ISSUE ARCHIVE
NO. 171 | Nov 2025
NO. 170 | Sep 2025
NO. 169 | Sep 2025
NO. 168 | Jul 2025
NO. 167 | May 2025
NO. 166 | Mar 2025
NO. 165 | Jan 2025
NO. 164 | Nov 2024
Jul/Aug 2011
I was out at a club watching some bands play the other night, but in the back of my mind I was wondering what to write about for the intro of this issue. Then it hit me. I'd been telling some friends at the show what a pleasure working on a recent album was, as the musicians involved were really good players and it was fun to work on. I'd also been enjoying the show I was at as I marveled at the quality of the musicians onstage. I suddenly realized what I wanted to say.
Sometimes we forget how or why we ventured off into this world of music recording. For myself, this path began with my interest in electronics and sound. Eventually I became more of a musician, playing in bands and such; but, in my opinion, I never became a great musician. Getting to work with players that intuitively understand and support a song with their abilities is a treat. At times I've felt privy to the best "private performances" I'll ever see from my favorite artists. For a kid that grew up obsessing over music and albums, being able to help capture these moments while working with great musicians and songwriters is certainly its own reward. I feel lucky.
— LARRY CRANE,EDITOR & FOUNDER
Early in 2010 I got to work with Bob Clearmountain while he mixed the recent Bryan Ferry album, Olympia, with producer Rhett Davies at (my long-time mentor) Hugh Padgham's Sofa Sound studio in West Lo...
There used to be a television show called What's My Line, wherein panelists interviewed a contestant and had to guess his or her occupation. Michael Beinhorn would have been an ideal contestant. The p...
Tristan Perich is a young experimental musician living and working in New York City. He creates interesting devices to present his original compositions, such as the recent 1-Bit Symphony. Encased in...
Roll Music Systems has been slowly bringing out pro audio products since 2003. Starting as a small recording studio in Minneapolis, this company (Justin Ulysses Morse and John Sommer, aka Johnny Smoke...
In an interview with Bill Skibbe for a "Behind the Gear" article [#44], he said, "One of the most important things you have to be able to do is troubleshoot and fix problems. Because when the stuff br...
Twenty years after his entry into the Minneapolis music scene, national success with his band Polara, opening his Flowers Studio and mid-wifing countless projects ranging from local demos to national-...
Roll Music Systems has been slowly bringing out pro audio products since 2003. Starting as a small recording studio in Minneapolis, this company (Justin Ulysses Morse and John Sommer, aka Johnny Smoke...
Teetering stacks of cassettes and CDs line every wall, occasionally broken up by whimsical relics, such as the bust of Elvis lamp and vintage board games. There are a lot of ideas that live in this room, recorded and archived in various formats. Stationed in a nest of equipment and instruments is DIY recording figurehead R. Stevie Moore, sporting a large, white beard and thick glasses. There is a lot of emphasis on "do" in the DIY term for him, with over 400 self-released albums since the mid '70s. Part of this work mentality perhaps came from his father, Bob Moore, a Nashville session musician who was featured on countless country and early rock recordings. R. Stevie witnessed a massive quantity of recording early on in his life and later went on to produce his own impressive volume of work. His technical setup consisted of what was available, and the technology was never a hurdle to jump over; it simply enabled him to record his songs. At first it was reel-to-reel tape machines with which he used a technique he refers to as "mic/line mixing," a variation of sound-on-sound recording. This method helped define his inventive sound, and his recordings retained a certain rawness and naïveté, complimenting his idiosyncratic songwriting. His first official release was Phonography in 1976, which was essentially a listening guide to his home recordings to date, curated and released with the help of his encouraging uncle. In 1982 Moore started his own distribution network, the RSM Cassette Club, which made his entire body of home-recorded work available.
In the insane world of recording and record production, we occasionally stumble across someone whose work puts him or her at many important junctures in music history, yet their name remains unknown t...
Steve King has recorded Aretha Franklin, The Winans, George Clinton, The Dramatics, Sponge, Was (Not Was), 50 Cent and Eminem [Marshall Mathers]. Here's his story, or part of it, from green recruit to...