Interviews
By Stephanie Stedman, Larry Crane
Long before I even dreamed of professionally recording or starting a magazine like Tape Op, I was a huge fan of the band Dead Can Dance. Formed by Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard in Australia in 1981, the band soon morphed from post punk to creating beautiful, ethereal sounds drawn from ethnic music...
Interviews
New Zealand's Mark de Clive-Lowe is your conductor, musical tour guide, and conduit to the past and future. From accomplished j...
Interviews
Since 2006 Catherine Vericolli has run her Fivethirteen Recording in Tempe, outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Along with long-time engin...
Interviews
Interviews
Years ago, before they hired (Tape Op contributor) Chris Koltay to tour with them, I mixed the band Deerhunter at a festival. Afterward I went to find the band and say hello. Lead singer and guitarist Bradford Cox came right up to me and said, "Dude! You turned up my guitar for the solos! I could hear it from the stage! Nobody knows to do that. Thank you!" It seemed so obvious to me, I couldn't understand how somebody would not do that. A few years after that I noticed another live sound engineer, mixing a Latin band, had a VCA group [voltage controlled amplifier] labeled "VAMP." He explained to me that the VCA had everything except the vocals in it. That way when the vocalist stepped away from the mic, and the band started to vamp, he would push the whole band louder to fill the void. Here was something just as obvious as turning up a guitar solo, and it had never occurred to me. The point is, when listening to popular forms of music, we generally want the music to consistently fill up about the same amount of space. When James Brown counts to four on "Funky Drummer," so everyone could "lay out and let the drummer go," Clyde Stubblefield does play a little bit harder, but the mix engineer also clearly turns him up right when the band drops out, and, correctly, doesn't turn him down until after the second beat when the band comes back in.
We first met esteemed mix engineer Michael Brauer in Tape Op #37 in 2003, when Mike Caffrey interviewed him about his multi-bus mixing technique. Some 16 years later Michael and I sat down at his new space, BrauerSound Studios, to discuss his career path and unique mixing techniques. He's crossed genres frequently, working as a mixer on projects by artists as varied as Luther Vandross, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Tony Bennett, Coldplay, John Mayer, Calle 13, Angelique Kidjo, Phoenix, Bon Jovi, M. Ward, Grandaddy [Tape Op #7], Caveman, James Bay, and Grizzly Bear.All archive photos and captions courtesy of MB.
This "daughter card" works with the BURL B80 Mothership [Tape Op #84] and B16 Mothership configurable audio I/O systems. When the B80 Mothership was introduced, the BDA8 was the choice for D-to-A output conversion, but it was not transformer-balanced like the BAD8 A-to-D input cards were, instead...
I have to stop and reflect on the way we listen to music today versus how I did growing up. It used to be a trip to the now defunct Tower Records or whatever local record store was in my town at the time. We browsed the racks looking for either the latest release from our favorite band or the...
(Cue Bon Scott howling "HIGH! VOLTAGE!") The Crescendo, andSPL's proprietary SUPRA high voltage op-ampsare an exciting innovation, and I believe it's a first of its kind: an 8-channel mic preamp operating on ±60 volt DC power rails (touted by SPL as "120V Technology"). While most pro audio gear...
Cubase is my primary DAW. It offers me the best performance and user experience for recording and mixing music – whether I'm running it on my Microsoft Surface hybrid tablet/laptop with a portable stereo interface, or on my purpose-built rackmount PC with 194/196 channels of I/O. Cubase is...
The recent history of audio has seen many companies come out with outboard phantom powered microphone amplifier devices intended to be used prior to the input stage of a proper mic preamplifier since the Cloud Microphones Cloudlifter CL-1 [Tape Op #85] was introduced in 2009. Typically, these are...
The DrAlienSmith DirtMic-01 is an awesome "outside the box" mic for creating rich harmonic distortion effects without a plug-in or guitar pedal. It's very useful for blending with clean vocals, bass, and electric guitar tracks in order to enhance a source's sound. It can also be used as a stand...
Earthworks has made well-regarded condenser microphones for over 20 years. I've been curious about their drum mics for quite a while, so I was stoked to receive a CMK4 mic kit for review. The CMK4 kit provides four DM20 mics and clips inside a Pelican style suitcase. The DM20 is the latest...
Leave it to Wade Goeke at Chandler Limited to come up with a new mic circuit unlike any I (and probably anyone else) have ever experienced. The full name of this new mic from the folks in Iowa is the Chandler Limited EMI Abbey Road Studios TG Microphone, and that should help give some idea of the...
Solid State Logic has dominated the analog mixing console world for rock, pop, and R&B records for over three decades, and while DAWs have mostly taken over as production and mixing environments, SSL has been expanding into digital consoles for broadcasting and live sound. SSL also produces a line...
I'm old enough to be wary of devices that claim to be cure-alls for making audio sound good. Processing devices, such as Aphex's Aural Exciter and BBE's Sonic Maximizer, abounded in the '80s, but most of the time I found the supposed sonic benefits of these devices to be far outweighed by how they...
To piggyback on John Baccigaluppi's End Rant musings "Give Me a Hammer" [Tape Op #102 and #115], I have been looking for a particular hammer that might serve as my aspiration to get back to what fired me up about recording in the first place: spontaneously capturing ideas as they arose, with no...
I've chatted with Eric "Mixerman" Sarafin in the past [Tape Op #34] about his hilarious The Daily Adventures of Mixerman book and reviewed some of his helpful Zen and the Art of... guides to producing, mixing, and recording. With Musician's Survival Guide to a Killer Record, Mixerman turns the...
This wonderful book tells the story of master engineer/producer Al Schmitt's career, along with many of his thoughts about the art of making records, with a smattering of interesting photos to boot. I'm not sure I need to remind the readers of the artists Al has worked with, but names like Bob...
If you've ever mic'd up a drum set, you are no doubt familiar with the struggle for floor space among various cymbal and mic stands – the traffic jam around the snare drum is about as predictable as death and taxes. If you've ever used multiple microphones in an iso booth, you know that floor real...
Most 500 Series racks are just that – a hunk of rack gear that's not the sexiest piece of kit in the studio. They're mostly just a utility piece that's simply designed to interface other equipment with the really fun stuff in the 500 Series world. Let's face it, 500 Series chassis are mostly just a...
When producing, mixing, or mastering, how frequently do you go out to your car and check your mix? Do you listen on three different headphones and a few different Bluetooth speakers? My answer to this question has changed over the years, and today the simple answer is that I don't feel the need to...
The Stealth is the latest addition to Aston's product line. I've been an admirer of their revolutionary designs since reviewing their Starlight small diaphragm condenser [Tape Op #123]. I then purchased the Halo Shadow reflection filter based solely on my experience with the Starlight. Aston...
My mix bus is a little crowded. Generally, I have three to four units doing very subtle things. I enjoy the cumulative effect of several stages of iron and discrete op-amps soaking up transients and warming things up. I seem to get away with a single bus compressor, like many may use. Often, before...
Welcome to the brave new world of DSP! Along with folks like iZotope, Audionamix is on the cutting edge of spectral based DSP technology that can do previously unheard of things with audio. These products are both based on being able to take a stereo mix of a song and separate out the vocals from...