Justin Smith, better known as Just Blaze, catapulted to the upper echelon of hip hop in the early '00s as the producer behind a string of hits with Jay-Z and Roc-A-Fella Records. He has been in high...
Ray LaMontagne's 2010 album, God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise, may have won a Grammy award for Best Contemporary Folk Album, but I'd refute that narrow categorization. It's an album of honest...
Electric Lady Studios has a long, amazing New York recording history. Under the guidance of Lee Foster, the studio has seen a renaissance over the last decade. Daft Punk, Arcade Fire, The National,...
New York City's independent metal scene has recently burst into mainstream view. At least two venues are primarily putting on heavy music shows nearly every night of the week. Several of the best...
Archiving the recorded audio history of the United States? The National Recording Preservation Foundation is just getting up and running, with some familiar folks on the governing board. I had to know...
With over 40 years of studio experience, and having worked with artists like Dave Brubeck, George Benson, and Weather Report, Robert Honablue was recently the Director of Engineering at The Honablue...
Ray LaMontagne's 2010 album, God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise, may have won a Grammy award for Best Contemporary Folk Album, but I'd refute that narrow categorization. It's an album of honest...
Lou Clark is an accomplished recording studio designer, engineer, and avid supporter of the Audio Engineering Society. With over 20 years of studio design expertise on a national...
Justin Smith, better known as Just Blaze, catapulted to the upper echelon of hip hop in the early '00s as the producer behind a string of hits with Jay-Z and Roc-a-fella Records. He has been in high...
Under the leadership and vision of EveAnna Manley, Manley Labs has created and built some of the finest studio equipment (and high end home audio components) over the last two decades. Studios...
Last issue we ran John La Grou's article, "The Future of Audio Engineering." In John's look ahead we see a harrowing glimpse of a world where the audio engineer, composer, and musicians are possibly...
For those of you interested in how Tape Op gear reviews are produced, I'd like to relate what happened with a particular review published in the previous issue, and springboard to a summary of the...
For many months, contributing writer Eli Crews and Assistant Gear Reviews Editor Scott McChane have been switching back and forth between Pro Tools 11 and Pro Tools 10 [Tape Op #89] for their...
It seems like every time that I use a new plug-in from FabFilter, I find myself ceasing to use another similar plug-in that'd I'd been religiously using for years. Such was the case again with...
Perhaps sample-rate conversion is something you do rarely. On the other hand, if you're like me, you have to juggle multiple projects that need preparation for different destinations and sample-rates....
Getting prepped for this review was something of a unique experience. For the first time in five or six years of doing reviews for Tape Op, the founder of a company wanted to speak live over the phone...
I often need to audition audio files or compare different sources. I used to have a generic session in my DAW for this, but that became unmanageable. There were simply too many sample-rates, formats,...
This is a simple little plug-in that does one thing extremely well - it gets other stuff out of the way. It does that by employing a unique and elegant method, creating a reverse EQ profile of...
Many of us live in the "real world" - a place where we don't always have the resources to select, structurally modify, or build a "perfect" production room within the spaces we rent or own. Nine times...
At its core, recording, like any creative endeavor, is about us making decisions one-by-one, until they all pile up on each other to form something meaningful from the raw material - in our case, the...
In a world of modern mics which are all beginning to look and sound alike, the SOM50 mic stands out from the pack both visually and sonically. Ashman Acoustics, a Seattle based company, is headed by...
Serpent Audio's Chimera is the first LA-3A clone to fit in a 500-series module, complete with that opto-circuit compression that so famously soothes vocal dynamics or unruly bass lines, or... well,...
Back in the '80s, when we needed a beat and didn't have a drummer present, we used to have analog and digital drum machines to keep time. They were rarely confused with real drums, but some had a...
The RC 500 is a 1RU-height, rackmount, solid-state channel strip, with a mic/line/instrument preamp that routes to a FET VCA-based compressor followed by a three-band semi-parametric EQ. The EQ and...
I just got a new knife. It's Japanese, ceramic. I can use it for damn near everything I need to prep and cook a meal. I have other knives - boning, chef, serrated. So why do I use my new one for just...
Maybe it's love for the underdog, but I dig Traynor amps. When I play music instead of recording it, my main amp is a big-ass '70s Traynor Mark 3 - a Twin-style circuit with EL34s. It's an oddball...
AwTAC (Awesome Transistor Amplifier Company) of New York is quickly proving itself as a manufacturer with high standards. Since the introduction of its Channel Amplifier [Tape Op #93] three years ago...
I've been slowly building up to a realization that my older FireWire interface and I have to break up. We've been a good couple. At first, she was clearly too good for me, what with her classy 96...
I have always been a fan of Radial's direct boxes and have gotten plenty of use out of their JD4 rackmount DI over the years, so I was excited to record some tracks with their latest 500-series unit....
Hybrid mixing is here to stay. (Required reading: "What is Stem Mixing?" [Tape Op #87]) This may explain why our friends at API Audio, with their rich history in analog gear, have "thrown-in" to the...
It was 1985. I was in a band called Vomit Launch. Our guitarist, Lindsey Thrasher, was DJ'ing at our college station (KCSC) in Chico, California. While there one day, she picked up the phone and a...
