An unreal space and an amazing engineer/producer.
My pal David Lowery (Cracker/Camper Van Beethoven) has been doing a cool blog called 300 Songs, telling stories of how songs came about and other crazy stories. The most recent one is about the late Don Smith, who produced and engineered a bunch of...
I pulled short straw and had to go pick up the take out tonight (take away for our UK readers). The radio was set to NPR, so I let it alone. The announcer introduced a new segment called “Listen to This,” that features famous musicians...
Interviews, Stories, and the Truth by Larry Crane In Tape Op issue #53 I interviewed Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan, authors of the then-recently released book, Recording The Beatles. One of the topics we discussed was interviewing...
I dropped by Powell’s City of Books last night to say hello to Daniel Levitin and hear him talk about his new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine. I interviewed him in Tape Op #74 way back in 2009. There’s a lot of...
So you just drop a microphone to the bottom of an 800ft hole in the earth? Damian Wagner (issue 64) checks in with Tape Op. "I've just returned from a two week audio expedition to Brazil. I was in Brazil to test nine microphones, cables, speakers...
Subconscious Auditory Effects (SAE) is a term I have cobbled together to encapsulate a broad range of phenomena in this barely-studied field of inquiry. An SAE is any measurable effect on a person caused by a sound, or change in sound, that is...
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Here’s a fun and upbeat track from an unlikely collaboration between John Legend and Sufjan Stevens. Check out the first single “L-O-V-E” that features Legend’s wife Chrissy Teigen and their children along with Sufjan...
Bay Area native Scott Hansen, a.k.a. Tycho (Tape Op #123), has just released his sixth album, Infinite Health on Mom+Pop Records/Ninja Tune. Fans familiar with Tycho will hear Infinite Health as a logical progression in a sequence of...
Many of us appreciate the need for acoustic treatments, but few really understand some of the reasons behind it all. The problem is acoustics is a discipline of physics, and physics is often enshrouded in math, complex calculations, and...
