Interviews
By Larry Crane, Elizabeth Streight
Ray LaMontagne's 2010 album, God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise, may have won a Grammy award for Best Contemporary Folk Album, but I'd refute that narrow categorization. It's an album of honest songs, real performances, and some real feelings. Ray self-produced the album,...
Interviews
Electric Lady Studios has a long, amazing New York recording history. Under the guidance of Lee Foster, the studio has seen a renais...
Interviews
New York City's independent metal scene has recently burst into mainstream view. At least two venues are primarily putting on ...
Interviews
Justin Smith, better known as Just Blaze, catapulted to the upper echelon of hip hop in...
Interviews
Archiving the recorded audio history of the United States? The National Recording...
Interviews
Under the leadership and vision of EveAnna Manley, Manley Labs has created and built some...
Under the leadership and vision of EveAnna Manley, Manley LabsURLhttp://manley.com has created and built some of the finest studio equipment (and high end home audio components) over the last two decades. Studios across the world count on their mostly tube-based EQs, compressors, microphones, preamps, mixers, and more.
Justin Smith, better known as Just Blaze, catapulted to the upper echelon of hip hop in the early '00s as the producer behind a string of hits with Jay-Z and Roc-a-fella Records. He has been in high demand ever since, working with Eminem, Lil Wayne, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Mac Miller... really, it's hard to find a major rapper who hasn't worked with him. I recently went up to his Rebel Base studio within Stadiumred in Harlem to discuss hip hop beats, videogame soundtracks, live DJing, and his New Jersey-bred connection to dance music.
Lou Clark is an accomplished recording studio designer, engineer, and avid supporter of the Audio Engineering Society. With over 20 years of studio design expertise on a national level, his list of successful designs is impressive.
With over 40 years of studio experience, and having worked with artists like Dave Brubeck, George Benson, and Weather Report, Robert Honablue was recently the Director of Engineering at The Honablue Institute of Audio Engineering in Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood. I dropped in one afternoon to talk about his career. Unfortunately, soon after our chat Robert closed down THI. "It is with great sadness that I have to announce the closing of THI Studios to our clients and all potential clients. I know that THI served as one of the finest studios around for your projects. But running THI as a school, studio and mastering suite has taken its toll on me, and my doctor has suggested that I let go of the business for health reasons." — Robert Honablue
I've been slowly building up to a realization that my older FireWire interface and I have to break up. We've been a good couple. At first, she was clearly too good for me, what with her classy 96 kHz-capable converters, and high-end, ahem, clocking. But after time, our relationship began to show...
AwTAC (Awesome Transistor Amplifier Company) of New York is quickly proving itself as a manufacturer with high standards. Since the introduction of its Channel Amplifier [Tape Op #93] three years ago and their Panner module (which adds a stereo- panning summing bus to the L/C/R bus in the Channel...
I just got a new knife. It's Japanese, ceramic. I can use it for damn near everything I need to prep and cook a meal. I have other knives - boning, chef, serrated. So why do I use my new one for just about everything? Because it works - every time. The Daking Comp 500 is like that knife. A very...
Maybe it's love for the underdog, but I dig Traynor amps. When I play music instead of recording it, my main amp is a big-ass '70s Traynor Mark 3 - a Twin-style circuit with EL34s. It's an oddball amp, and I love it. So I jumped on the chance to review this little DarkHorse 15H. Of course, today's...
Back in the '80s, when we needed a beat and didn't have a drummer present, we used to have analog and digital drum machines to keep time. They were rarely confused with real drums, but some had a quality that earned them time in the studio due to charm (e.g., Trio's Casio VL-1), intense sonic...
Many of us live in the "real world" - a place where we don't always have the resources to select, structurally modify, or build a "perfect" production room within the spaces we rent or own. Nine times out of ten, we just have to go with what we've got. For some of us, that means a bedroom, an...
I often need to audition audio files or compare different sources. I used to have a generic session in my DAW for this, but that became unmanageable. There were simply too many sample-rates, formats, and variables to rely on a single generic file. Fortunately, I found a great application that...
It seems like every time that I use a new plug-in from FabFilter, I find myself ceasing to use another similar plug-in that'd I'd been religiously using for years. Such was the case again with FabFilter ProMB; a multiband compressor/expander that, like most FabFilter plug-ins, re-invents familiar...
For many months, contributing writer Eli Crews and Assistant Gear Reviews Editor Scott McChane have been switching back and forth between Pro Tools 11 and Pro Tools 10 [Tape Op #89] for their recording and mixing duties. Neither has finalized their move to PT 11, but both are looking forward to the...
I have always been a fan of Radial's direct boxes and have gotten plenty of use out of their JD4 rackmount DI over the years, so I was excited to record some tracks with their latest 500-series unit. Radial's line of 500-series modules can now lay claim to a tube-based mic preamp - the PowerTube....
The RC 500 is a 1RU-height, rackmount, solid-state channel strip, with a mic/line/instrument preamp that routes to a FET VCA-based compressor followed by a three-band semi-parametric EQ. The EQ and compressor utilize the same circuitry as in the PreSonus ADL 700 [Tape Op #93]. It's an all-metal...
Getting prepped for this review was something of a unique experience. For the first time in five or six years of doing reviews for Tape Op, the founder of a company wanted to speak live over the phone to me. Sounds mundane enough - but that one event speaks volumes for the way my entire experience...
Perhaps sample-rate conversion is something you do rarely. On the other hand, if you're like me, you have to juggle multiple projects that need preparation for different destinations and sample-rates. Saracon is one of the premier SRC applications on the market. It works with PCM digital files, but...
At its core, recording, like any creative endeavor, is about us making decisions one-by-one, until they all pile up on each other to form something meaningful from the raw material - in our case, the performances and sounds in front of us. If we're lucky, it's just "flow," and we're not even aware...
Serpent Audio's Chimera is the first LA-3A clone to fit in a 500-series module, complete with that opto-circuit compression that so famously soothes vocal dynamics or unruly bass lines, or... well, works well in pretty much any other scenario you can think of. Fitting the LA-3A-style guts into a...
In a world of modern mics which are all beginning to look and sound alike, the SOM50 mic stands out from the pack both visually and sonically. Ashman Acoustics, a Seattle based company, is headed by Matt Ashman, a veteran of AEA mics. Matt approached the design of the SOM50 in a way that is unique...
Hybrid mixing is here to stay. (Required reading: "What is Stem Mixing?" [Tape Op #87]) This may explain why our friends at API Audio, with their rich history in analog gear, have "thrown-in" to the ever growing project-studio market by offering a small-format console to meet modern audio-...
This is a simple little plug-in that does one thing extremely well - it gets other stuff out of the way. It does that by employing a unique and elegant method, creating a reverse EQ profile of whatever signal you feed into its sidechain input. It works like this: when you assign TrackSpacer a...