"Cowboy" Jack Clement is a guitar player, singer, songwriter, engineer, publisher and producer, born in 1931 in Tennessee. He began working in Memphis at Sun Records in 1956, engineering and producing...
So you play in a band and you produce your own stuff. Awesome — me too. And like a 5 foot 6- inch aspiring football player watches Rudy, I listen to Yeasayer. Their 2007 debut album, All Hour...
The Rock 'n' Roll Camp For Girls of Portland, Oregon was founded in 2001 with the intent of bringing girls and young women together to learn more about music and encourage creativity. Girls aged 8 to...
As the principal writer, performer and engineer behind the group Xiu Xiu, Jamie Stewart has been responsible for some of the most exciting and unsettling indie music of the last decade, attracting a...
By far one of the most revered and imitated microphone preamp/equalizers is the Neve 1073, originally released in the early 1970s as the main channel module in the infamous 80 Series consoles. There...
Ernst Nathorst-Boos and Marcus Zetterquist, along with Peter "Pelle" Jubel, founded Propellerhead Software in 1994. Propellerhead, based in Stockholm Sweden, has given us some unique software for...
The human brain is a very unique thing. The plasticity of the brain alone allows for certain unused sections of this organ to be reallocated for other purposes. This is why a blind person tends to...
We live in the era of technology democratization. As musicians, we now have affordable access to nearly any bit of technology you find useful. Powerful DAWs and plug-ins, exotic microphones, amp...
Allen Farmelo, who reviewed the Euphonix MC Mix, MC Control, and MC Transport (www.euphonix.com) for Tape Op #76, emailed me recently to clarify some points in his article. He wrote, "This is just a...
I first came across the KSM353 at the Shure booth at the 2009 New York AES Convention. After two long days of pretending that I could hear anything in a discerning way in this huge, bustling expo...
I've been building my own PCs for two decades. It all started when someone bequeathed a 5 MB Seagate hard drive to me. (At the time, it was valued at $499; I still have the JDR Microdevices catalogue...
Thanks to Top Hat Recording, a few of us Austin engineers, producers, and studio owners got to listen to one of the first Wunder CM7 FET mics alongside its inspiration -the Neumann U 47 fet. Top Hat's...
I'm a big fan of small monitors for mixing and referencing my mix away from the larger hi-fi monitor systems. I've been using Auratones for decades and won't mix without them. When I saw these little...
It all started in 2006 when I bought a Monome 40h (Tape Op #62) and plugged it into my computer's USB port. (After a lot of configuring) I held in my hands a box of blinking buttons -each light...
Wave Arts claim that Tube Saturator, "a basic circuit consisting of a Baxandall-type three-band EQ feeding two 12AX7 triode preamp stages... is the world's most accurate real-time tube-amp plug-in."...
As an owner of a 1976 API model 3232 console, Jeff Steiger has years of experience restoring, repairing, and modifying his desk. The modular build of those APIs is modification-friendly. Being a...
The thought of replacing drums may seem outright offensive to many of us. After all, aren't we supposed to be recording things? But sometimes, we're called to mix projects that we did not track. Other...
Keith McMillen Instruments has hit the nail on the head with a very simple, yet oh-so-handy gadget that measures the voltage and remaining life of batteries. The Batt-O-Meter can test any 1.5 V...
Finding myself in what seems to be the largest surge of interesting studio gear development in history, I'm always surprised when someone asks me if a piece of gear does enough. Maybe it's the fact...
Epson is a household name when it comes to desktop printing technology, so it's no surprise to see their inkjet expertise applied to on-disc printing. The company's Discproducer is a self-contained...
Produced by Karl Blau and LAKE. For anyone who thinks that K Records might be all lo-fi, out-of-tune troubadours (which isn't true anyway), here's a group that offers lush, beautiful songs and a great...
Here's the eighth proper album and second album with new (since 2008) singer Mollie Israel. I've been a fan of this much-overlooked band ever since meeting them and catching a show years ago, but with...
Never one to sit still, Sigur Rós vocalist Jónsi has finished his second record outside of his band since Riceboy Sleeps by Jónsi and Alex was released last year. While that album...
Smokey is a first-rate guitarist who's played with artists like Johnny Cash, Beck, Tom Waits, John Doe and Joe Strummer. This album, described as Congolese dance music (a field I have to admit no...
This album took many years to surface. It began with recordings by Richard Barone (issue # 54) made of Tiny in 1976 in a Travelodge Motel and at Recnac Recording in Florida. Restoration (and...
An album created completely from iPhone instruments, samplers and beat generators? Yup, here it is, courtesy of Freematik (Tom Freeman). Apps used include iDrum, Beatmaker, miniSynth, Thereminator,...
Journalists talk about Giant Sand and Calexico as if the desert informs and sculpts their recorded output, but I'd like to point anyone looking for some really lost-in-the-high-desert music towards...
I've been a fan of Mark Edwards and his long-running band My Dad is Dead since I heard his first album in 1986. A short stint on the legendary Homestead Records produced some of his best work, but...
