Greg Kurstin is an in demand producer who's worked with a laundry list of great artists, including Lily Allen, Sia, Pink, The Shins, Foo Fighters, Liam Gallagher, Beck, The Flaming Lips, Tegan and...
Born in Bergenfield, New Jersey, Jack Antonoff has performed, recorded, and toured with the bands Outline, Steel Train, fun., Bleachers, and, most recently, Red Hearse, with a self-titled album...
Apart from the world of recording, Phil Thornalley may not be a household name, but a quick scan of the many records he's produced, engineered, and co-written (or all of the above) reveals a...
This issue’s cover is an homage to the Pink Floyd song “Echoes,” from the album Meddle. The idea came to me after I saw Brian T. Silak’s photo of Jack Antonoff’s vintage tape delays, as the Binson Echorec...
A recording studio in a house is something you'd expect in Nashville in today's age of in-the-box recording, but back at the dawn of the 1970's it was an unheard of move most country music record...
Last year I had the opportunity to pay a visit to Atlantic Records, right off of Times Square in New York City, to have a conversation with their Senior Engineer, Ebonie Smith. We talked about her...
This issue’s cover is an homage to the Pink Floyd song “Echoes,” from the album Meddle. The idea came to me after I saw Brian T. Silak’s photo of Jack Antonoff’s vintage tape delays, as the Binson Echorec...
In 2014, I attended the inaugural Advanced Audio + Application Exchange (A3E) conference and wrote about it in the TapeOp.com blog. A3E has continued to grow, and A3E events now run tangentially with...
I've listened to music critically for most of my life. First, as a teenage music fan, I would sit with headphones on poring over masterpieces by Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Yes, the Beach Boys, King...
I recently had the experience of listening to hundreds of new albums in a slightly disassociated context; many times I knew nothing about who the artists were or what style of music they were...
Born in Bergenfield, New Jersey, Jack Antonoff has performed, recorded, and toured with the bands Outline, Steel Train, fun., Bleachers, and, most recently, Red Hearse, with a self-titled album...
Apart from the world of recording, Phil Thornalley may not be a household name, but a quick scan of the many records he's produced, engineered, and co-written (or all of the above) reveals a...
A recording studio in a house is something you'd expect in Nashville in today's age of in-the-box recording, but back at the dawn of the 1970's it was an unheard of move most country music record...
Last year I had the opportunity to pay a visit to Atlantic Records, right off of Times Square in New York City, to have a conversation with their Senior Engineer, Ebonie Smith. We talked about her...
Greg Kurstin is an in demand producer who's worked with a laundry list of great artists, including Lily Allen, Sia, Pink, The Shins, Foo Fighters, Liam Gallagher, Beck, The Flaming Lips, Tegan and...
In 2019, I was asked to moderate a panel at Music Expo Miami, and luckily for us one of the panelists was Maria Elisa Ayerbe, a local recordist, producer, and mixer I had heard much about and wanted...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Subconscious Auditory Effects (SAE) is a term I have cobbled together to encapsulate a broad range of phenomena in this barely-studied field of inquiry. An SAE is any measurable effect on a person caused by a sound, or change in sound, that is...
