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...
In the disembodied world of today's computer-based multitrack mixing, one can spend a lot of time crafting a unifying sense of "space." Despite the dozens of reverb plug-ins and rack devices...
In the fall of 2008 I was hired to help build a temporary home studio in the California coastal town of Bolinas, where Devendra Banhart was planning to start tracking a new album. I was excited...
From the first moment another engineer raved about a Little Labs DI to me, I knew that this company was onto something special. It turns out Little Labs is Jonathan Little, a man who lives and works...
Ableton Live is a program that has long been hard to define — is it a DAW, is it a DJ-centric program, is it a tweaker's toolbox or is it all (or none) of the above? A recent major update,...
Tim Spencer's TRUE Systems, based in Tucson, Arizona, has been quietly building a reputation as a manufacturer of quality mic preamps for the last 12 years. Tim's electrical engineering degree, and...
Vic Keary and Nick Terry, along with partner Jon Bailes, are the people behind the UK gear company Thermionic Culture. Larry and I both have several pieces of their gear that we really like, so...
About an hour's drive across the Netherlands from Amsterdam sits the city of Oosterhout. In Oosterhout is where you'll find RMGI, Recordable Media Group International, one of two places in the...
In 1999 Universal Audio, the company founded by the esteemed Bill Putnam Sr., was re-launched by his sons, Bill Jr. and Jim Putnam [Tape Op #24]. In addition to re-creating some of the classic...
How many hours have we all sat staring at the GUI [graphical user interface] of our plug-ins and rarely, if never, thought about the people behind the math, form and function of these amazing...
When the name Heil started popping up around recording studios in conjunction with an interesting take on large diaphragm dynamic microphones a few years back, it was not a new name to those with a...
In my own stubborn world of recording, sample libraries are slowly making inroads. Almost everything I work with involves real instruments recorded in a room, yet sampled strings, Mellotron and...
