Woodland is the name of Gillian Welch and David Rawling’s studio in Nashville, and it’s also the name of their new album. On Woodland, the duo continue to show their deep connection as collaborators. The album has a wide open sound that features their seemlessly blended and intimately recorded vocals, and the light touch of a backing band that includes drums, bass, pedal steel, banjo, and airy strings on tunes like "What We Had" and "Hashtag". "Lawman" and "The Bells and the Birds" have a lovely somberness, and the album as a whole has a "live off the floor" feeling to it that we hear less and less of these days. Woodland will stay in our "recently played" column for the forseeable future.
We interviewed Gillian and Dave back in 2001 for Tape Op #85.
Tape Op is a bi-monthly magazine devoted to the art of record making.
Here is a list of some of the books on recording and music that we have added to the reading (or re-reading!) queue recently.
Are We Still Rolling?by Phill BrownGreat studio session stories about The Rolling Stones, Talk Talk, Hendrix, Led...
Hard to believe that 2022 is already coming to a close. As was true in 2021, it was obvious that as the world was on lock down, artists were busy using their time to be creative and the result was an incredible amount of fantastic releases across...
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...
So here's a pile of CDs I'm supposed to be listening to right now instead of enjoying The Skids' Sweet Suburbia album. Some of these I actually bought (so I should be enjoying them I guess) and some were handed over by friends (yes, the Scott...
In editor Larry Crane's recent End Rant [Tape Op #127], he talked about how people are currently learning recording techniques, all of the misinformation on the internet, and how this leads to the homogenization of music making in general. All of the...
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...
Lots of laptops use an accelerometer to detect that the computer is falling. When that happens, the computer parks the hard drive heads to prevent them from bouncing on the HD platter. Apple calls this the Sudden Motion Sensor. On...
Years ago John Fischbach, a well-established and respected producer/engineer, came to my studio to record an album that our mutual friend, Luther Russell, was producing. [See Tape Op #21.] In those days my studio, Jackpot! Recording, was a diamond...