North London-born Chris Carter has had an extraordinary 50-year career in music. While working as a visual artist and sound engineer for various television stations in England, he extended his...
Alvin Lucier is one of the most influential composers in the post-John Cage era. Having authored over 172 pieces for film, theater, television, and dance companies, it is fair to say that he is...
The career of Jimmy Douglass is incredibly interesting. Coming up at Atlantic Records in the early '70s, he learned the ins and outs of studio life on the fly while observing masters like Tom Dowd and...
As the music director for Bruno Mars, Kanye West, and Lady Gaga, Jeff Bhasker eventually parlayed a keen musical sense into a successful production career, with credits on iconic records by Kanye,...
The Miami-based songwriter, producer, and fashionista known as Suzi Analogue lives with synesthesia, a neurological condition that causes one sensory pathway (i.e., hearing) to influence another...
As creative people in the music industry, many of us fail or succeed based on our credits. The music we work on and the artists we engage with often define our value to others in this field. Gebre...
Recently, I was recommending a soldering iron to a Tape Op contributor who was excited to start fixing cables on his own. I suggested the Weller WLC100 40Watt Soldering Station weller-tools.com....
Last year I bought The Beatles’ super deluxe 50th anniversary box set edition of The BEATLES (commonly known as “The White Album”). The new mixes that Giles Martin [Tape Op #103]...
Photo: Chambers, courtesy of Alvin Lucier. See his interview here. I'm John Baccigaluppi, the other guy at Tape Op and this issue I'm writing the intro that Larry, our editor, usually writes....
The career of Jimmy Douglass is incredibly interesting. Coming up at Atlantic Records in the early '70s, he learned the ins and outs of studio life on the fly while observing masters like Tom Dowd and...
As creative people in the music industry, many of us fail or succeed based on our credits. The music we work on and the artists we engage with often define our value to others in this field. Gebre...
Alvin Lucier is one of the most influential composers in the post-John Cage era. Having authored over 172 pieces for film, theater, television, and dance companies, it is fair to say that he is...
One of the original founders of Eventide Clock Works Inc, Richard Factor has seen a lot of changes in the world of audio and electronics. Eventide’s time-based effects units were some of the...
The Miami-based songwriter, producer, and fashionista known as Suzi Analogue lives with synesthesia, a neurological condition that causes one sensory pathway (i.e., hearing) to influence another...
North London-born Chris Carter has had an extraordinary 50-year career in music. While working as a visual artist and sound engineer for various television stations in England, he extended his...
As the music director for Bruno Mars, Kanye West, and Lady Gaga, Jeff Bhasker eventually parlayed a keen musical sense into a successful production career, with credits on iconic records by Kanye,...
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...
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...
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,...
