Interviews
By Steve Silverstein
When I was in high school, I knew a lot less about music than I do now, but even then Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade seemed to jump out of my speakers. It certainly sounded a lot different from anything else that had crossed paths with my teenage ears. I remember reading in Rolling Stone...
Interviews
Tape Op gets quite a few letters and e-mails suggesting people that we should interview, and recently, J. Robbins had to be one o...
Interviews
Eric Ambel started his professional career writing and playing guitar as a Blackheart and a Del Lord. Now a producer and musician, he...
Interviews
The first time I tried to reach Giant Sand, OP8 and Calexico drummer/multi-instrumentalist John Convertino at his Tucson, Arizona home he didn't answer the phone. It seemed only natural that when he called back he told me he hadn't heard the ring because he was playing the drums. He and the other musical head behind Calexico, Joey Burns, have been busy. With the follow-up to their first record Spoke, the latest Calexico release The Black Light has kept them on the road in Europe and around the States, seemingly around the clock. But in addition to their rigorous road diet, they have managed to play and record with artists such as Richard Buckner, Barbara Manning, Doug McCombs and their musical alter egos (with long time friend and Tucson music-man Howe Gelb [Tape Op #12]) Giant Sand and OP8. I talked to both of them during some of their time off and asked them about the recordings, the bands, the music business, and Tucson.
This man should need no introduction. At the height of "grunge-mania" he had recorded the records for Mudhoney and Nirvana that started it all. And he did tham fast and cheap. On the back of Nirvana's Bleach was the famous sentence, "Recorded in Seattle at Reciprocal Recording by Jack Endino for $600." Faced with 100 clone bands trying to get the same results (yeah, right) he fled to doing recording work in other countries and sticking to working with "rock" bands that he dug. He was also a member of the awesome Skin Yard, where his guitar skills were in fine form. We tracked Jack down in Seattle while he was tracking the new Zen Guerilla album for Sub Pop at Studio Litho for an in-depth interview.
Looking at my Pere Ubu liner notes, I noted the frequent appearance of the last name "Hamann". After some confusion, I realized that there were two different first names which accompanied it. I learned that Ken Hamann was the father of Paul Hamann, and poked around to find that they'd recorded a Styrenes single and a Girls single. A friend added that Ken Hamann had recorded a Grand Funk album. It wasn't until I talked to the Hamanns that I discovered the extent of their history in recording and the rest of the story behind their studio, Suma, in Painesville, Ohio.
When it comes time to mix, how about recycling those guitar pedals you have lying around - some of them work really well for a specific effect - just stick one on an aux send! Take the Danelectro "Dan-Echo" pedal for example. For around $110.00 you've got a great delay pedal for tracking and/or...
I was in a local audio shop with my pal Craig when he mentioned this inexpensive little analog to digital converter. For under $170 you can get an outboard converter to put in between your mixer and DAT machine! This seemed too cheap, and I was worried about the unbalanced inputs and S/PDIF only...
It seems like more people are mentioning these cool little compressors lately. They're 1/3 rack space sized jobs that do a better job than a lot of compressors that cost way more. They have the usual front knobs, threshold, attack, release, ratio and output. There's a relay-activating bypass and...
Someone once advised me that no cheap microphone is a bad microphone. With the same principle in mind, I bought this device (which, despite its name, serves mostly as a preamp and something of a mixer) for roughly $30. I learned from a technician at Shure Brothers that the SE-30 was originally...