years in Nashville, when digital multi-track had just begun to take over. The second time was when I got Pro Tools v1.0 in 1991. To me, it seemed obvious that hard disc recording and editing were the future, and I wanted a head start (of course, it didn’t matter that the technology was not quite ready for prime time). Either way, I knew that ※this [Pro Tools] or something like this, was the future of music production.”

To be fair, it would be another 10 years before DAWs, hard disc recording and non-linear editing were truly ready for prime time. But it was a trend I was beginning to notice: historically, there is around a 20-year cycle for each new major tech shift in the music industry.

Magnetic recording was introduced roughly in the 1940s, multi-track recording gained popular around the 1960s, digital audio in the 1980s, DAWs in the 2000s, and now at the end of 2025, what do we see on the horizon? Artificial Intelligence (AI).

I don’t think at this point, any of us can predict how AI will look or exactly what it will do, but it seems pretty clear that AI is positioned to be the key new technology of the next era of music production. Or to put it another way, “this [AI], or something like this, is likely the future of music production.”