About The Cover Art for Issue #167

When we published issue #167, we, of course, credited Hazel Morishige for the cover art, but I forgot to credit the individual pieces of art that Hazel had cut out of previous issues of Tape Op for her collage, so I thought it would be fun to explore Hazel’s collage a bit more in-depth and show the entire piece of art since we had to crop out some of it to fit the cover.

First up we have the hand touching the pink half circle, which comes from the Oeksound ad. I gotta say, I love the graphic design of the Oeksound ads. Super classy and minimalist. I can see why Hazel zeroed in on this one. And of course Oeksound also makes some great plug-ins like Soothe, Bloom, and Spiff.

Next we have that EQ at the bottom of the page which is the UTA 500EQ from the Undertone Audio ad. This EQ is amazing!!! You can read my review of it in issue 161. Eric Valentine and the UTA crew are making some really great, unique pieces of gear.

I’m not sure which issue that old RCA knob came from, but just underneath it is the API The Box console from the API ad. RCA and AP –I two great classic American-made consoles. You can read about The Box here and here.

The background for most of the rest of the ad is from the Universal Audio ad that had a photo of their vintage gear collection that they used to model their huge plug-in line from. If you read Tape Op, then you know that we all use a lot of UA gear and software and we love it.

That Les Paul guitar? That’s from the Sweetwater ad. All of us buy a lot of gear from Sweetwater because they’re super efficient, the pricing is good, and the sales people actually know what they’re talking about. And now they have their used GearExchange site, which is a nice option to buy and sell used gear without the big fees some of the other sites are now charging.

That roll of RTM tape is from the super cool looking hand drawn RTM tape ad, and again I can see why Hazel used this one as well. I’ve been using the RTM tape lately and really digging it; you can read my review here.

Those 3 knobs - API, Wurlitzer, and EMT 140 – are from my Panoramic Studio ad, but zooming out a bit more those are from the super cool “Knobs” cover that Scotty Iulianelli did for Tape Op #154. We love Scotty’s art, he also did the cover for #129, and he’s also the graphic wizard who does those cool looking Soyuz Microphone ads. And yeah, we love those Soyuz mics too!

Okay. Last but not least you can finally see the Peluso microphone that I had to crop out to get it to fit the cover space. I hated to do this, because I really liked the way the mic looked and filled the left hand side of the page, but if I put it in the hand got chopped in half and that didn’t work at all.