Shooter Jennings

Interviews

Jesse Lauter

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Lou Holtzman

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Ben Kane

Interviews

Denise Barbarita

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Heba Kadry

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JULY 6, 2025 INTERVIEWS
Logan Farmer’s <i>Still No Mother</i>

Logan Farmer’s <i>Still No Mother</i>

I think the best music reaches you on a subconscious level, connecting with you in a way that's not always immediately obvious – when you hear something that makes a real connection, you know it's there even if you don't quite know why. Logan Farmer's Still No Mother is, as he describes it, "A folk record that addresses climate change anxiety," so it's fitting that the first night that I heard it there was a 3000 acre wildfire burning a few miles away from my studio, along with over one million acres that were currently on fire around the state of California. To my ears and mind Still No Mother is not really folk music, though maybe my definition of folk music is too narrow. If Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back could be called folk music, then so can Still No Mother. But where It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is loud and heavy with its message, Still No Mother is quiet and seeps into your consciousness slowly. In fact, this record is probably one third silence, or at least one third very, very quiet, with much more space between the notes than the notes themselves take up. Farmer's songwriting and vocal style feels to me like somewhere in-between Nick Cave and Bill Callahan, and when he moves into his higher register, which is not too often, it evokes Jeff Buckley and even Thom Yorke a bit.

JULY 6, 2025 INTERVIEWS
Marc Urselli

Marc Urselli: Hal Willner, John Zorn, Lou Reed

Several decades ago a young engineer left Italy for New York, looking to enter the studios of Manhattan. These days, Marc Urselli is a respected producer, recording engineer, and front of house live sound mixer. He works out of New York's EastSide Sound as Chief House Engineer and has done sessions as varied as U2, Esperanza Spalding, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, and Foo Fighters, as well as having worked extensively with Hal Willner before Hal's passing this year. Willner was famous for his unique, multi-artist tribute albums, and his final production, Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs Of Marc Bolan And T. Rex, was engineered by Marc and saw release in August this year.

JULY 6, 2025 INTERVIEWS
Scott Jacoby

Scott Jacoby: The Humanity in the Process

In 2017 John and I went to visit Scott Jacoby in Manhattan at his Eusonia Studios. Since then he's mixed Jason Mraz's Look for the Good album, produced and written for a diverse slew of artists (including Deva Mahal, Cory Henry, Rachel Platten, and Stormzy), and helped create a studio (AMA Recording) at The AMA Center on the island of Anguilla for teaching arts, media, and technology in the Caribbean region. His career includes songwriting, production, mixing, and more, and he keeps busy, working with artists like Coldplay, Vampire Weekend, Sia, John Legend, and José James.

COLUMNS

Forest for the Trees
END RANT
Gear Geeking w/ Andy
GEAR GEEKING

GEAR REVIEWS

Gear Reviews

013 FET SDC Microphone

by 013 FET SDC Microphone  |  reviewed by Robert Cheek, John Baccigaluppi

Talking and writing about microphones feels a bit like talking and writing about wine – we all like what we like, and mouthing off about it can get pretentious pretty quickly. Nonetheless, we continue to do it. One of my holy grail microphones is the vintage Neumann KM 84. I have an aural memory of...

Gear Reviews

A12t In-Ear Monitors

by A12t In-Ear Monitors  |  reviewed by Lars Fox

I use in-ear monitors (IEMs) to really dig down deep into the details of mixes I’m tweaking – most especially vocals. You can clearly hear weird breaths, overly loud esses, plosives on “b” and “p” sounds, plus other tasks like reviewing reverb tails, overall spaciousness, digital ticks, and so on....

Gear Reviews

C705 Condenser Mic

by C705 Condenser Mic  |  reviewed by Brad Allen Williams

In 1947, a young Dr. Heitaro Nakajima was hired by the technical and research division of Japan’s public broadcast house NHK. Although he’d have a long and illustrious career (later spearheading the development of the compact disc), one of his earliest projects wasn’t a complete success. Inspired...

