Interviews
By Bob Massey
Since he first hit the road in 1996 with Washington, DC skronk-rockers Kerosene 454, engineer Jonathan Kreinik has never slowed down. His resume as a live and studio engineer includes work with Trans Am, The Fucking Champs, Hot Snakes, !!!, Rocket From the Crypt, The Sea and Cake, Trail of Dead, The...
Interviews
Sally Browder is a producer/engineer working in Los Angeles. The path to her career was an odd one, paved with lots of luck along the...
Interviews
For forty years, David Lewiston has been recording traditional music all around the globe. He grew up in the London suburbs playing t...
Interviews
Chris Regan of Soundwave Research Labs introduced me to Crowley and Tripp microphones (Soundwave Research Labs is the parent company of Crowley and Tripp). He explained that the company had been developing ribbon mics and testing them at area studios, gathering ideas and input from users. I asked Chris to bring two mics, the Studio Vocalist and the Proscenium, to Makeshift Studio for a trial, and invited a few friends to listen while singer/guitarist Milo Jones performed. As Milo played I found the two Crowley and Tripp microphones to be right up there with my favorite ribbon mics, AEA and Royer. I was immediately impressed by their quality. Both mics had a big, smooth sound, were super solid and looked about the size of a can of Red Bull. Recently I visited Soundwave Research Labs in Ashland, Massachusetts to interview Bob Crowley and Hugh Tripp, the company founders. Before our interview, Bob spent a good hour showing me the lab and his experiments, including a fly's wing fixed to a transducer, then an oscilloscope that visually displayed the wing's reactance to a current of air. Bob's love for ribbon mics started in the 1970s, when he and a group of friends from Newton, Massachusetts made live recordings of local acts like The Modern Lovers. Together, the friends had a collection of RCA mics that they came to know and trust. Over the years, in his research for developing ultrasound transducers for the medical industry, Bob visited and worked with some of the world's greatest microphone manufacturers. Now he has come full circle and is putting his experience and passion into creating the next wave of performance ribbon microphones, built in the Crowley and Tripp laboratory with the best materials possible. He and his partner Hugh are breaking new ground. The two are just beginning work on a ribbon microphone to be used specifically on kick drums and bass cabinets (long thought to be a no-no for the fragile ribbon element). In this microphone, the ribbon itself is composed of a group of carbon nanotubes that are arranged to form a super strong, tear-resistant material. Both Bob and Hugh have a huge appetite for learning, experimentation and sharing their knowledge. Both are expatriates of Boston Scientific, and Bob holds patents for over 100 inventions in music, ultrasound and life-saving devices. Crowley and Tripp's first mic, the Studio Vocalist, made its debut in 2004. The company now has five models. At the time of our meeting, Crowley and Tripp were just heading-out to show their newest mic, the Recordist, at AES in California. The Recordist will be sold in pairs for stereo and Blumlein recording.
I'd come to a midtown Manhattan law office to meet Geoff Emerick, the infamous engineer on most of the significant recordings by The Beatles, to talk about his new memoir Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording The Beatles, along with his co-author Howard Massey, an accomplished writer and engineer himself. What's most striking upon meeting Geoff is how mild-mannered he is — he's certainly quite humble considering his starring role in some of the most important recordings of the 20th century. In fact, when I come right out and refer to Geoff as a prime candidate for the "Fifth Beatle" moniker and say what Elvis Costello alludes to in his wonderful preface to Here, There and Everywhere — that Geoff's role was truly as producer, while George Martin's was more that of an A&R man or session "director" — Geoff visibly blushes before shrugging off what to him really does appear to be an outlandish suggestion. But let's face it — this is the guy who crafted some of the signature sounds we all take for granted. Paul McCartney's bass sound post-"Paperback Writer"? Geoff Emerick. Matching up the speeds and editing together two takes of "Strawberry Fields Forever" in two different keys? Geoff Emerick. George Harrison's heart-wrenching guitar sound on "Free As A Bird"? Geoff Emerick. In fact, the list goes on and on...
Tucked away smack dab in the middle of two stadiums, the Fox and State theatre complexes, a police station and the rotting corpses of Detroit's once elegant apartment district, lies one of the city's least known gems. If you don't know where it is, you'll never find it, but once you're told and are inside, you won't forget it. Jim Diamond and Ghetto Recorders are names synonymous with the enormous popularity of the Detroit garage rock explosion. As a recording engineer/producer/studio owner, founding member of The Dirtbombs and member of The Witches and Bantam Rooster, Jim has worn many hats in the progression of Detroit's underground music. That said, there is a second party to this story — John Linardos, mastermind behind Motor City Brewing Works and world famous Ghetto Blaster beer. It was his personal rehearsal and demo studio that eventually became the Ghetto Recorders that we know and love today. Beer and rock 'n' roll — the perfect prescription, and the perfect segue into this interview. I got together with Jim and John at the Motor City taproom on a balmy night in October.
Pete Anderson is known to many as the original guitarist and producer for Dwight Yoakam. These days Pete's life revolves around his label, Little Dog Records, and studio, where he's recently produced, recorded and released records for Moot Davis, Cisco and even Kirk Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets. The studio space here is modest but flexible, and with his partner-in-crime Sally Browder [see interview this issueURL], he's able to do anything he needs to do at their own space. Pete's also done a handful of solo records featuring his melodic, twangy, great guitar playing and superior tone. His last, Daredevil, is a fun outing — the kind that's great to leave in your car stereo for the summer!
Over the last two years, mixing at The Hangar, John Baccigalupi's studio in Sacramento, I've come to rely on the pair of ADAM P22As that John has in the control room there. They've been just about my favorite monitors that I've ever used. They're accurate without being strident and musical without...
