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.
Geoff Stanfield and Andy Hong add an update to the original Meris Mercury7 Reverb review by Adam Kagan.
GS: I am a fan of the Meris line of gear. They are a small shop who builds their high-quality modules in Los Angeles. I have reviewed the Meris...
A few months back while on a call with Tape Op publisher John Baccigaluppi, he mentioned that he was working on an album project where the majority of the sounds were generated by his cat Raspy. That is not to say that Raspy actually sat down...
(me and Elliott rolling in Jackpot!'s original MCI JH-16, Feb. 1997)
As most readers of Tape Op may have picked up on by now, I have been involved in the archiving and cataloging of the music of my late friend, Elliott Smith. Here's an interview I...
Some Maybe Not-So-Obvious Items Every Studio Needs
In the past we've run a few columns about items every studio should have, like Sharpie pens and masking tape, but here I decided to look around me and think about all the items that aren't...
I got an email the other day from a PR person looking for Tape Op to write an article about several "known" engineer/producers and their drum recording techniques in the studio. These guys are known, and one of them we've written about and I think...
On November 9-11, 2018, Ableton held their Loop 2018 conference in Hollywood, CA. Thom Monahan and I both went to check it out. Here’s some of what we experienced, starting with Thom. -JB
It’s hard to imagine a music software company...
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...
Art is Alive is a solidarity effort aimed at providing resources, spreading awareness and building connectedness within the artistic and creative freelance communities impacted by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Created by artist Rhiannon Giddens, and...