Andrew Savage, one of the co-songwriters of Parquet Courts, is decidedly "not an engineer," yet he owns tape machines and once built a studio with his friends in Denton, Texas. Savage's top priority...
I still remember my first experience hearing Taylor Deupree's Northern on a winter night back in 2007. Reaching into a stack of borrowed CDs in my apartment, I randomly selected a disc for some...
Here Photo: At The Old Western waiting for the rest of the musicians... Luke Temple wears several masks and many hats. Since 2005 he has released five solo records under his own name, four as Here...
Way back in [Tape Op #39], we received a wonderful report on how The Mammals utilized a bunch of borrowed gear and gathered talented friends to track their Evolver album at home, in upstate New York....
Photographer Brian T. Silak and I met up with indie rock legends Yo La Tengo at the SOHO Manhattan offices of Matador Records. We discussed the evolution of the band's songwriting and recording...
Although I’d heard of Berlin-based musician Nils Frahm, I actually first heard his music on his beautiful and recently released LP, All Melody, which I reviewed online for Tape Op #123. Nils was...
Check out this interview with our own Larry Crane in Spanish language audio magazine Audioforo! Read it HERE
It's been a few years since we reviewed Pro Tools 11 [Tape Op #101], the first version of the venerable DAW that featured 64-bit architecture and a newly reimplemented Avid Audio Engine, as well as...
Get your FREE passes to AES 2018 in NYC HERE!
While attending the Summer NAMM Show, I ran into several friends who thought I had left Tape Op completely. I apologize if my “Gear Geeking” column in the previous issue wasn’t clear...
If you're one of the folks doing all your music making in-the-box, with your DAW and plug-ins, then you can skip the rest of this rant. Consider yourself lucky, as this older analog gear is getting...
Here Photo: At The Old Western waiting for the rest of the musicians... Luke Temple wears several masks and many hats. Since 2005 he has released five solo records under his own name, four as Here...
How many of you ladies and gentlemen are making music these days intended for listening primarily on a five CD changer set to shuffle? If that's your audience, you might feel forced to use multiband...
Andrew Savage, one of the co-songwriters of Parquet Courts, is decidedly "not an engineer," yet he owns tape machines and once built a studio with his friends in Denton, Texas. Savage's top priority...
I still remember my first experience hearing Taylor Deupree's Northern on a winter night back in 2007. Reaching into a stack of borrowed CDs in my apartment, I randomly selected a disc for some...
Although I’d heard of Berlin-based musician Nils Frahm, I actually first heard his music on his beautiful and recently released LP, All Melody, which I reviewed online for Tape Op #123. Nils was...
While hardly a glamorous concept, room acoustics represent a critical link in the recording or playback chain. While comprehensive room design is a complex cocktail of science, math and chance...
In the disembodied world of today's computer-based multitrack mixing, one can spend a lot of time crafting a unifying sense of "space." Despite the dozens of reverb plug-ins and rack devices...
I have been a big fan of spring and plate reverbs for decades, and over the past three years I have spent a significant amount of time diving into the wormhole of designing and building them,...
Here's a ridiculously cheap and simple way to make a pretty nice microphone shock mount. Cost is under 10 bucks (way under if you build more than one) and it shouldn't take too much more than a half...
With news of Neil Young pushing to get studio quality audio out to the consumer, it occurred to me that it would be good to get some perspective on how we go about comparing audio quality. One of the most problematic issues surrounding audio...
Expect to see more changes in the music purchasing/acquiring habits of teenagers as time goes by. Courtesy of the NPD Group's press release: "teens (age 13 to 17) acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD purchasing declined 26...
Everyone has been talking about Dave Grohl's new documentary Sound City a lot lately. That's cool; it's a fun romp of a movie, even if Dave can't decide whether he's making a film about a Neve console, a dying studio, a rock star jam session or an...
I'm about to write something that at first will seem like another gray-beard waxing nostalgic for a by-gone analog era. But, stick with me, because I think the tables are turning to where going analog might be as forward-thinking as it gets. Let's...
In a fascinating and really open Facebook debate initiated by fellow producer, cycling enthuiasist, and coffee-drinking pal, Eric Ambel (www.ericambel.com), I was alerted to what was finally a clear insight into how and why Spotify could possibly...
Over the last few years we've seen an explosion of online music services. Pandora, iTunes, Spotify, Rhapsody, Soundcloud and dozens of other platforms are touted as groundbreaking ways to deliver music to listeners. But this success is on the...
Richard Kaplan, owner engineer of famed recording studio Indigo Ranch [Tape Op #103] is selling the remainder of his classic equipment collection. It includes vintage and rare pieces by API, Aengus, Fairchild, Teletronix, Neumann and...
Wall Street PR reports on the woes of Avid, the company behind Pro Tools. What does the future hold? I'm just terrified of having to learn a new platform, buying more gear and software, and there not being a de facto DAW standard for professional...
Carol Kaye is one of the most recorded bass players of all time, with 10,000 sessions and 40,000 songs under her belt, including a staggering list of hits for Ray Charles, The Righteous Brothers,...
A reader just informed me that APPLE's recent Logic Pro X includes "Drummer", a virtual drummer plug-in. One of the virtual drummers is named "aidan", who apparently cannot find the CAPS key on his virtual MacBook. In Aidan's "Portland Kit" we...