I love the Arturia plug-ins and so does Dana Gumbiner. Between the two of us, we've reviewed every plug-in synth they've ever released. But as much as I think the plug-ins are amazing, I use them less often than I'd like because of their complexity and huge CPU hit. The graphics are amazingly...
Audio-Technica has just released a microphone that I've been waiting on for years. The ATM450 is a small-diaphragm condenser microphone. Audio-Technica makes several excellent small-diaphragm condenser mics already, but what makes this one different is its side-address design. The ATM450 is...
Native Instruments-a company whose reputation was built on software as opposed to hardware-just released their Audio Kontrol 1 into a market already crowded with affordable portable recording interfaces with excellent audio quality and reasonable flexibility. But rather than just follow the...
Our pal Diane Gershuny turned us onto this handy little studio organization tool at the Austin NAMM show and sent us a few to try out. AudioSkin is one of those plastic products that wraps around loose cabling and turns it into one neat bundle of cables that's easier to deal with. The super cool...
China Cones are an isolation device used to decouple monitor speakers from the console, stand, or surface supporting them. Made of ceramic, the manufacturer claims China Cones vibrate in a frequency range outside of human hearing, making them a better isolation solution than brass or other commonly...
I have fallen in love with a software synthesizer. I never thought it could happen to me. After long, fulfilling relationships with my analog synths (various Moogs, Rolands, etc.), I kinda brushed off most analog-modeling software synths as budget imitations, which is really snobbish and unfair, I...
When this unit arrived in my studio, my first assumption was that it was a "remix" of the DigiMAX 96 or LT, both of which are fine units and sound pretty good, especially for their price. But honestly, they're kinda boring. Eight preamps feeding eight A-D converters to Lightpipe-clean sound,...
Abbey Road Studios along with their stateside partner, Wade Goeke of Chandler Limited, are continuing to make some of the great sounding early audio gear from the EMI empire available to us common folk. Wade's hardware is amazing, but the plug-ins are also surprisingly great. The EMI compressor...
For quite sometime many have viewed Waves L2 as the best digital plug-in limiter. And over the years, there have been many challengers. While some upstarts had strengths in different uses, none seemed to have that all-around solid performance of L2. Heck, I know quite a few people that think Waves...
The Lemur is a unique, open-ended controller geared towards DAW and live-performance applications. The Lemur hardware is essentially a flat touch-screen interface (kind of like a tablet PC) which utilizes a proprietary "multitouch" technology, allowing one to use all ten fingers to simultaneously...
I finally got hip to Live. I used to think it was primarily for stage use, but I've since realized that its ease-of-use (hey, if you can perform with it, it better have an extremely efficient UI) along with a very mature feature set makes it a formidable studio tool too. Just to get my feet wet, I...
Having never used any Buzz Audio products before, I was intrigued at the prospect of checking out this 2-channel Class A preamp. The 1RU-height box features a nice array of front-panel controls for each channel: polarity reverse, 20 dB input pad, finely stepped gain knob (+16 dB to +65 dB), phantom...
Last winter, I got my hands on a Savage Macht 12x guitar amplifier and haven't tracked guitars without it since. For technical details and configuration options, visit the website. I'm going to focus on what it's like to record with this little 12 Watt, 6V6-driven, 1x12, tube combo. From the start,...
The Mbox 2 Mini is the most compact of Digidesign's Pro Tools systems; it's almost exactly the same size as a stack of four CD jewel cases. It has some heft due to its robust metal enclosure; I wouldn't be afraid to lose it for a few days within the depths of my courier bag, where it'd have to take...
The more I use Pro Tools, the more I use outboard analog. I used to have a single table-high rack of outboard processors (not including all my preamps), but these days, I'm working with two racks full of analog processing. My latest addition is a pair of 5033 EQs from Mr. Neve's Portico range (see...
Wow. 34 inputs and 36 outputs via a single FireWire cable. 32 channels of ADAT Optical I/O at 44.1/48 kHz; 16 channels S/MUX'ed at 88.2/96 kHz. Two channels of S/PDIF I/O. Word clock in and out. Two balanced analog outs on TRS connectors with a level knob. Headphone out. MIDI I/O. And front-panel...
As I write this, I'm just finishing up rough mixes for a project that I tracked and edited with Pro Tools HD 7.3. It's my favorite upgrade in recent years. 7.3 added so many crucial user-interface tweaks that it's far easier to get around a project, and it's even possible to change some settings...
Creating a sample instrument is a seemingly straightforward task-record the sound of the instrument with great fidelity, and program a sleek and usable interface to trigger that recording. However, the breadth of styles and ambiences that a piano can have greatly complicates this task. Reason...
Almost 20 years ago, I was working for a recording studio that was owned by an FM radio station. One day, the Program Manager asked me if I wanted some gear the station was throwing away. They had just redone the transmitter and were tossing two Gregg Labs Tri-Band broadcast limiters that were part...
Anyone who's read my reviews in Tape Op has probably seen one of my "dealing with headphones in a busy studio sucks" rants where I complain about how my clients treat all my headphones like crap and throw them on the floor until they don't work anymore. Well, Bill Hannapel at Stedman must have read...
There's hype, and then there's hype... and then there's HYPE. No buzzwords have been spared in the promotion of M-Audio's new tube microphone, the Sputnik. "The end of microphone envy," with its saucy overtones, is supposed to say it all. It's compared to venerable workhorses like the Neumann U 47...
This is the last book I ever bought at Tower Books on the corner of Broadway and Land Park Dr., before they and the entire Tower Records chain, which was started here in Sacramento, CA, went out of business this past Fall. In fact, Tower was started in the drugstore (Tower Drugs) that was located...