Interviews
By Roman Sokal
Daniel Burton has seen it all and would rather stay home. This does not mean he is jaded or a hermit — he just knows what should be done in order to get things done. If you listen to any of his recordings, be it albums by acclaimed artists such as Songs: Ohia, Dave Fischoff or the Early Day Miners (whom...
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[ image wave1 type=center ] One of the most difficult challenges a mixing engineer faces is figuring out how to balance the low fre...
Interviews
Trans Am have made their name by inventing the nexus of Neu!, ZZ Top, Kraftwerk, Van Halen and Mike Post. They've kept themsel...
Interviews
Interviews
In his twenty-five plus years in the music business, Andy Wallace has grown from an unknown home recording enthusiast to the premier mixer of his day. Andy's first commercial breakthrough came with his co-production (along with Rick Rubin) and mixing of Slayer's Reign in Blood and continued with high-profile work on such projects as mixing Nirvana's Nevermind, Rage Against The Machine's self-titled debut and it's follow-up Evil Empire, and production and engineering of Jeff Buckley's debut album, Grace.
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 another excerpt from his (still!) unpublished book, Are We Still Rolling?URL Last issue: Phill began doing two albums at once. –LC
New high-end studio reverbs tend to sell for over $1000, and $10 Pioneer models produce a lot of noise. Orban's mid-80s rack-mount unit presents a reasonable compromise. With 2 channels selling for about $300 (used, obviously), it has relatively low noise, balanced outputs, and a characteristic...
Recently Drawmer introduced a new version of its 1960, the venerable and mid-priced ($2750) stereo mic pre/DI/compressor. This version is called the 1969, and all of its modifications are courtesy of Fletcher and the guys at Mercenary Audio. I've been tracking with this device for a while now, and...
For anyone who purchased their home studio by max-ing out their Visa card, a set of outboard audio meters probably isn't high on your list of priorities. Most modern gear includes at least decent metering, and many digital boxes go so far as to offer a choice of average or peak metering by simply...
The McHugh Military AMM-68 is a tube-powered small condenser microphone designed around the AKG C-60. That is where the similarities end. I use the term "around" as the microphone's design is nothing short of genius in its simplicity. The whole thing comes in an army surplus ammo box that is...
I still cringe when I think about the first digital mixer I ever used: The Yamaha DMP-7. It was noisy, it sounded gritty, and its user-interface was horrible. But the DMP-7 had scene recall, moving faders, and it was fully automatable when connected to a MIDI sequencer - features unheard of at its...
My mom thinks of me as a gadget-kinda guy - probably because she's seen my living room. It's full of recording gear, plus I have a second room full of all sorts of computer gear. To her, it all looks the same... rooms full of electronic gadgets. When Christmas comes around, she likes to shop for me...
I travel a lot. A typical month has me in three different cities across the globe. Therefore, most of my computing is done on a laptop. My favorite laptop accessory is the Macally iOptiJr mouse. It's quite small and packable, but not too small to be uncomfortable when used for hours at a time. It's...
I can't recall a time when good-sounding mics have been so readily affordable as they are now. I purchased three Oktava MC012 condenser mics for less than it would have cost me to buy three SM-57s. The biggest music retailer in the US regularly advertises this mic for $99, but if you're friendly...
At least once a year, a studio will usually make an investment in a piece of gear which is supposed to make their recordings jump light-years in quality. This typically comes with a high price tag, which is why a small studio doesn't do this often. The Pendulum Audio MDP-1 ($2495) is one of these...
To be honest, I'm not one for getting excited about pitch correction. It always seemed that it put some kind of "robotic-ness" to the voice. However, when I saw that Oberheim had licensed the Antares Auto-tune engine, and had begun marketing it under the name OB-Tune, I downloaded it on a whim....
Firstly I want to recommend that every recording school or university with a recording program immediately purchase an STT-1. Nowhere else can you get so many different signal paths and sounds in one box. The STT-1 is like some kind of educational audio science fair project on steroids. First let's...
Steve Albini's review of the Royer R-121 in a previous issue of Tape Op is what prompted me to try out the R- 121. A quick demo confirmed that the R-121 was a fantastic mic, so I ordered both an R-121 and a SF-12. The SF-12 is a stereo ribbon mic, with the ribbons facing 90 degrees apart, set up as...
My dad used to have two sayings that he liked to use. One, use the right tool for the job and two, put it back where you found it when your done. The right tool for me these days is the z-Systems z-Q2 stereo digital mastering equalizer. It's the EQ I reach for and use the most. Why, you might ask?...