Interviews
By Ginger Beignets, Lisa Machac
Jordan Brooke Hamlin is multi-instrumentalist, engineer, producer, and owner of MOXE Studios in Nashville, Tennessee. Jordan's portfolio boasts collaborations with Grammy-winning legends such as the Indigo Girls and Brandi Carlile. In this conversation with Lisa Machac (of Omni Sound Project),...
Interviews
With a diverse discography that includes everyone from The Lumineers to Lenny Kravitz, David Baron has carved out a career as a key...
Interviews
I first met engineer/producer/studio owner Clay Blair some ten years ago, and we did a short interview that ended up running later as a bonus feature with Tape Op
Interviews
Nestled in a commercial building in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, you...
Interviews
I've long been a fan of the seminal punk records that Richard Hell & The Voidoids...
Interviews
We interviewed Molly Rankin and Alec O'Hanley from the Toronto-based Alvvays, and...
I first met Alan Parsons in 2004, when I interviewed him for Tape Op issue #42. We've been lucky enough to work together on Recording Academy presentations and meet up socially a few times after that. I always thought we'd have fun doing a podcast, and as it was now 20 years later it felt like a good time. Alan had also built his ParSonics Studio on his ranch in California, and a deluxe box set reissue of the Alan Parsons Project's Pyramid album was coming out soon, so we had quite a lot to talk about. Enjoy!
With roots in Toronto, the most populated and diverse city in Canada, Alfio Annibalini has been working steadily in recording, mixing, teaching audio, producing albums, and playing as a musician – currently with Rush's Alex Lifeson in Envy of None. He has an amazingly wide range of credits; from Danko Jones, to Big Wreck, to Voivod, to Philip Sayce, to the Arkells. He's a solid character and a survivor of an ever-changing music business for 25 plus years, with his skills always in demand. I first met him in 1995, during the production of the cult underground stoner/doom album SpaceJumboFudge by Sons Of OTIS. He has always long been on my "to interview" list, so I dropped him a line. Turns out he's lived in the same city I do, since 2018; the working class, musically rich-meets-gentrified city of Hamilton, Ontario, an hour west from Toronto and an hour northwest of Buffalo, NY.
In an industry where evolution is key to an artist's longevity, Damon McMahon, known as Amen Dunes, is redefining his musical journey by coming home. The self-described "luddite" – who cemented his place in the underground music scene through a series of releases on Locust Music and Sacred Bones Records, 2009 through 2018 – was actually weaned on raves and hip-hop in the suburbs of NYC. We spoke about the writing and recording process for his recent album, Death Jokes, which involved the courage to see a vision past some embedded legacy views and, surprisingly, a personal connection and comfort found working with the software Ableton Live at home.
A few years ago, my studio manager, Zach Bloomstein, needed to do a session in the Santa Barbara area, and his client hooked them up with Alan Parsons' ParSonics Studio in Goleta, California. There, he met the house engineer, Noah Bruskin, and when he returned, he told me how amazing and helpful Noah had been on their sessions. When I dropped Alan a line for our recent podcast, he told me, "I have a complete genius Pro Tools operator in the studio," and said to drop Noah a line. In an era where everyone seems to lament the lack of mentoring in recording, Noah has been able to spend years working with a master engineer/producer – a situation that is generally lacking these days, and his takeaways offer up some good insight.
I’m a faithful Trident user and have had several Trident recording consoles over the years. Trident Studios was formed by two brothers, Norman and Barry Sheffield, in 1968, with artists such as Manfred Mann, The Beatles, David Bowie, and Elton John recording there. When the studio upgraded from 16...
A 9-inch square, 32-page hardcover book, ABCs of Audio Recording is a delightful children’s read featuring a page-by-page alphabet of audio terms, with short descriptions and simple illustrations or photos. “A is for Amplifier” or “T is for Tape” will give you an idea of the content, and topics...
Kendra Lynn, our former long-term studio manager and now staff engineer at Jackpot! Recording Studio, recently gifted me with a very unique-looking (and sounding) microphone. Housed in a vintage steel can that used to contain Pittsburgh Brewing’s Olde Frothingslosh’s Pale Stale Ale (circa 1969),...
