Welcome to issue #15 of Tape Op.

Hello and Welcome to Tape Op number 15!

Kick off yer shoes and hang out a bit, would ya? Alright. Boy, a lot of crazy stuff has happened since the last issue... The fact that we're going to be printing up a new mag every two months might interest you a bit. Look for a new issue around March 15th! I just hope we can keep up with the pace. I went to New York several times in the Fall. I was on panels for CMJ and the Independent Music Forum where I got to spout off about using whatever gear you can get your hands on to the utmost and such — and I got to be on some other panel for a bunch of suits where I pretended to know about MP3s. But the killer adventure was when John (you know — our publisher) and I went to the AES [Audio Engineering Society] and met with a bunch of gear companies and tried to convince them to run ads in our wonderful little magazine. That's right, your humble editor has to go do stuff like this. Anyway, it was actually a treat to check out new gear (Tascam has a stand-alone 24 track hard drive for under $4000!?) and meet some of the people who build this cool audio stuff (like Bruce Bartlett, John Hardy, David Bock, Evanna Manley, Doug Fearn, Brent Averill and others) but I also had a funny revelation. I was bouncing around in the back of Geoff Daking's van with John and fellow engineers Darron Burke and Dave Ackerman after an amazing Italian meal up in the Bronx, when it hit me: We are the new legends in the making. A lot of our readers (and writers) are the ones who are (and will be) making the amazing records. We can gush all day over the recording achievements of Brian Eno, George Martin, Roy Thomas Baker and others but we can create our own legendary work now! Everything has already been done? Bullshit! Let's go for it!

Hit record now!

Larry Crane, editor