Hailing from Bremerton, Washington, Phil Ek grew up as a kid who was into music from the get-go. As a teenager he would travel across the Puget Sound to pick up the latest releases from SST and Sub...
Doug Martsch is the main force behind Built to Spill, with his songwriting skills, excellent lead guitar playing, and fragile voice. He lives with his wife and family in Boise, where he has built a...
In his solo projects and work with his group Mount Analog, Tucker Martine uses collages of tunes from several genres, as well as electronic soundwashes, field recordings, and fragments from diverse...
Seattle-based Chris Ballew has been a sideman for Beck, a front man for The Presidents of the United States of America, an integral part of Supergroup, the entire mysterious cast of The Giraffes,...
Mark Neill talks a long time. A simple question on Blumlein pairs can unleash a conversational flood of anecdotes, electronic puzzles and acoustic theories lasting an hour or more. Just when you...
If you're tired of climbing behind your racks, and finding the right cable every time you want to use a piece of outboard gear or a console insert point, it may be time to find yourself a patchbay....
There are very few record producers whose names grace large portions of my CD collection, and Tony Visconti is one of them. His production work with David Bowie (including the newest album,...
You've had the idea — the sound was in your head. You've said to yourself, "Self, I'd sure like to make this voice (guitar, drum kit, etc.) sound like it was recorded with a telephone. But...
The talkback mic is the usual way to communicate, one-way to your musicians out in the studio. But if you are recording all in one room a closely-mic'ed loud rock band, how do you hear them making...
1. I'm tired. I think continual listening, especially when checking for pitch, may be exhausting. Just a thought. 2. Recently, while recording an album, I witnessed one of the most amazing vocal...
As a two inch 16-track recordist, I'm pretty wary of digital plug-ins that claim to offer the "analog" sound. But, I'd heard really good things about this plug-in from a few people so I wanted to give...
Two of the biggest issues with recording at home are trying to protect your ears from the drums pounding and amps blaring only a few feet away and attempting to hear what you're recording while...
One of the easiest ways to clean up your audio is to buy a power conditioner and plug all your audio gear into it. A good power conditioner will filter out noise (both electrostatic and...
Being a DIY electronics geek, I think of the cable tie as one of the most amazing inventions of all time. They're cheap, they're easy to handle, and they can hold incredible amounts of weight (or...
For over 5 years I've struggled with a dilemma common among electronic music producers - how do you take compositions that took weeks to painstakingly compose and sequence and perform them to an...
One of the most important aspects of recording music is providing the artist with a good cue mix. Nothing can make or break a studio performance as easily as the quality of the cue mix. That's why a...
I have recently been doing more mixing within the digital domain using a computer and recording software. While I like the flexibility of working this way, having to use a mouse for everything really...
I've been on a quest for a variety of headphones for tracking use in my studio, as my trusty Sony 7506 cans are falling apart after 7 years of constant service. The ATH-M30 is the lower-cost...
The first mic pre I ever bought was a Brent Averill Neve 1272 and it remains one of my all-time favorite mic pres for guitars, vocals, snare - just about anything. It has this cool gritty kind of...
Synthesis Technology makes its MOTM synthesizers the old fashioned way: modular and analog. A modular synthesizer is a collection of individual units ("modules"), each of which shapes an audio signal....
Recently the mic market has been swamped with a bunch of low cost alternatives to high end classics. You've seen the ads and reviews that claim they're "just as good a Neumann (AKG, Telefunken,...
Unlike many microphone preamplifiers in this price range (around $700), the VMP-2 uses Jensen input transformers and 12AX7 tubes to get the job done, as opposed to a solid state chip using a starved...
I recently got an Apple iPod MP3 player for my local commute, and found out that it has a lot of other uses that make it into a viable tool for the traveling engineer. By now you have seen ads for it...
Easily the most surgical speakers I have ever heard. A good analogy would be that if the Meyer HD-1 were 16 bit these are 24. Flat within 2 dB from 40 Hz all the way up to 40 kHz with a low frequency...
Avalon was kind enough to grace me with the presence of their solid state/tube compressor/limiter which also includes a 6 band EQ. The first thing that impressed me about the unit was the sound of the...
As the world fills up with many low-cost Chinese condenser mics, the manufacturers who have been around a while have had to take notice of this and offer mics in a comparable price range. Shure...
On a recent vist to LA, I visited with Jim Putnam and saw his small home/garage studio where all the Radar Brothers albums have been recorded. Even though I've now seen where the magic is made I'm...
The Buzzcocks unleashed these three amazing albums in the span of a couple of years, with Martin Rushent producing. These remain the standard to me by which guitar-driven punk-pop records must be...
Bill Doss must have been the poppier, less experimental, part of the Olivia Tremor Control. That's a good thing here. Wild psych-pop recorded in his home-based A World As Myth Sound. Fun sonics....
Hey look, another Tape Op contributor! Eric Tischler fronts and records this band, tracking in his basement. It's good indie rock band action, a bit basement-sounding at times, but poppy and rocking....
The fact that one of the greatest living songwriters lives in a modest home in NJ making records on an old Tascam 388 escapes most people. Fred Cornog is ERP, was featured in the first issue of Tape...
CDs (or vinyl) of well-recorded drum beats, and that's all. You can dump these on your multitrack and write songs around them, cut them up in your computer and build new beats, or spin them at clubs...
How do you get your record mentioned here? If you're a Tape Op contributor (Steven Nereo) it certainly helps - if your record was made at home on a computer and sounds great that helps - if the songs...
If you have to have a band, why not hire Ian McLagan (Small Faces, etc) and ex-members of The Damned, PIL and 3 Mustaphas 3? Then get our wonderful pal Grant Showbiz to produce, with the ever-patient...
Singles, outtakes and rarities from a band that lurked through the grunge years in Seattle. Note that Jack Endino played guitar in this band and probably recorded/produced it all though there's no...
Old time is not a crime, especially when played with heart and fun. All original tunes, unlike most bands of their ilk, cleanly (but not too cleanly) recorded by Edan Coen at Soundgun Studio in...
Greg Sage reissues his first 3 CDs from 1980-83. Important, amazing, powerful, ahead of their time - and all the more amazing that they had the initiative to record the latter two albums on their own,...
Take the premise that New Order began with, of melding rock songs and electronics, and pull that screaming into this era with a lot of tongue-in- cheekiness and playfulness - you have Trans Am....
