For about five years now, I’ve felt awfully let down by technology. It’s the year 2005, for God’s sake - where’s our awesome Jetsons-style futuretech? Where are our flying cars? Shouldn’t HAL 9000 have been activated like a decade ago by now? The Transformers movie was set in 2005 and I don’t recall seeing any 100-foot-tall robots on the ride into work this morning (admittedly, they may have been in disguise).

We’ve stumbled pretty badly, at least in the areas of transforming robots and malevolent computers. On the bright side, technology’s actually been pretty kind to us on the music-recording front. In fact, I would go so far as to say we live in something of a golden age for unsigned bands. At least as far as recording the joyous and unpolished noise we make goes.

Not too long ago, if you wanted a decent recording and didn’t have a label to front you the money (which, of course, you’d have to pay back, but that’s another discussion), you’d have to scrabble together several thousand dollars and book time in a studio. And a few hours in a bargain-basement studio was hardly a guarantee of quality. Barring that, you could try to record your band with a 4-track, an endeavor doomed to tape-hissy, flat-sounded failure unless your band happened to be named Guided By Voices (although producing those tape-hissy failures was still often fun; one of my favorite musical memories is of spending a weekend in an unused milking barn recording a 4-track demo that can best be described as “craptacular”).

Things have changed. In the past few years, things’ve progressed to a point where anyone with a decent laptop and some software can lay down recordings that, in terms of sound quality, blow the doors off of even some seminal indie-label studio recordings (like, say, the first Uncle Tupelo album or the entire Husker Du catalog-great music, all, but they sort of sound like ass). It’s a fun time. I suppose that Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crud”) dictates that the vast majority of the albums being recorded on laptops and digital 8-tracks are awful, but they’re rewarding for the people doing the recording. And 90% crud means 10% awesome.

My own band has spent the past year and a half in the basement recording rabbit hole. We avoided recording for years because any mention of putting money together for studio time just made us laugh. Eventually, technology caught up, and our bass player obtained a good digital 8-track for less money than a new guitar would cost. Our drummer’s basement, which already did double duty as practice space and bike-fabrication factory, was converted into an ad-hoc studio.

You learn a lot about the internal structure of your band when you sit down and record. It’s very different from playing live; playing live is usually sort of timeless and almost always fun. For me, at least, the rest of the world seems to slip away when I’m playing live and I get centered in this weird zone of pure enjoyment. There are those transcendent moments like that when you record, but there are also moments of extreme frustration and boredom. Nothing sucks worse than trying to record your part on a song fucking it up and having to start over for the eighth time. Although sitting around during a session when other people are recording their parts and you have nothing to do but sit there and listen to the same lines eight times does suck mighty hard, too. Mixing down can be a tussle if you’re DIY-ing it and don’t have a producer there to arbitrate disputes over whose part is too loud in the mix and whose needs to come up. And it can be a mighty hard dollar sitting with your eyes closed listening to six different mixes of the same song, trying to remember the subtle differences between each one so that you can pick the best.

But these are all nice problems to have. It’s not like the home-recording process is this mega-torture session; there are lots of moments where you’re crackling with creative energy and having the time of your life. And when you’re done, there’s nothing better in the world than listening to the final mixdown and thinking: “this is us, we made this.” Even in the very likely event your new album falls into the cruddy 90%, the beauty of Sturgeon’s Law is no one thinks their output is crud. When you’re basking in the afterglow of your DIY album, that’s a wonderful thing.

So, yeah. My band just spent the last year and a half in a basement full of bikes recording our album. And I’m sure it’s not crud. Doesn’t sound like crud to me.