What other city in the world has such a recording studio history? John and I spent several days in Memphis and barely scratched the surface of this legacy. Due to having an amazing tour guide, local...
Easley McCain Recording in Memphis has been a fixture in the recording scene since the early '90s, initially with local records with bands like the Grifters, and later nationally with bands like Sonic...
Scott Bomar just turned 30, yet he's been playing bass professionally for 15 years, on stage and in studios. His band, Impala, churned out garage rock in the nineties, and eventually Scott's interests...
I first met Xopher Davidson in the late nineties at the Bloody Angle Compound studio, located in a corner of San Francisco that feels like nowhere. It is, literally, where the sidewalk ends, and, like...
Don Coffey Jr. admits that he stumbled onto his career as a studio engineer by accident. From the early 1990s until last year, the 37-year-old native of Knoxville, Tennessee, was the drummer and...
As a longtime synth geek, I sometimes wondered whatever happened to TONTO, the modular behemoth featured on Stevie Wonder's great seventies records Talking Book, Innervisions, and Fulfillingness'...
Many of us would be fortunate to record national bands, build great sounding studios, or design our own line of pro audio gear in our lifetime. But over the past ten years Bill Skibbe and Jessica...
Monitoring is arguably the most important link in the audio chain. A while back we examined some basic monitor set-up issues. We noted that most people have decent enough speakers, but they don't...
Ribbon microphones are finally coming back into vogue these days after a long, unexplainable hiatus from the recording studio. The sudden proliferation of Oktava's ML52 is in no small part due to the...
In recording albums, editing Tape Op, being a fan of music and teaching recording information and techniques to groups of home recordists one thing has become clear to me. The biggest problem that has...
I was spoiled rotten a few months ago. I did a session with a wonderful jazz vocalist with a smoky, classic voice. In past sessions with her I had used ribbons like the RCA 77-DX and AEA 44C, which...
Telefunken NA has been reissuing the classic line of Telefunken mics, like the Ela M 251 and U 47M, for the last few years (see our review of the 251 in issue #34). This mic, the Ela M 14, is the...
Ask any acoustic guitarist, and they'll tell you their biggest challenge: amplifying the dang thing in a live situation. The three perennial solutions all have serious drawbacks: soundhole pickups can...
If you're a recording studio, mastering facility, record label, professional photographer, or production facility that sells or otherwise distributes CD's and DVD's that you author yourself, you need...
Frequent travelers know the challenges of taking music on the road. Headphones can be fatiguing. And with luggage space at a premium, hauling a decent set of speakers is out of the question. Up to...
Almost everyone knows that the last few years have ushered in a slew of new tube microphones. Low-cost ones, pricey ones, colorful ones, plain ones, transformer- balanced, and transformerless ones....
The Drawmer 1968 Mercenary Edition is a 1RU version of Drawmer's popular 1969 compressor, without the mic pres. For me, the unit defines punch. It can also provide smooth leveling for the stereo buss,...
The Central Station is a talkback system and studio monitoring interface that routes audio from mixing or playback devices to multiple control room speakers as well as a studio or headphone cue...
The i-5 is Audix's attempt to offer a mic as versatile and rugged as the ubiquitous Shure SM57. Given the number of 57's out there and the amount of use they receive, that's a tall order indeed. The...
I first saw a TRUE Systems mic preamp when Roger King, our Tape Op Conference Technical Director, got the 8- channel Precision 8 right before TRUE Systems went national. As it turns out, Tim Spencer...
My living-room stereo system consists of a mish-mash of late-70's and early-80's hi-fi gear, a Rega Planar turntable, six in-ceiling speakers hooked up to a power amp, and a pair of ADAM Audio P11A...
