Interviews
Interviews
Interviews
Interviews
Recording engineer Bella Blasko has worked with bands like The National, Big Red Machine, Feist, and Bonny Light Horseman. Additionally, she earned a Grammy nomination for her work on Taylor Swift's "cardigan" from the album, folklore. She recently spoke with Lisa Machac of the Omni Sound Project about her influences, recording on tour, and her aspirations.
Record producer, songwriter, musician, and singer, Eurythmics co-founder Dave Stewart is a man of many talents and skills. Beyond co-producing all of the Eurythmics' catalog with Annie Lennox, he's produced music for Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Joss Stone, Mick Jagger, Daryl Hall, Jon Bon Jovi, and Ringo Starr. His new album, Ebony McQueen, is an expansive tale of a UK teen discovering music, as well as an intriguing, psychedelic listen that will eventually be finding its way to the stage and screen. Dave also owns Bay Street Studios in the Caribbean, along with Bay Street Records, and stays continually busy producing artists and helping release their music. Our chat begins via a Zoom call with a rough connection:
Fantastic Negrito's new album, White Jesus Black Problems, is based on the true story of Negrito's seventh generation white Scottish grandmother (Grandma Gallamore), an indentured servant living in a common law marriage with his seventh generation African American enslaved grandfather (Grandfather Courage); in open defiance of the racist, separatist, laws of 1750s colonial Virginia." In this country, we worship billionaires while parts of some cities look like what we'd call the third world. I'm trying to convey what I see when I walk down the street here in Oakland." Born Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz in 1968, he released a big budget Interscope debut (The X Factor) as Xavier in 1996. Then, after a near death accident and quitting music for seven years, he was reborn as Fantastic Negrito. He has released five albums under the moniker since 2014, and the last three, including 2021's Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?, have won consecutive Grammys for Best Contemporary Blues album.
It's a snowy March morning, and I'm enroute to Corpus Studios in Queens to hang with Arthur Rizk. Arthur's driven up from Philadelphia to chat before he works live sound at the Bowery Ballroom. He was up late mixing, but seems genuinely happy to catch up with the Corpus studio family, who he's been working with on the upcoming Show Me The Body album. With a production style rooted in classic hard rock techniques and deft use of textural sound design, Arthur has quietly become the go-to producer for left of center heavy music in the 2020s. From his home base in Philly to studios around the globe, he's welded his parallel pedal mayhem for the likes of Ghostemane, Kreator, Power Trip, and Cavalera Conspiracy. He's also an emerging king of traditional heavy metal with his own bands Eternal Champion and Sumerlands. We spoke under the glow of Corpus' lovely Berlant tube preamps about bringing calm to chaos, while also working hard to keep the party going. Feature Photo Jaclyn Wollard
In our world of recording gear, there are plenty of “classics” when one thinks of compressors, mic preamps, or microphones. However, one particular piece of gear that usually isn’t at the top of anyone’s list of classics is a de-esser – an excellent utility piece of equipment, but probably not...
I love the sound of ribbon microphones, and I put one in front of a guitar amp nearly every time I record one. I ran across the Samar Audio Design AL95 online, and after reading about it, I had to check it out. When I first received the box sent for review, it was so light I thought the contents...
Hailing from 1978, and peppered throughout several classic recordings in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the AMS DMX 15-80 S was the world’s first microprocessor-controlled, 15-bit digital delay and pitch shifter; a rack-mounted combo wonder box with a sinusoidal VCO for modulation effects. The UAD plug-in...
Solid State Logic, better known as SSL, boasts a four-decade history of producing leading products for commercial studios, broadcast facilities, and live sound. However, SSL has recently directed their attention towards project and home studios, and they’ve seriously upped the ante of modern studio...
If you have a single rack space 1/4-inch patchbay from the likes of dbx, Behringer, Samson, or Neutrik, you understand the challenge of marking things clearly. Nashville’s Trace Audio has an inexpensive solution in the form of peel-and-stick labels. Custom cut according to model, the white patch...
BABY Audio is quickly developing a reputation for boiling plug-ins down to their essential components and reshaping them into concentrated, powerful production tools. With their newest release, a sleek reverb plug-in called Crystalline, they’ve reinvented the algorithmic reverb wheel, drawing...
CEntrance’s DACport Pro is a portable tool designed by people who understand the needs of working engineers. Laptop audio outputs offer up questionable quality – assuming your maker deigns even to include one. One of the engineers here at Treelady Studios swears by a USB stick that combines DAC and...
Fourteen years ago, Apogee Electronics released their original Firewire Duet [Tape Op #65] – arguably opening the floodgates for one-knob desktop interfaces that focus on portability and ease of use, with high-quality conversion and built-in preamps. Many other manufacturers have followed suit with...
This is a new one. FiDef is a psychoacoustic process MAAT licensed from FideliQuest LLC for inclusion in thEQblue (which is a sweet EQ – but that’s a different discussion). Now available as a standalone plug-in, FiDef JENtwo is available without the EQ. First, I’ll summarize the formal explanation...
There is absolute magic contained in the plastered walls of classic studios’ echo chambers. I’ve been lucky enough to make many records at Sound Emporium Studios in Nashville, which has two wonderful tall and narrow chambers. I’ve run everything through them. I’ve climbed into them with acoustic...
I recently moved into a new control room, and because of this much of my gear, interface, monitoring, and general workflow changed drastically. My new mantra was to scale down the physical footprint of my overall setup, but I still needed some robust preamps that would serve me well in a variety of...
You know the scenario: You’ve mic’d up a whole band, did the first day of tracking, and are shutting down for the night, coming back tomorrow for more takes. There are over 25 microphones placed all over the studio to capture various instruments. As we should know, these microphone elements – be...
Texture still seems to me to be the hill on which the battle between us analog Luddites and the digital future is raging. Though digital emulations are now, broadly, pretty good and getting better, sitting next to an actual device and its digital kissin’ cousin has almost always reinforced my bias...
Attention guitar nerds: A new documentary by Alice Gu premiered at SXSW this year that spotlights Reuben Cox, the man behind Old Style Guitar Shop in Los Angeles. Reuben is responsible for developing the coveted rubber bridge guitars that have recently been made popular by artists such as Blake...
Every stereo mix has a phantom center, or middle channel. This “mid,” includes any audio that is not panned (or recorded) exclusively to the right and left “side” channels, and creates a center image in a mix between the speakers. In typical mixes of popular music styles, the mid channel will...