Tape Op Magazine - Issue #92

Interviews

Dan Carey

By Larry Crane

What's your history? I know you've worked with reggae producer Nick Manasseh in the past.

I played in band when I was a kid and then kind of got tired of that. As a reaction, I went into completely electronic stuff and thought, "I'm not going to play the guitar any more."...

Interviews

John Hampton: Ardent, Gin Blossoms, Memphis

By Brandon Herrington, Hans Dietrich Faulhaber

I became a friend of John Hampton's when he recorded my sister-in-law (Gail Elise Clifton of the Klitz) in 1986 at Ardent Recording Studios in Memphis, Tennessee [ #58URL]. His production skills were clearly at work while producing a fine sounding demo that may someday see the light of day!...

Interviews

Brian McTear: Shaking Through, Miner Street

By Roy Silverstein, Peter English

I first learned of Shaking Through via an email from Sharon Van Etten, who once played at my old home studio/house/show venue, The Habitat, in San Diego, CA. It turns out she was the first artist chosen to be a part of the unique web-based documentary series co-created and produced by Brian McTear...

Interviews

Dick Hyman: Moogs, Movies and NYC Sessions

By Curtis Settino

Dick Hyman has had an amazing career in music at the keyboard. With 60-plus years of...

Interviews

Dan Carey (bonus)

By Larry Crane

They say that record producers and engineers are the people behind the curtain, but if so...

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FEBRUARY 23, 2026 INTERVIEWS

Dick Hyman (bonus): The Electric Eclectic Man

BY CURTIS SETTINO

Dick Hyman has had an amazing career in music at the keyboard. With 60-plus years of experience, he's seen the industry go through many twists and turns. He's played with greats such as Benny Goodman and scored films for Woody Allen. He's also worked as an arranger, musical director and composer for countless albums, TV shows and concerts, and, if that all weren't enough, he was a pioneering performer on the Moog synthesizer in the late 1960s.

FEBRUARY 23, 2026 INTERVIEWS

Eric Lichter: His Dirt Floor Studio

BY PATRICK DUNN

Walking into Eric Lichter's Dirt Floor Studio in Chester, Connecticut, is what I imagine it must have been like to walk into The Band's Big Pink or Shangri La recording spaces in the '60s and '70s. His vision for the space is immediately clear: a home for creation — not a sterile facility. After years of traveling the country as a singer-songwriter, Eric opened Dirt Floor in 2007 to help other artists avoid the same mediocre recording experiences he had gone through. His work as a producer and engineer has gained Dirt Floor a reputation for being one of the best studios in the Northeast for roots-based music.

FEBRUARY 23, 2026 INTERVIEWS

Jeff Lynne: ELO, Wilburys, Beatles, Tom Petty

BY LARRY CRANE, MARTYN ATKINS

Jeff Lynne might be best known as the songwriter and singer behind the incredibly successful Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), or maybe as a member of the fun supergroup Traveling Wilburys. But the other side of his story is that Jeff is a successful record producer, with credits ranging from his aforementioned groups to sessions with George Harrison, Tom Petty, Brian Wilson, Roy Orbison, Paul McCartney, Dave Edmunds, Del Shannon and Joe Walsh. He even worked on The Beatles' "new" tracks for the Anthology series. For a man that who comes off so matter-of-fact and unassuming, that's a career to be reckoned with. Jeff recently re-recorded ELO's hits as Mr. Blue Sky — The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra, and has a beautiful album of covers out called Long Wave (see our sidebar review of both).

FEBRUARY 23, 2026 INTERVIEWS

Ronan Chris Murphy: King Crimson, Ulver, Terry Bozzio

BY LARRY CRANE

Of all the elements that make up a successful engineer/producer, I always find that a positive outlook, a love of many musical genres, and a quest to learn and to achieve more always form the core values of people I admire. Ronan Chris Murphy has all of these and more. He runs his Veneto West Studio in Santa Monica, California, works on many records a year there (as well as internationally), creates and hosts the fabulous online Ronan's Recording Show and runs a small school called Recording Boot Camp. But at the core, it's all about the music. Ronan has worked with great groups and players in his studio and all over the world including King Crimson, Ulver, Terry Bozzio, Steve Morse, Tony Levin, Martin Sexton, Pete Teo, Chucho Valdes y Grupo Irakere and Nels Cline.

