Interviews
By Kevin Ryan
The year was 1970. Hidden away in a London suburb with a Studer 4-track, Paul McCartney was clandestinely recording the songs that would form his first solo album, McCartney. 5,000 miles across the Atlantic, in Hawthorne, California, nineteen-year-old Emitt Rhodes was similarly ensconced in his parents'...
Interviews
In many a studio the Empirical Labs Distressor is as much a common sight — and sound — as a guitar amp or coffee machine. And for g...
Interviews
Dave Sardy is a rare bird in the world of rock production: A virtuoso on both sides of the glass. As the leader and producer of the ...
Interviews
Tony Levin is one of the masters of bass guitar and the Chapman Stick, having played with...
Billy Anderson recorded one of hard rock's most intriguing and fucking coolest albums in history — Jerusalem, by the now-defunct legendary stoner-rock band Sleep. It was a lengthy one-track sonic low-end frequency voyage into unknown that was almost too volatile to be put on shelves. And when you came out of it, you felt stoned — literally, as if the heavy boulder — rolling rhythms and sounds he captured had hit you repeatedly over the head like the way they did it in Biblical times. In fact, Anderson has recorded some of the best curios within the rock genre, from stoner rock and beyond — all pieces of musical and sonic art by the likes of Fantomas, Mr. Bungle, Neurosis, the Melvins, L7, Unsane and even the Red House Painters. Anderson is also a mysterious character — his name appearing everywhere but his likeness and such remaining relatively in the unknown. I managed to track him down at his abode in the San Francisco Bay Area, to have a chat with this "big brother in sound", a man who knows his way around every environment, and sports the necessary mental traits of being professional and warmly informal, both at the same time.
Though Emitt [see interview this issue] wrote the songs, played every note, and acted as his own engineer and producer, when mixing time rolled around the tapes were whisked away to Sound City where the team of Keith Olsen and Curt Boettcher would work their magic. Keith, of course, would go on to become an insanely successful producer (Fleetwood Mac, anyone?), but in 1970 he was still a young engineer, just trying to make a name for himself. We recently spoke about his work on Emitt's albums and what it entailed.
Audio gates are one of the most powerful, yet often overlooked, tools in your recording arsenal. A properly set gate can tighten your drum tracks, clean up your vocals, reduce leakage from other sound sources, minimize noise from amplifiers or cassette tapes, or create dramatic effects.
See Issue #28 for my full review of Altiverb for MAS, a plug-in that I would consider the best software reverb I've heard. Well now it's available for RTAS and VST as well as MAS. You can check audioease.com for a complete list of impulse responses, but I want to take this space to rave about the...
Langevin was a manufacturer of consoles in the 1960s. Manley Labs has since purchased the name, and although they base some of their solid-state designs on the original Langevin topology, the original units are sonically different. I picked up my discrete two-channel version from a friend, already...
If you read my review of the Shure KSM 141's last issue, you know that I rarely spend my own money on mics. Instead, I rely on the kindness of others for most of my transducing needs. The AT4050 is one mic I did actually buy, and it's been my solitary "good mic" for years now. It seems many people...
Why do you need an Uninterruptible Power Supply? Here's a scenario. You've just hit record. The hard disk is spinning as it writes the track. The power suddenly goes out. The write-head on the hard disk swings uncontrollably to rest position, spitting the last bits of magnetic flux onto an...
In Issue #30 I mentioned using "safe" ink pens when marking CD-Rs. The supposed issue is that Sharpies and their ilk can bleed through the plastic layer and eat away at the aluminum below, thus destroying the readability of the CD-R. I've never had this happen, but I don't want to either. I'd been...
There are many reasons to need another eight channels of digital conversion, but the most common is if you have a Digi 001 or 002. You really need an ADAT Litepipe compatible converter to maximize those units. I had also considered the Frontier Tango 24 converter which is essentially the same but...
D/A converters are often an afterthought in many project studios, but high quality converters are essential for both accurate monitoring and analog processing. Converter quality can be assessed most easily by listening for clarity, depth of field, graininess, and dynamic range, especially in the...
Ribbon mics are all the rage these days and deservedly so. With their sharp detail and warm, accurate sound reproduction, ribbons have become the new flavor-of-the-month in the audio world, especially with the advent of digital technology. I myself have been lusting after one (or more) of these...
