Interviews
By Sasha Zand
Hardly known, yet everywhere at the same time, Bryce Goggin has managed to help create seminal albums for Pavement, Spacehog, Evan Dando, Elliott Sharp, The Lemonheads, Kim Deal's Amps, The Apples in Stereo, Swans, Nada Surf, Trey Anastasio and his stadium stalwarts, Phish. He's got two glowing...
Article
[ image luppi1 type=center ] Italian-born film composer Daniele Luppi grew up listening to the groovy lounge sounds of Italian pop...
Interviews
Ten years ago, Bruce Watson was just another would-be musician, running a department store by day in his adopted home of Ox...
Interviews
At the TapeOpCon this year our Keynote Interview will be New Orleans recording legend Cosimo Matassa. This is a man who should go down in the history books with as much acclaim as Sam Phillips, Bill Putnam, Tom Dowd, Phil Spector or any other pioneer of the recording arts. Cosimo started J&M Recording Studio in 1945 at the age of 18, and recorded what many music historians consider to be the very first rock 'n' roll song ever recorded in 1947, "Good Rockin' Tonight" by Roy Brown. In 1949, he recorded Fats Domino singing "The Fat Man", and went on to work on many sides with him, like "Walkin' to New Orleans". He also recorded the Professor Longhair song "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" that same year. By 1953 he had worked with Ray Charles and recorded Joe Turner's "Honey Hush". By the end of that year he did some of the first recordings of Earl King, Lloyd Price, Huey Smith, and Bobby Marchan. In 1955, Cosimo was blazing new sonic trails when he captured the immortal "Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard, continuing on to record "Long Tall Sally" and "Slippin' and Slidin'". In 1956 he had to move the studio after the police raided the upstairs neighbor for running an illegal book joint. He settled into the French Quarter on 525 Governor Nicholls Ave., and changed the name to Cosimo's. Here, in the New Orleans heat, thing kicked in with Little Richard tracking "Rip it Up", "Lucille" and "Good Golly Miss Molly". Many other hits, like "Sea Cruise" by Frankie Ford, and artists like Irma Thomas and Dr.John, came out of this fertile environment. Soon Allen Toussaint joined the picture, producing hits for Minit Records and introduced the world to artists like Lee Dorsey ("Working in the Coal Mine") and Aaron Neville ("Tell it Like It Is"). After he closed the studio, Cosimo worked as a freelance engineer for Alan at his Sea- Saint Studio but eventually retired to help his sons run his father's original business, a market in the French Quarter. It was at this market that we found Cosimo and held an impromptu street interview while the bustle of New Orleans life carried on around us.
Fran Manzella, designer of East Hill Studios, Masterdisk, Sterling Sound, Stratosphere Studios and many, many others, learned studio design through his inquisitive nature and determination to understand how acoustic properties work. I visited the designer in his office in Northern Westchester, New York, where he had sketches, photographs and computer printouts strewn all over his workspace in delightful chaos, a testament to his tireless efforts in making his clients' visions become reality dozens of times over. Manzella doesn't shoot from the hip. He is informed, deliberate and always looking to identify and solve the problem, no matter how big or small.
BLUE (Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics) builds some of the finest microphones available today. The company's commitment to manufacturing its own parts, from condenser diaphragms to the tiny screws that hold them together, helps ensure consistent quality. Company founder Skipper Wise put on hiatus a career as a jazz musician for that of a microphone manufacturer, but brought along the same passion and enthusiasm.
In Tape Op #31, West West Side mastering engineer Alan Douches observed that sometime in the next millennium, retro-minded sound smiths will be seeking to recapture "that classic late-century ADAT studio sound" and begin scouring the world for the few Alesis tape machines that had survived the ravages of time. "It's hilarious," says Wrens guitarist/vocalist/recordist Charles Bissell of Douches' prediction. "It's hilarious because it's inevitable." Bissell is probably right. The ADAT revival will occur, and people will pay through the nose for the machines themselves and for the VHS tapes that they employ. What Bissell is too modest to admit, however, is that if this all goes down as projected, he'll be partially to blame, because the Wrens new album, The Meadowlands (mastered not so coincidentally by Douches), clearly demonstrates how much can be achieved in this much-maligned medium. Of course, you can make a good record on any format you want if you're willing to spend five years getting it just right. Yeah, you heard me — five years. Every night for nearly half a decade, Bissell would return from a New York City white-collar day gig to the New Jersey house that he shares with bandmates Kevin Whelan (bass/keys/vocals) and Greg Whelan (guitar/vocals) to fire up the studio that occupies much of the living room. Songs were compulsively worked and reworked, parts changed, and sounds tweaked within an inch of their lives. And then, when the last track of their long-gestated third album was finally mixed and mastered, the Wrens did the only thing they could to ensure that the ordeal had in fact come to an end: They brought their ADATs to a local Garden State watering hole, propped them up on the bar, ordered some beers and got sloshed while they erased the master tapes. The mixes that remain are a shining example of what indie rock can and should be when low expectations — and even lower budgets — are not allowed to encroach upon a desire to create music that is as artful as it is kick-ass. Certainly the Wrens' two previous full-length efforts, 1994's Silver and 1996's Secaucus, are also exceptional home-recordings, but The Meadowlands is an instant DIY classic, worthy of sharing a shelf with Guided by Voices' Alien Lanes or the Shins' Oh, Inverted World. Imagine it's a sinewy long- distance runner, picking up the smart-rock torch right where Wire and the Buzzcocks dropped it. Who could have guessed that that was in a New Jersey swamp?