The latest release of Cakewalk’s PC-only DAW is out, and what a long, strange road it’s been. Is it called Cakewalk now? Or SONAR? Before the 20th century ended, Cakewalk began the new millennium by designing a new audio engine for their DAW and calling it SONAR [Tape Op #116]. SONAR added...
This 399-page, large format book, Historic Recording Studios: America’s Sound Factories and the People Who Made Them, is actually Volume One (A to M) of “A Scrapbook and Encyclopedia” by producer, musician, journalist, and music fan Randy McNutt. It’s an updated and reformatted continuation of his...
The Sony C37A may be the last classic tube mic without ubiquitous modern clones. There are a million variations of the Neumann and AKG classics at all sorts of price points, which is wonderful considering the continuously skyrocketing vintage market. However, until recently, there were few modern...
In a climate where it sometimes seems like a race to the bottom, with companies trying to build the cheapest audio outboard equipment they can, it’s refreshing to come across gear like Soyuz’s new Lakeside. A single channel preamp in one rack space, with an internal power supply, XLR I/O, and a...
Just as one must “settle in” to a new set of monitors, getting accustomed to new headphones can also be challenging. However, if you’ve ever sat down in an unfamiliar control room, in front of monitors you’ve never mixed/tracked with, and were able to say to yourself, “Everything sounds perfect....
A new delay plug-in, you say? I already have dozens of delays and have been pretty happy with my options – but sure, I’ll check it out. Mountainroad DSP may not be a familiar name, but it’s bound to be soon. Over the past few weeks, their Lumina Delay has become a staple in my mix template,...
Like a lot of Tape Op-ers, I started my recording expedition with a cassette 4-track. For a young songwriter, the 4-track was nothing less than a joy engine – a new way to capture ideas and shape song demos, wrapped into a studio that I could take with me that unlocked a whole new creative...
I’m a songwriter and musician who composes and records at home. Once in a while, I may bring in another musician buddy with a special skill on a particular instrument, but when it comes to recording I work solo 90% of the time. I also tend to use the least amount of gear possible; mainly due to the...
In over 20 years of talking shop with notable engineers and producers, I’d never heard one mention of Datamix consoles. But then I had a very informative conversation with a good friend who is a casual historian of vintage studio tools and brilliant designer of modern studio innovations, and I...
I was mixing the record that would never die – or at least would never go to mastering. You may have been there yourself; you start mixing, and then the artist goes to another studio and adds a bunch of tracks, and now you’re dangerously close to having to start over. Except, the client definitely...
I had ruled out mic mounts that attach to a drum’s rim after trying some in my studio years ago, only to find that they transmitted way too many bad sounds directly through the mount. I’ve been happily using mic stands since. However, I also play drums in several bands, and sometimes I notice the...
I’ve been using iZotope RX [Tape Op #123] for over a decade, starting with RX 3 [#100], and this "audio repair toolkit" has become an integrated part of my workflow on every music project I do. Most RX users are in post-production, and I can imagine why. Dealing with location sound, sound effects,...
In an effort to cover all of the bases, Universal Audio has taken some of their ever growing and uber useful line of UAFX pedals [Tape Op #159] and turned them into plug-ins. When I heard that they were virtualizing these pedals, I expected the plug-ins to appear as visual facsimiles of the UAFX...
If you asked me whether you should try this UA LA-6176 Signature Channel Strip plug-in – or any of the company's plug-ins, Apollo hardware units, or their near zero latency console-like digital workflow – I'd say, “Yes!” The UA LA-6176 is one of the newest offerings, capturing the essence of the...
I have always loved a good sounding reverb unit, one that is authentic and usable in real life mixes. I used to own the magnificent AKG BX20E spring reverb, housed in a beautiful 3.5 foot tall wooden tower made in Austria. It sounded even better than it looked, utilizing helix springs with long...
In this large format, 90-page full-color book, Simone Corelli takes on a tutorial ride through iZotope’s RX audio restoration app and plug-in suite, and is updated for the current RX 11 [see review this issue]. With Avid recently offering up the simplified iZotope RX Spectral Editor with all Pro...