I'd been having problems with drummers and headphones for years. The headphones would fall off drummer's heads, they would bleed too much click track into the mics, and their output wouldn't be loud enough to overcome the sound of the drums around the drummer. I was considering buying the Studio...
I have been wanting to audition a master clock for sometime now and finally had both the opportunity and reason to do so. November was a busy month at my studio with mostly digital sessions, giving us ample opportunity to test this clock out. The big question on my mind, as I'd heard a lot of...
The Cornford Harlequin is a hand-wired, 6-Watt "recording amplifier" with a stripped-down design that utilizes two 12AX7s, a single EL84, and a sparse control panel (Pre-amp Volume, Treble, Bass, Master Volume, Voice switch, Hi and Low inputs). One of the biggest problems with some Class-A (and...
IBP stands for "In Between Phase." In other words, this box provides you with a continuously variable phase knob-as opposed to a fixed on/off 180-degree phase switch-allowing you to combine signals that are partially out of phase while minimizing the effects of phase cancellation. The process...
I first heard this two-channel preamp from New Zealand's Buzz Audio on 3D Audio's 3D Pre CD. Compared to other "clean" pres on the CD, the MA 2.2 sounded more real on the takes of male vocal mic'ed with an AKG C 414. With the MA 2.2, I heard a big sound with more air around the mic and a touch more...
Metrophones Isolation Headphones feature heavy- duty earmuffs with Koss speakers inside. There are three models: Studio Kans (without metronome); Metrophones (built-in analog metronome); and Metrophones LCD (with digital readout metronome). We tested the latter. The small LCD panel displays the...
When I caught wind that Speck was working on a single-channel mic preamp, I was excited. I'm a big fan of Speck's reasonably-priced ASC parametric EQ. So I extrapolated and figured a Speck mic pre would be equally valuable. Speck was good enough to send me a 5.0 to play around with, and ultimately,...
The MOSFET (Metal-Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) was used in attempts to produce tube-like clipping in some '80s Marshalls, Carvins, and other high-powered guitar amps. MOSFETs never sounded much like tubes, but when used correctly, they produced a pleasing, singing sustain all their...
Right from the start, I noticed that the Old School Audio MP1-A ($499) has an extended, "airy" top and sounds flat and accurate in the low end with very little coloration. Compared to the other two preamps in the Old School Audio line, it is very clear and mostly neutral sounding. It reminds me...
Whether you're an electronic musician who's searching for the right set of sounds to load into your software sampler or an analog bloke who's desperately in need of Amazonian crickets to lay into a video effects track, chances are, sometime you're gonna have need for a sample library. Often,...
Client storage is increasingly an issue as more and more recording projects and studios move into the digital domain. Most of the smaller budget studios I've worked with seem to send their clients to Fry's Electronics for an 80G internal IDE drive to record onto. In the spirit of Larry's end rant...
The first thing you notice when listening to ADAM P11-A bi-amped monitors is the incredible detail. These aren't overly bright, thumping speakers with smiley-face frequency response curves-the midrange is very clear and very defined. The top end is accurate without being harsh, and the stereo...
See Issue #30 for my review of the Mbox as most of my comments there on small to mid-sized studios needing Pro Tools compatibility also apply here. You've probably seen the ads and know that the Digi 002 is like a Digi 001 (eight channels of analog I/O, eight channels of ADAT I/O, and two-channel...
In my opinion there are very few mic preamps under $800 per channel that are any better sounding than an inexpensive console. Many of the "budget" mic pres are based on simple, cheap integrated circuit (IC) op amps. These circuits will work, but have low headroom, and the fidelity of the whole...
I saw (and heard) a bunch of gear at the annual AES show this past Fall. With so many cool new products to discover, you'd think that it'd be hard for a gear geek like me to choose one product that stood out above all others. Well... guess what. Nothing impressed me as much as the complete line of...
I'm a bag geek. Bags make up a big part of my lifestyle. When I'm in town, I commute by bike with a courier bag. When I'm on the road, I commute by plane with a carry-on bag. I'm also a gear geek, so I need bags that let me carry all my gear. So when I saw the M-Audio Studio Pack at a recent...
What a luxury TC Works, a TC Electronic sister company, has bestowed us native platform users. TC Works introduced the PowerCore several years ago and if you haven't had a chance experience the power of DSP powered plug-ins, then a new world of sonic textures awaits. I really didn't know what I had...