COLUMNS

GEAR REVIEWS

Gear Reviews

16x2 tube mixer

BY 16x2 tube mixer | reviewed by Adam Kagan

In the land of DAWs, we have become obsessed with infusing some analog-ness back into our productions. Obviously, we still require some analog gear to record acoustic sources, but the search has been on for the best console, summing amp, transformer saturation, or whatever the magic pill is that...

Gear Reviews

5059 Satellite Summing Mixer

BY 5059 Satellite Summing Mixer | reviewed by Adam Kagan

By now, we are all familiar with the Rupert Neve Designs Portico Series of processors and RND's big-daddy 5088 console [Tape Op #73]. Over the last few years, these products have proved themselves worthy of the Rupert Neve badge and are now staples in million-dollar facilities and project rooms...

Gear Reviews

Acoustic Ramp diffuser

BY Acoustic Ramp diffuser | reviewed by Andy Hong

The modestly-sized control room of my personal studio is acoustically treated with a Primacoustic Primakit [Tape Op #36], twelve wood-panel RealTraps [#36], nine broadband RealTraps Mini/MondoTraps [#38, #48, #85], four large clouds from Acoustical Solutions [#37], and an array of Auralex...

Gear Reviews

Auria 48-track DAW for iPad

BY Auria 48-track DAW for iPad | reviewed by Eli Crews, Andy Hong, Hillary Johnson

When I first purchased my RME Fireface UCX audio interface [Tape Op #88], I tried it in Class Compliant mode with my iPad 2 running MultiTrack DAW by Harmonicdog. With Harmonicdog's various limitations in its version 1.0 release, the novelty of recording on the iPad quickly wore off. (Meanwhile,...

Gear Reviews

MA-301fet condenser mic

BY MA-301fet condenser mic | reviewed by Craig Schumacher

Following up on the success of the MA-300 large-diaphragm tube mic [Tape Op #87], Mojave recently released a FET version. As was the case with the MA-200 - tube version first, then roll out the FET. The beauty of Mojave's strategy is that they now have a serious line-up of microphones that give...

Gear Reviews

MLA-3 multiband compressor

BY MLA-3 multiband compressor | reviewed by Adam Kagan

The worlds of project studio and commercial studio have collided in a big way over the last few years, and now we are seeing the same convergence with gear that was developed for the mastering lab finding its way into the personal studio. It only makes sense; due to magazines like Tape Op, online...

Gear Reviews

MXPre LC1 mic preamp for Sony MXP-3000 series consoles

BY MXPre LC1 mic preamp for Sony MXP-3000 series consoles | reviewed by David Barbe

I have way too many mic preamps. The problem is that I like lots of different flavors. We have Neve, API, Chandler, Daking, Hardy, Summit, UREI, Sony, Amek - in some cases several different ones of each. At Chase Park Transduction (Athens, GA), we have two rooms, both with Sony MXP-3036 consoles....

Gear Reviews

Sonar X2 Producer

BY Sonar X2 Producer | reviewed by Alan Tubbs

SONAR X1 [Tape Op #82] was a major change from the previous eight or so iterations of SONAR. X1 looked, operated, and felt very different from its predecessors, which were so... Windows looking, with an overabundance of text boxes and buttons along the top toolbar. The legacy UI was functional, but...

Gear Reviews

Titan compressor/limiter

BY Titan compressor/limiter | reviewed by F. Reid Shippen

Perhaps in a bid to thumb his nose at Thermionic Culture's usurpation of avian nomenclature, Dave Hill has come out of the Crane Song witness-protection program with a new sideline of self- labeled gizmos that have nothing to do with birds. They still have a lot to do with really good-sounding...

Gear Reviews

Vertigo VSC-2 compressor

BY Vertigo VSC-2 compressor | reviewed by Eli Crews

When the German plugin experts at Brainworx decided to port some of the best contemporary German and American hardware into the digital domain, they started a new company called the Plugin Alliance. The concept was to offer customers a one-stop portal for high-end plugins modeled after analog units...

Gear Reviews

Workhorse Powerhouse

BY Workhorse Powerhouse | reviewed by Andy Hong

The brainiacs at Radial Engineering can't leave well-enough alone. Last year, they reinvented the 500-series rack with their Workhorse rack and mixer [Tape Op #85]. Now they've gone off and released several more innovative ways to house our 500- series modules. I recently purchased three of these...

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COLUMNS

by Larry Crane

GEAR REVIEWS