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[ image niblock1 type=center ] While most subjects of Tape Op interviews have discussed their interest in recording, Phill Niblock thinks far more about reproduction of sound. He composes his pieces, which are often described as minimalist, for playback in large rooms with loud, clean reproduction...
Interviews
Bias and equalization; you've probably heard and used the terms for years, possibly without really understanding their effect o...
Interviews
Every now and then a record comes out where the production and recording techniques work together with some really unique songwriti...
Article
Interviews
Years ago a friend of mine sent me a cassete with a live broadcast of the Go-Betweens, Downey Mildew and Glass Eye that he recorded off the radio from KCRW (public radio 89.9FM) in Santa Monica, California. These weren't crummy recordings by any means, and when I saw that compilations of tracks from KCRW sessions were being released (via Mammoth records) I wasn't surprised. The show is called Morning Becomes Electric and Scott Fritz has born one of the main engineers for the show for the last eight years.
Now I know a lot of people established in the industry today say, "A school can't teach you about recording, what could a class possibly teach you about the complexities of the recording industry?"
Deep in the industrial wasteland of Red Hook, Brooklyn, Adam Lasus has turned an old firehouse into a recording outpost called Fireproof Recording. With the pole still intact, the firehouse proves an interesting place to make records. After checking out other studios, my band North Sea Story, decided to do our record Working for Wellness there. Having never worked with Adam before, the time spent at his studio developed into a perfect opportunity to observe and ask him questions about many things. Adam's work can be heard on records by Yo La Tengo, Space Needle, Versus, Gigolo Aunts, Varnaline, Ditchcroaker, Mark Mulcahy, the Lilys, Sugar Plant and many others. After his start in Philadelphia with Studio Red, he relocated to New York City to discover that there is more than just a tree that grows in Brooklyn.
Larry Packer owns and operates Uncle Punchy Studios in Silver Spring, Maryland. His current setup includes 20-bit ADATs (32 tracks) as well as Pro Tools Mix Plus and a Yamaha 02-R digital console. Larry has worked with artists such as with Clutch, Sixty-Watt Shaman, and Avail as well as mastered recordings for Deep Dish Records, Genes CD & Adelphi Records (R.L. Burnside, Skip James, etc). We've known each other for ten years and I finally got around to seeing what he had done with the place since I was last there.
When I first started Tape Op I wanted to only talk about inexpensive gear (PZMs!) and records that were done on small budgets. Now I find myself stretching out a bit - my 8-track studio is long behind me and I just spent $10,000 on a used 24-track. And gear has piled up around me - some of it not...
This strange bass is none other than a 31 inch (with a 13-1/4 inch fretboard), rubber stringed, fretless bass guitar. You tune it like a regular 4-string bass (E, A, D, G), and it sounds absolutely outrageous! I'm serious! It even comes with it's own, little case! It has one active piezo-style pick...
This is the first time it's happened. As I was packing up the loaner 4047 to send back to Audio- Technica I got kinda sad. I'd been using this $500 beauty on everything - guitar amps, vocals, drums - you name it, it sounded great. I could set it up as a room mic for drums in spots where other mics...
Many of the new large diaphragm condenser microphones coming out lately make the claim that their mic sounds just like a Neumann U-67 or U-87. Sadly though, none that I have tried even come close. The irony of this situation is that when I recently tried the new Cad E-350, it's characteristics...
I briefly reviewed this software in Tape Op #18, but now I have been able to really spend some time with it. Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first. This software, when compared to Cubase or especially Pro Tools, is not easy to get started with, nor is it very intuitive. The reason for this...
At the recent AES show, Digidesign was handing out postcards that promoed their new free version of Pro Tools. It's an 8 audio/48 MIDI track version of Pro Tools 5.0.1 that will run on a Mac or PC without any additional hardware. This is a cool way to get your feet wet with hard drive recording...
Recently I got to try out the Apogee Rosetta (street price, $1100). Using this in place of the DAT machine's analog to digital conversion seems to preserve more of the qualities of the mix so it sounds like what I have up on the board. It doesn't add that special "something" of analog tape, but it...
Not the soon-to-be released one, but the standard-issue one has a built-in CD player. Most people who have come into contact with them know that. Some may even know that when you hit the "select" button you get to scroll through different screens of "eye candy" whose images respond to the amplitude...
It's amazing how one little box could change what I do so much. Simply put, this is an impedence matcher for going from the output of tape/board/line-level type signal to the input of guitar amps, stomp boxes and the like. Boy this opened up a lot. Now drum busses are feeding distortion pedals and...