Interviews
By Steve Gullick, Kevin Coral
Another fact is that last year they released one of the best American records in a long time, Deserter Songs. Recorded by the hot producer of the day, Dave Fridmann, it was an instant classic. We were lucky enough to talk to Jonathan and Grasshopper on their swank tour bus when they rolled through Cleveland....
Interviews
Wharton Tiers has run Fun City studios out of his Manhattan basement since 1981. He's recorded some of the finest records by S...
Interviews
So what do you do when the band you're interviewing asks you to chop up the tape, splice it back together and print it just like...
Interviews
Robyn Hitchcock has long been one of my favorite artists, whether it's the spastic...
Interviews
In his tiny apartment in New York, Dean Wilson, aka Illyah Kuryahkin, has created some of...
Interviews
Ween gets away with murder. It is one of the few bands that writes, records, and releases...
Quaintly nestled in the western region of upstate New York, USA, between Buffalo and Erie, Pennsylvania, lies a small blink-and-you'll-miss-it town named Cassadaga; a place where maybe the most exciting thing going on might be someone filling up their vehicle with gasoline. While existence in any small community may lend itself to being very quiet and seemingly uneventful, Cassadaga in particular, just so happens to be summoning some of the world's most acclaimed musical recording artists. The source responsible for the phenomenon points towards nearby Fredonia resident Dave Fridmann: producer, recording engineer, musician and an overall friendly collaborator. His perogative is different and simple — to fill up tracks.
We interviewed Phill Brown in issue number 12 of Tape Op. Over the years he's worked with some of the greatest artists ever, like Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Traffic, Spooky Tooth, Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin, Robert Palmer, Bob Marley, Steve Winwood, Harry Nilsson, Roxy Music, Stomu Yamash'ta, John Martyn, Little Feat, Atomic Rooster, and Talk Talk. This is an excerpt from his book, Are We Still Rolling?URL, and we'll be running more chapters from it in upcoming issues. Last issue: Phill got his start as a tape operator and worked on sessions with Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Kramer.
For those who thought electronic music started with rave culture or people like myself, who don't really want to buy whole Morton Subotnick albums but have always been curious, this is a cool find. Three CDs of the most important electronic music pioneers: Clara Rockmore, Milton Babbit, Brian Eno,...
One of the best things about using a dedicated recording chain is that it frees up inputs and busses on your mixing console. It's also impossible to accidentally "buss" some other audio into your recording when you forgot a pushed buss button somewhere on your board. I have discovered this snag...
Have you ever been in a studio and embarrassed yourself by A/B-ing your mix with that amazing sounding Nirvana record and the band walks in and screams, "Hey, don't make us sound like Nirvana!" Well, before you loose your coolness the next time (or geekiness - if that's what you strive for, like...
This low-budget publishing effort manages to give a solid introduction to MIDI drumming. It covers nothing too advanced, especially given the expansion of MIDI options since 1987, but if you're a beginner, it's a fine place to start. From drum machine programming to triggering from an acoustic drum...
The U8 comes at a time when recording into a computer seems so non-tactile... operating the "tape deck" and punching in with a mouse doesn't quite work for me in the music making/recording process. The U8 collects all the outboard gear needed for hard-drive computer recording in one small place:...
I am really lucky because a very good friend of mine gave me his vintage Neumann U-67 to use on one of those indefinite loan kind of deals. It really does sound fantastic, and I use it all the time. But it recently went down and I had to record some vocals for an album project. I had recently...
A lot of people are jumping on the Meek bandwagon and I happen to be one of them. Of course it's the obnoxious Meek green, but it still sounds great. Up front it has a fairly clean and neutral preamp sound. It definitely sounds better than a Mackie board preamp to my ears. One thing that makes the...