Gear Reviews

Clearmountain's Spaces Plug-In

by Clearmountain's Spaces Plug-In  |  reviewed by Gus Berry

Late last year, Apogee Digital released Clearmountain’s Domain [Tape Op #135], a plug-in that allows users to emulate the effects that renowned mix engineer, Bob Clearmountain, has been using on hit records for decades. Clearmountain’s Domain houses a stereo delay, impulse response reverbs, and a...

Gear Reviews

Crystals Plug-In

by Crystals Plug-In  |  reviewed by John Baccigaluppi

Crystals is Eventide’s latest port of its iconic H3000 Harmonizer algorithms into a simpler plug-in GUI – similar to their Blackhole, MangledVerb, Spring [Tape Op #137], MicroPitch, along with others from their Anthology [#111] library, and it’s a keeper. It’s a combo of reverb, pitch shift, and...

Gear Reviews

ICE Cube-12 Subwoofer

by ICE Cube-12 Subwoofer  |  reviewed by Larry Crane

Did you know it’s possible to spend $4000 on a 12-inch powered subwoofer? Wait, no, that’s not what I’m reviewing here! While writing this review I ended up scanning Sweetwater and found a similarly-spec’d subwoofer for four times the price of the ICE Cube-12. Now that we’ve put this in...

Gear Reviews

Listento Remote Monitoring Plug-In

by Listento Remote Monitoring Plug-In  |  reviewed by Brad Allen Williams

If the COVID-19 pandemic has any silver lining, it’s the way it has invited the reimagining of entrenched habits. When we all mothballed our tracking rooms in March, we became pretty open-minded to new ways of working. Unattended mixing and mastering could help us survive for a while, but we wanted...

Gear Reviews

New STAGE 1 Board Isolation Platform

by New STAGE 1 Board Isolation Platform  |  reviewed by John Baccigaluppi

At the January 2020 NAMM Show (which seems like a lifetime ago) the New STAGE 1 Board Combo was one of the cooler things I saw. It’s really simple; an amp-sized heavy-duty ABS polymer plastic board with four integrated mini vibration isolators on the bottom. At NAMM our friend Paul de Benedictis...

Gear Reviews

Saturn 2 Saturation and Distortion Plug-In

by Saturn 2 Saturation and Distortion Plug-In  |  reviewed by Dave Hidek

FabFilter’s Saturn was one of 2012’s most celebrated plug-ins, offering multi-band distortion and saturation, along with a sleek GUI, plus a powerful modulation section that was embraced by sound designers and electronic musicians alike. If you weren’t in the know then, consider yourself in the...

Gear Reviews

SEQ-S Linear Phase EQ Plug-In

by SEQ-S Linear Phase EQ Plug-In  |  reviewed by Don Gunn

NUGEN Audio, in case you’re not familiar, have been making sizable inroads in the post-production and mastering worlds over the last 16 years with plug-ins that I generally characterize as problem-solving tools. However, in the last few years, they have also begun to focus on music production and...

Gear Reviews

SiX Analog Desktop Mixer

by SiX Analog Desktop Mixer  |  reviewed by J. Robert Lennon

After a series of moves that necessitated selling most of my recording gear, I recently found myself with a stable spot for a small office/studio that’s largely dedicated to working alone. High on my want list were a couple of good preamps and two decent channels of compression. I started looking...

Gear Reviews

SV33 Microphone

by SV33 Microphone  |  reviewed by Brendan Connors

I have used Earthworks products since early in my career, and have always wondered what a flagship Earthworks studio vocal microphone would be like to use in one of my sessions. Much to my delight, they finally released the SV33 in 2018, a large diaphragm cardioid electret condenser aimed at the...

Gear Reviews

VISO & PIB Isolation Booths

by VISO & PIB Isolation Booths

I was told early on in my career, “Start at your source and work your way back,” and it’s never let me down. If I get stuck on a problem for too long, it’s usually because I’ve ignored that advice. I remember early in my career during a vocal session having a problem with a clicking sound. I...