Interviews
By Zachary Gresham
Battle Tapes Recording has been at the epicenter of left-of-Nashville rock and indie music since 2003. Tristen, PUJOL, Forget Cassettes, Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires, HeCTA, Turbo Fruits, and Lambchop have all made records there in the last five years alone. We sat down with owner/operator Jeremy...
Interviews
I've been a fan of Audiotree's video webcast for a couple of years now. It's by far my favorite live-music program a...
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Interviews
Mac DeMarco's persona precedes him. He's a bedroom auteur in the great tradition of R. Stevie Moore and Ariel Pink, and he's managed to cut some of the most fan-beloved records of the 2010s. Budgets? Shoestring. Mic closet? Not enviable. Collaborators? Once a guy named Garfield helped him break a TEAC machine. How does he do it? How many full-length albums did he cut before he turned 25 years old? Enough to call him one of the hardest working guys in indie rock. With his newest full-length release, This Old Dog, Mac outgrows a tape fetish and lunges into the adult world of boutique digital recording rigs.
So my phone rings, and Tape Op contributor Jesse Lauter tells me he needs some help putting together a multitrack recording rig for a documentary film he is co-producing on the 50th Anniversary Monterey International Pop Festival. "I think we can make that work," I said, "When is the show?" "Oh, 12 days from now?" Needless to say, we were scrambling to pull together a recording rig. I have a 24-input remote setup, but we needed 48 inputs (plus audience mics) in order to capture all the various signals coming off stage for each of the eight sets per day of the three-day festival.
The AT8459 is a product that encourages you to say, “How did I ever live without it?” It’s a compact, double-socket arm with mic threads on the ball ends. After you screw on a mic clip to the male-threaded end, and attach the female end to a mic stand or boom, you can articulate your mic into...
While organizing my mic cabinets recently, I decided to replace some of the crappy plastic mic clips that I’ve collected over the years. Some of the cheap clips I bought separately, some came with low-cost mics, while others came with expensive Sennheiser, Neumann, and AKG mics. And some mics, like...
Four knobs, a three-position switch, and no bull! bx_subfilter is touted as a simple but effective tool for tightening up bass frequencies, and it is 100% free for all Plugin Alliance members. I’ve been drinking the Plugin Alliance Kool-Aid for almost two years now. As an informed member, I...
The landlord of our new studio location really likes organized racks and cables. His control room looks like a server farm installed by IBM. Cables are loomed, labeled, and cut to length. No excess clutter can be found. But I come from the school of thought that anything behind the rack is fair...
In my opinion, macOS 10.8.5 running Pro Tools 10.x is stable and “rock solid.” Some of us put off inevitability to maintain productivity, but eventually “progress” (be it for our own benefit or not) will move us forward... or our older hardware will fail. For the time being, I’m gambling that a...
When SE Electronics invented the trademarked Reflexion Filter [Tape Op #56] in 2006, I recall many engineers in our industry thinking it was a groundbreaking product, while others were skeptical. Since then, the basic premise of the Reflexion, a curved acoustic barrier that surrounds the rear of a...
This powered monitor incorporates the most impressive speaker technology I have ever experienced. It’s a real game changer. The Kii THREE’s dispersion pattern is cardioid, even at the lower end of the frequency spectrum, where reflections from nearby wall/floor/ceiling surfaces normally wreak havoc...
When the music-recording market made a shift towards project studios and converted spaces, many of us had to suffer through years of crappy sounding rooms. I have countless memories of working in studios that lacked acoustic treatment, while sitting behind the console cursing at the difficulty of...
Opolar sells a variety of fans. The F511 is a 9’’ diameter, three-blade desktop model with two speeds and a built-in stand. It can be useful in remote-recording situations or anywhere you have 200–600 mA of current available from a USB Type A port. (I mention this because most USB hubs have an...
The Red Range is Focusrite’s latest series of audio interfaces, currently comprised of the Red 4Pre and Red 8Pre. The former has four built-in Red Evolution preamps, and a total I/O count of 58 in and 64 out, divided across digital and analog channels. The latter has eight preamps, and a total of...
In my recent review of the Audeze Deckard headphone amp/DAC [Tape Op #119], I emphasized the value of high-quality monitoring systems for laptops, iPhones, and other portable devices. An enhanced mobile listening experience really makes a difference, and its merits should not be ignored. What has...
Having worked (and played) in various recording studios since the mid-’80s, I’ve seen (and worn) my share of Fostex headphones. Along with AKG K240 and Sony MDR series models, Fostex cans were everywhere in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I remember two basic versions from back in the day. There was the...
Elevation Lab is an industrial design firm based in Portland, OR, that can’t decide whether its name includes a space or not. It makes the kinds of products that we wish were included with the gear we purchased. From iPad and Apple Watch docks, to magnetic chargers — the company offers a portfolio...
USB products are everywhere. macOS-based mastering engineers have been dealing with external disc burners for many years, ever since Apple decided internal units were passé. And it seems everyone has clients who rely on thumb drives and those small portable hard drives. All that moving around can...