"At some point in the future," says Moby, dressed in a Guns n' Roses shirt and sitting in his spartan Manhattan home, "everything will be virtual." It's a warm spring day outside; the pale-pated electronic musician nurses a glass of organic carrot-orange juice while making himself pasta and meatless meatballs. He's taking a break from recording his new album in his home studio to rap about the technology that has changed the way he makes his living.

Ten years ago, Moby would have been stuck in an airless studio with an engineer. Today, he can hang out in his living room, which is white with sealed cement floors, a jute rug and a small amount of Fifties and Sixties modernist furniture. Everything is very much in its right place. Two newly arrived oil paintings - scenes of Southern Reconstruction done in a kind of postmodern Renaissance style - are propped against a wall. Books about God sit in a bookcase alongside an encyclopedia of rock stars. On the coffee table, next to The 20th Century Art Book, The Economist is opened to an article about Latin America, with doodles in the margins. In the next room, a massive monitor sits on a table next to a keyboard. A bank of blinking lights - samplers and effects processors - hum in a rack mounted on the wall. They're not long for this place. "Eventually, records will be made utilizing just a laptop and a MIDI controller," Moby says in his unwavering, humble-sounding monotone. "The sound quality is already so good, and it's so much less expensive."

On some level, that vision is already a reality. With a powerful enough computer, the right software (programs like Digidesign's Pro Tools and Steinberg's Cubase, used with various virtual-instrument programs) and a MIDI controller (a device that triggers sounds saved to your computer's hard drive), anybody with a bit of musical talent can create songs that sound like they were recorded in a professional studio. This technology places a limitless arsenal of instruments and effects - from the warm gospel tones of a Hammond B4 organ to the distorted wallop of a vintage Marshall amp - on musicians' computers and spells the demise of studio gear like mixing consoles, effects processors and - perhaps one day - pro studios themselves. "The only thing important about a synthesizer is the way it sounds," says Moby. "If you can get wonderful sounds from one that exists in the virtual world, what is the incentive to buy a big metal box with silk-screened graphics on it? The companies that make those big recording-studio mixing desks must be terrified. You can get a virtual desk for a few thousand dollars that does more than an $800,000 console."

Moby also likes the fine-tuning available in the virtual world. "The nicest thing about this stuff is the control," he says. "You can make minuscule modifications, then store it to a song file. If you call up that song, all the settings are right there for you. That's a big change." It's a level of flexibility that this do-it-yourself freak once thought impossible. "I've pretty much been doing everything myself since 1984," he says. "I'm a little bit envious of people making computer-based music now - the equipment is so much more user-friendly. In order to make an electronic record in the mid-Seventies, you needed a Ph.D. in computer programming."

To create 1999's Play, Moby used both software - namely, Cubase (for sequencing his sounds) - and conventional studio gear (a traditional mixing desk). Since then he's gone fully virtual, studiowise. He has, however, kept and increased his sizable and arguably unnecessary collection of synthesizers. "I like a lot of my old synths, and I'll use them for a long time," he says, walking around the clinically organized room. "When people can replicate them in the virtual world, I'll switch over. If I were just starting out now, though, all I would buy would be a computer and virtual-instrument programs."

The liberating creative and financial benefits of digital recording have started a revolution that's well under way. "Musicians used to be at the mercy of whoever owned the recording studio, the engineer, the producer," he says. "Their music might sound great in their rehearsal space, and then some half-wit engineer close-mikes everything, and they end up sounding like a late Seventies jazz-funk record. Now musicians are empowered, and that's wonderful." Moby himself has been empowered to be most prolific. "I've got 140 songs so far," he says of his new album. "I just know my system so well that it's very easy to go in and do stuff."

That's not to say the new technology is bug-free and easy as cut-and-paste. Getting a home studio up and running involves many steps and hours spent on hold - musicians might not need engineers, but they do need tech support. "It might get frustrating doing everything yourself," Moby admits, "but that frustration forces you to learn."

Digital technology isn't without its unfortunate side effects. For one, the accessibility of digital recording lends itself to amateur noodling. "The digital-music revolution is a wonderful thing," Moby says. "It allows people to approach music as a hobby. All you need is a computer, a rudimentary sequencing system and some sounds. Good home-studio programs now have good sounds. A lot of electronic musicians slave away for years to make a good-sounding record that could have been done with software." Keep in mind that having the correct color palette does not make painting the Mona Lisa any easier. "I had this conversation with [producer] Rick Rubin once," Moby says. "He said that you can have the best sounds in the world, but that's not why people buy records. They buy records for atmosphere and nice songs."

That's right - just because it's easy to make doesn't always make it easy on the ears. "So many people making electronic music are content with a six-minute track that's quite repetitive and sounds good but doesn't really do anything," Moby says. "It is satisfying to sit down at your computer, spend three hours and make a cool-sounding track, and some people don't want to do more. So this technology can promote mediocrity. At the same time, so did the electric guitar: Most of the people who plugged one in made quasi-mediocre records. Electronic music certainly hasn't cornered the market on mediocrity. "It's funny," Moby continues, "the height of digital signal processing is programs that make virtual things sound analog." And that, of course, is just the present. The future will be as efficient and compartmentalized as life in a weightless biosphere. "There will be a time," predicts Moby, "when you will be able to use a laptop to create a song that sounds as if it were recorded by a band in a studio, and no one will be able to tell the difference. In the next few years, I wouldn't be surprised if they invent singing programs. You will type in a phrase and tell the program to have it sung by a Caucasian woman, eighteen years old, with whatever inflection you choose. Whoever invents that will make a lot of money."

[From Issue 871 — June 21, 2001]