Ryan Hewitt

Interviews

Ryan Hewitt

By John Baccigaluppi and Sarah Simon

In just a few short years and at a relatively young age Ryan Hewitt has become one of L.A.'s first-call engineers in a notoriously competitive and dwindling market. The son of a well-known remote recording engineer, Dave Hewitt, Ryan's made records with The Red Hot Chili Peppers, the...

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John Frusciante and Ryan Hewitt

Interviews

John Frusciante and Ryan Hewitt: On working together, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rick Rubin, Ian MacKaye, Blink-182, Synthesizers as processors and lots more

By John Baccigaluppi, Sarah Simon

The first thing you notice upon entering John Frusciante's Laurel Canyon home is the two Studer A- 800 two-inch machines that nearly block the front door and hallway, leaving just enough room to get by them and into the house. In the tradition of great music being made in this canyon, John has...

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Slovenia

Interviews

Slovenia

By Al Lawson, John Baccigaluppi, Andy Hong

When John and I first started making plans to attend the May 2007 AES Show in Vienna, Austria, we talked about taking advantage of cheap intra-Europe flights and touring other countries. Having been to Vienna before, I was looking forward to going elsewhere for a different dose of interesting food...

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Michael Grace

Interviews

Michael Grace: Behind the Gear with Grace Design

By Walt Szalva
Michael Grace started Grace Design in 1994, a boutique pro audio company located in...
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Nicolas Collins

Interviews

Nicolas Collins: DIY Electronics

By Arno Lingerak, Robert Poss
Nicolas Collins's book, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art Of Hardware Hacking, is a...
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Bob Paquette

Interviews

Bob Paquette: and his microphone museum

By Joe Wong
Milwaukee's Bob Paquette Sr. is regarded by many as the world's foremost expert...
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MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

COLUMNS

END RANT by Larry Crane
Lies
END RANT

Lies

by Larry Crane

Over the years I've heard artists all tell me the same damn lies during the course of a session. Note that the people in question might just believe they are speaking the truth. It's some odd form of musical brainwashing or group hallucination. "We've been practicing for months." "We'll nail all...

GEAR REVIEWS

Gear Reviews

D-Box

BY D-Box  |  reviewed by Thom Monahan

Hey kid, wanna make a record? Lord knows how you're going to do it. At home on a laptop, in some studio doing basics, probably to a computer, but maybe you're using tape. Your session changes locations from here to there, maybe even daily as you bring the studio to the musicians. You head out and...

Gear Reviews

dfh EZdrummer

BY dfh EZdrummer  |  reviewed by Josh Peck

The $179 price for EZdrummer is well worth the investment if you are looking for a virtual drummer with great-sounding, multi-mic'ed, live drums. EZdrummer comes with two excellent sounding kits with a healthy number of variations of the sample sets (open vs. closed hats, rolled snares, rims, and...

Gear Reviews

GearBox Plug-in Gold Bundle

BY GearBox Plug-in Gold Bundle

This is a plug-in bundle with a hardware front-end which doubles as a copy-protect dongle. As a plug-in suite for Mac OS X or WinXP, GearBox Gold is a home run! But, if you only want to use the plug-ins with your existing DAW, the TonePort DI hardware (Tape Op #51) may seem superfluous to you. Line...

Gear Reviews

Germanium Compressor

BY Germanium Compressor  |  reviewed by Mike Caffrey

The Chandler Germanium Compressor is yet another amazing piece from designer Wade Goeke, and "Chandler Germanium" continues to be synonymous with innovation. The Germanium Compressor is unlike any compressor I've ever used and is arguably his best design yet. It will probably be the beginning of...

Gear Reviews

Green Glue

BY Green Glue  |  reviewed by Garrett Haines

I wish I had known about this stuff years ago. It would have saved me time and money. It's a construction adhesive that turns regular drywall into one of the best sound-control building materials you can buy. Green Glue, as the name implies, is used to make a sandwich of two sheets of building...

Gear Reviews

High Speed Microphone Preamp

BY High Speed Microphone Preamp  |  reviewed by Mike Jasper

Jim Williams has been making his Audio Upgrades High Speed Microphone Preamp since 1994, but largely on the down low-no advertising, no reviews, just a page on his audioupgrades.com website. The first thing you notice about the two-channel preamp is how simple it is. It's one rackspace of...

Gear Reviews

K6 phantom-powered ribbon mic

BY K6 phantom-powered ribbon mic  |  reviewed by GH & Chris Moore

Karma is one of the newer microphone companies out there. They specialize in mics with unique sounds and designs at very affordable prices. We've been working with Karma on the beta versions of the K6 phantom-powered ribbon mic for over a year. After a few revisions, Karma is ready to present the...

Gear Reviews

M 88 dynamic mic

BY M 88 dynamic mic  |  reviewed by Steve Silverstein

The M 88 is an easy microphone to overlook. It lacks the instantly-recognizable visual profile of its closest competitors, the Electro-Voice RE20/PL20 and the Shure SM7, and it cannot rival the RE20 in studio ubiquity (which falls only slightly short of the notorious SM57 and D 112). Tape Op...

Gear Reviews

Portico 5014 Stereo Field Editor

BY Portico 5014 Stereo Field Editor  |  reviewed by Andy Hong

Readers who are familiar with my reviews know that I do a lot of sum-difference processing. In other words, I convert stereo Left/Right signals to Mid/Side, process the M/S, and reconvert back to L/R. (Or sometimes I start with M/S, process, then convert to L/R.) My Sony DMX-R100 digital console...

Gear Reviews

SCM20SL monitors

BY SCM20SL monitors  |  reviewed by Craig Schumacher

Quick question... What is the most important piece of equipment in your studio? The obvious answer is you and your ears. Back in the day, the quality of the monitoring is what separated good rooms from great rooms. These days there are more studio monitor choices available than ever before, and...

Gear Reviews

Sonar 6 Producer Edition w/ Rapture & Dimension Pro

BY Sonar 6 Producer Edition w/ Rapture & Dimension Pro  |  reviewed by Joseph Briggs

In my music production work, I employ huge audio and MIDI track counts, oodles of plug-ins, and heaps of audio editing. I might use 50 tracks for vocals alone, and another 40 for guitars. For example, the songs "Your Touch" and "No One Like You" by Universal Recording artist Luminous (a...

Gear Reviews

Sub6 Be active subwoofer

BY Sub6 Be active subwoofer  |  reviewed by Allen Farmelo

In Tape Op #60, I gave a glowing review of the Focal Solo6 Be studio monitors, and now I turn to the Sub6 Be, a mighty subwoofer especially designed for use with Focal's 6-range speakers. The Sub6 arrived about a week after the Solo6s, so I'd had time to acclimate to the bass response of the Solo6s...

Gear Reviews

TLM 49 large-diaphragm condenser mic

BY TLM 49 large-diaphragm condenser mic  |  reviewed by Andy Hong

When a representative from Neumann sent me this mic months ago, I was told that it was a killer vocal mic. So I did what I think many Tape Op geeks would have done; I tried it on everything else but vocal. First up, electric guitar. I wanted to re-amp some tracks for the band Shepherdess (members...

Gear Reviews

XLogic Alpha Channel

BY XLogic Alpha Channel  |  reviewed by Andy Hong

If you primarily record to DAW and you're in need of a high-quality recording channel, take a look at SSL's XLogic Alpha Channel. It streets for $1695, which is $50 less than the Rupert Neve Portico 5032 (Tape Op #58) and quite a bit cheaper than channel strips from other high-end manufacturers....