Interviews
By Jonathan Saxon
Producer/engineer Val Garay is best known for his work on albums by James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Toto, Kim Carnes, Seals and Crofts, Jackson Browne, and The Motels. Interestingly, he comes from a show business family. His father was an entertainer who was close friends with Errol Flynn, Max Baer, Lauren...
Interviews
Erik Wofford owns and operates Cacophony Recorders in Austin, Texas, and has worked with artists such as the Black Angels, Explosio...
Interviews
In 2001, Alistair Chant's band, Actual Size, were signed by Gut Records and used money from their record deal to build a recordi...
Interviews
Mastering engineer Gavin Lurssen has been behind the console since 1991, won three Grammys and one Latin Grammy, and runs Lurssen Mastering — one of Southern California's busiest facilities. He's worked on records like Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' Raising Sand and the Foo Fighters' Sonic Highways, as well as with clients like Ben Harper, Queens Of The Stone Age, Eric Clapton, Miranda Lambert, Rickie Lee Jones, and Elvis Costello. The fascinating Lurssen Mastering Console app/plug-in recently came out, via IK Multimedia, and was developed with Gavin and Reuben Cohen of Lurssen.
Starting in 1965 at Abbey Road Studios, Jerry Boys wound his way through many of the UK's finest studios, including Olympic, Sound Techniques, Sawmills, and Livingston. He also has travelled all over the world making records. And on that path he worked on albums with Buena Vista Social Club, R.E.M., Sandy Denny, Toumani Diabaté, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Shadows, Yehudi Menuhin, the Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann, Steeleye Span, Level 42, Everything but the Girl, Ry Cooder, Ibrahim Ferrer, John Lee Hooker, Ali Farka Toure, Shakira, Olivia Chaney, Omara Portuondo, and The Kronos Quartet. I've long considered him to be one of the best, and most versatile, engineers in the world, and we had quite a fine chat on a sunny day in London.
The following is extra conversation from our feature interview with Mateusz Wozniak .
Producer/engineer Val Garay is best known for his work on albums by James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Toto, Kim Carnes, Seals and Crofts, Jackson Browne, and The Motels. Interestingly, he comes from a show business family. His father was an entertainer who was close friends with Errol Flynn, Max Baer, Lauren Bacall, and Bing Crosby. We met up at his home studio, off of beautiful Topanga Canyon, in Los Angeles, to discuss his career and recording techniques.
BAE has been making high quality gear in Los Angeles since the '80s, when the company's initials referred to the name of original owner Brent Averill, and Brent got his start racking vintage Neve 1073 modules and 1272 line-amp cards. As the recording industry turned towards the digital realm and...
Do people still argue about analog summing versus in-the- box mixing? I'm sure somewhere in Internet-world, the flames are still raging. I can see both sides of the long- running argument, but it's kind of like pontificating on hiking. It's great to talk about how nice places are, but at some...
In 2014, SonicScoop ran a good article detailing a few engineers' go-to mix-bus chains. I was surprised to see the substantial pile of plug-ins and outboard units (though nearly all plug-ins) that everyone strapped across their 2-bus. I expected more "I leave that for the mastering engineer"...
Last summer, I invited myself to Panoramic House, John Baccigaluppi's studio in Marin County. I was thinking about buying a new mix-bus compressor, and Panoramic had a few I wanted to audition. Plus, really, I just wanted to see the place. And holy shit, it is glorious! For a crazy low rate, you...
One of the last things I think about when hearing the term "broadcast mic" is actual broadcast application. I have never done a podcast or worked at a radio station. Broadcast mics are typically large-diaphragm dynamic mics, tailor-made for announcers and DJs. They have extra shielding and are...
Brainworx bx_console sent me down a rabbit hole. This plug-in is not just a digital model of an analog channel strip; it is the paradoxical digital door to the zeitgeist of analogism. Let me explain: Analog audio devices are made of electrical components, like resistors and capacitors. Every...
The Effect Integrator pedal is a quick and easy way to introduce your favorite guitar stompboxes into your mic signal chain. As a former FOH guy and constant pawn-shop pedal peruser, I decided to give the Effect Integrator a whirl to see what it could offer on stage and in the studio. Anybody...
I literally had to hide my Roland GR-55 Guitar Synthesizer under the couch, safe from view. This unassuming piece of gear (it only sports a few buttons and five main foot controls), started taking over my life — 15 minutes just to "test out" a new sound design became 2 hours and 15 minutes later....
Brad Avenson is great at packing a lot of hi-fi functionality into the smallest possible, heavy-duty aluminum cases. His latest product aimed at guitarists and studios is a "remix" of his IsoDi. At 3.3'' × 5.25'' × 1.4'', it's about the size of most standard direct boxes, but it does much more....
It's pretty awesome to stumble across a quarterly print 'zine that's "dedicated to increasing visibility for women working in live and recorded sound." Women in Sound is the product of editor Madeleine Campbell, a young recording engineer working in the Pittsburgh area. Issue #1 features Heba Kadry...
While Great Britain's legacy of recording gear manufacturing is rich, it's mostly been devoid of condenser microphones. Although many historic capacitor mics have roots in Germany or Austria, they've been manufactured in Eastern Europe, Australia, Japan, China, the United States... but not the UK,...
Ozone 7 is a sizable update to the already feature-rich Ozone mastering suite of plug-ins. The standard version of Ozone 7 includes three new functions, while the Advanced version has seven. Vintage Limiter pulls the "tube" mode found in earlier versions of Maximizer and gives it its own module....
Mics can make the ordinary extraordinary. Mics are the lenses through which we show the listener the picture of what and how we see the world. Along the years, there have been many different iterations of mic design. Some have survived longer than others, not only physically but also in our...
To most audio engineers, Manley Labs is best known for its rack gear. But Manley also makes mics. The Reference Cardioid and Reference Gold are hand-built tube mics suitable for critical recording applications. The Reference Gold is available in Mono and Stereo variants, with the only meaningful...
Every rare once in a while, I stumble across something on the Internet that is so unique, overlooked, and vital, that I feel I need to point it out to somebody. SY Programming is one of those finds. Written in 2002 by Mr. Janßen, it's seemingly a how-to guide on programming the Yamaha SY77, an...
Since around 2002, those in the know have held secret appreciation and employed covert application of the ART Pro VLA and Pro VLA II compressors. These 2RU-height, tube-based, optical compressors found themselves at home on rock drum and vocal buses, taming harsh transients and imparting their...
Here's another product from Radial Engineering that has much more to it than meets the eye. At first glance, the Workhorse SixPack has the same form factor as any other six-slot 500-series frame with a carry handle, like the API Lunchbox, the product that defined this popular format. But if you...