The Altec/Western Electric 633A is the classic microphone known as the "Salt Shaker," so named for its small cylindrical body with rounded edges and series of small holes across the top. It's an omnidirectional dynamic microphone with limited frequency response that was manufactured in the mid...
I was looking around for a decent stereo equalizer to combine with my stereo compressor across the mix bus. I found quite a few choices that would serve my purposes, mostly in the $2000 to $4000 range, but I thought, let me look into what my old mentor Malcolm Toft is up to these days. He taught me...
I'll be right up front about the fact that I really like Blue mics. I own four of their mics and they all sound great -I mean good enough to stand next to vintage mics costing six times more- and they all sound different from one another. The Bluebird is no exception. We've been using it around the...
I reviewed the Drum Drops CD's a while back, which were simply two-track audio CD's of cool-sounding drum tracks for use in recordings, demos or what have you. Now the boys at Drum Drops are hooking us up with DVD's (4 GB each) of discrete drum tracks, set up as 24- bit, 44.1 kHz AIFF sound files...
The Evolution UC-33e is the latest in what is sure to be a bonanza of budget-minded MIDI control surfaces. Compared to bigger brothers like the Mackie Baby HUI or TASCAM US-428, the UC-33e has a remarkable balance of controls vs. price point. What you get is a nifty silver box that plugs into your...
Aarrgh!! Dealing with headphones has to be one of the worst things about owning a studio. Headphones seem to spontaneously break, blow up, or magically grow legs and leave the studio without even having the courtesy to say goodbye. Every studio has at least one big box of busted headphone parts...
While I gave the mic preamps in the Focusrite ISA 428 a favorable review back in Tape Op #38, I wasn't able to check out the optional, eight-channel, 192k-capable A/D converter in time for that issue, so I just wanted to write a quick follow-up. The folks at Focusrite sent me the AES/SPDIF cable I...
Since its appearance in 1970, the Minimoog® has become one of the most valuable analog synthesizers- and for good reason. Its commanding bass and lead sounds are unmatched by any other monophonic synthesizer, and the instrument's accessible controls and general playability make it a powerful live...
Another "toy hunt" led me to what has become one of my personal favorites: A 1984 Fisher-Price model 3805 Karaoke machine. This little eBay wonder cost me $9.99 plus shipping. This 6'' x 8'' x 2'' box runs on four C batteries or an optional 6V DC adapter. It has a small, futuristic-looking...
When I first installed my Polywell rackmount PC into my Sound Construction Isobox Post, I was not happy. The case fan in the PC vibrated with such vigor that it shook the whole rack. It was as if the Isobox itself was buzzing, not just the rackmount computer inside of it. The Isobox was functioning...
For the past few months I've been evaluating a very nice stack of equipment made by Dangerous Music of New York City. These four devices function as stand-alone units as well as connected together to form a system that addresses many of the logistical problems that one encounters when recording to...
Theremins. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. On the one hand, they're just ridiculously difficult to play in a musical way. On the other, as far as crazy noisemakers go, their cool-quotient is off the charts. I've noticed Theremins have become nearly standard equipment in the hipper...
The enclosures for the various Mac G4 desktops- sure they're easy on the eyes, easy to pick up, and easy to open... but adding anything other than DIMM's and PCI cards is a hassle... and the cases are quite bloated given how little you can put inside them. I wanted to rackmount my G4's in my Isobox...
Open letter to Jon Brion: At last year's TapeOpCon in Portland, OR, when asked what piece of gear you hate the most, you responded by saying that you hate the Shure SM57. "Why do we have to always use them?", you asked, making a plea to try something- damn, anything!-else. Well I tried to scrap...
It's hard to write "reviews" of digital gear. First off, since there are so many specs it seems like half the review is repeating this info off the brochure. Second of all, depending on the applications, people will certainly have different needs and experiences from a piece of gear like this. I...
I've been looking for a good RTAS sampler plug-in since I played around with SampleTank SE, which was bundled with my Digi 002. While the LE version had some good sounds, it was obviously a lightweight version, which left me wanting a more powerful sampler and sound library. Last December, both...
In that neurotic quest to listen to a fresh mix on as many systems as possible, I stumbled on a new one. You know, you listen through every monitor in the control room, then you burn a disc and listen on the boombox in the kitchen, the lead singer's Walkman, and the inevitable... the band piling in...
Whenever I get the chance, I like to cruise through toy stores to see what kind of oddball noise makers or noise manipulators I can find. During a recent hunt, I ran across what looked like a clear-blue plastic megaphone. It said Voice Changer on the box and had settings for "Spaceman," "Alien,"...