Interviews
Interviews
Interviews
Interviews
In an anonymous garage on a residential street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn sits Excello Recording. It's been there for 13 years, long before the parade of hipsters crossed the BQE. It's an enigmatic space off a side street and recently, I got the chance to chill out and chat with Hugh Pool, one of Excello's owners/partners and it's chief engineer.
Jay McKnight is the founder and operator of MRL — Magnetic Refer- ence Laboratory. If you've ever owned and maintained an analog tape deck you know MRL as one of the few sources for calibration tapes. Before that he worked at Ampex, Gotham Audio and Armed Forces Radio, to name a few. Jay helps people every day with their never ending questions about analog tape recording. Jay is a man you are lucky to come across — a tremendous resource. His place in audio history is assured. His hard work is behind so much that we take for granted.
Being in the right place at the right time is sort of a mantra in the recording world — and a serendipitous moment that we all may hope for. Ken Scott has literally been in the right place a number of times, whether it was at Abbey Road Studios recording The Beatles, Trident Studios with David Bowie, in France recording Elton John, with Supertramp constructing their epic '70s albums, in L.A. recording and managing Missing Persons or producing DEVO. Ken has been at the ground floor of so many albums that we now consider classics — Transformer, Crime of the Century, "The White Album", Hunky Dory, ...Ziggy Stardust..., All Things Must Pass, Truth, Madman Across The Water, Honky Chateau, Don't Shoot Me I'm Only The Piano Player, Son Of Schmilsson, Aladdin Sane, Crisis, What Crisis?, Emerald Visions Of The Pure Beyond. What more needs to be said?
My brother John has been recording music as long as I have (since the early '80s), but while I ventured into professional engineering, John's always been more of a musician than an engineer. With that said, his 4- track cassette recordings from the past are fantastic, pushing the technology and...
The GML 2032 is a single-channel preamp/equalizer that draws from the designs of the GML 8300 mic preamp series and the GML 8200 equalizer, adds a high-impedance instrument input on the front panel, and does it all in a 1U-height chassis. With a street price around $2750, the 2032 costs about the...
It's difficult to pigeonhole the API 2500 compressor for a specific purpose. In fact, it has found broad acceptance in mixing and mastering suites alike. In most part, this is due to the broad flexibility and depth of features, many of them unique to this 1U-height device. You'll find the standard...
Accusound® Silver Studio Pro cable features silver- plated copper strands, unique winding techniques, and a black, braided nylon jacket. It's made in the USA and comes with a lifetime warranty. Do silver plating and custom winding techniques make a difference in the audio? Yes, absolutely. You can...
This is one of the first mics resulting from the collaboration between Electro-Voice and Blue Microphones. It's a medium-diaphragm (14 mm) condenser microphone in a beautiful and very functional form factor. The body is actually made of wood, is relatively small, and the mount has not one but two...
I've been trying to find more synths and modular synths to put into my studio, partially to play them as instruments of course, but also for all the possibilities of using them as audio processors for filtering audio and for triggering from audio. On a recent mixing session, I wanted to run some...
After last year's AES show, this was the one plug-in I was really excited to hear. We have one of the hardware Chandler TG 12413 limiters in the studio, and it has quickly become a favorite amongst the engineers here. Let's face it, the question for a plug-in like this one is, "Does it sound like...
Every January, I attend the NAMM show with John Baccigaluppi and Larry Crane, and we spend days walking like zombies through giant rooms full of instrument and gear manufacturers. Pretty much everything sold by the music industry can be found here (and there's also a ton of stuff that you can't...
Face it. You need a drum machine. Whether it's for something as simple as generating a decent click for a drummer, working out song arrangements, or even for full-blown drum and percussion tracks, the basic drum machine has become somewhat of a staple in the studio. But who wants to wade through...
During one of my Recording Workshops a few years ago, while I was talking about using an RTA (Real Time Analyzer) to check mixes, a student piped in that there was a free plug-in online. So we downloaded and activated Elemental Audio's Inspector plug-in, and damn if it wasn't a great little helper....
My first thought upon powering up these compact nearfields was, "Wow, these sound much bigger than they look!" After spending some time tracking and mixing through them, I'd have to say they give much pricier monitors a run for their money. They are powerful enough to complement most control rooms,...
My wants and needs in an audio interface today are very specific. I work solo 90% of the time, so I rarely ever need more than two analog inputs; these have to be XLR with phantom power. I want as small a device footprint as possible since space in my recording den is pitifully small. I like quick...
Fellow gear reviewer Eric Tischler sent me this helpful tool. It's a key fob with a 1/4'' plug and four LED's, one for power and three for -32, -22, and -16 dBu signal level. You plug it into a jack, squeeze the body, and read signal level. Great for finding a break in a signal chain. In the ideal...
This was one of the neatest things I saw at last fall's AES show, but after Wes Dooley was nice enough to give me one, it was lost in shipping coming back from the show. So, after seeing him at NAMM, Wes kindly sent me a second one. I love simple, affordable gadgets that do something you never...
This is a very cool DVD produced by and available from audioMIDI.com. Bob Moog (in his last public appearance), Tom Oberheim, and Dave Smith (of Sequential Circuits and Evolver fame) are the featured speakers at an event moderated by Roger Linn (who designed the LinnDrum, the AKAI MPC, and more...
Although most engineers tend to relegate multiband- processing to mastering or final mixing, I find myself using multi-band or frequency-selective processing on individual tracks all the time. For example, if you listen to Nedelle's first album, Republic of Two, you'll hear band-limited...
The TM-1 is a tube-based signal-processing device hand-made in California and housed in a heavy, yellow, Hammond-style case. It has five comfortable knobs and five jacks and runs on an AC power adapter. I wanted to open it up to check out the interior construction, but there's a warning sticker...
While many excellent, low-cost, nearfield monitors have appeared on the market lately, studio subwoofers in our budget range that can accurately reproduce sound in the sub-80 Hz regime have been hard to come by, and decent low-end translation has been a consistent problem in the WMBR studio....
The Tubelink2 is an interesting two-channel variable- MU tube limiter. It is a Class-A/B design with custom transformers on both the input and output and a complement of readily-available tubes (12BH7, 12AX7, and 6AL5). The 2U-height faceplate has two VU meters, and there are controls for input,...
This affordable little box will hook up your turntable to your computer's USB port, thus allowing you to transfer vinyl LP's to digital. If this doesn't answer all those emails I've received asking how to do this, then I don't know what will. It can be powered from the USB port or an external wall...