Interviews
Eddie Kramer: Recording Hendrix and teaching future engineers
By Alex Kostelnik
Eddie Kramer worked humbly with the students of Terry Setter's Advanced Audio Engineering class at The Evergreen State College...
Article
Digital Mixing
I recently finished recording and mixing a five song EP that, for the first time, I transferred into a computer and mixed digitally...
Interviews
Universal Audio
By Eric Broyhill, John Baccigaluppi
The 1176LN and the LA-2A are two examples of classic compressors which use very different...
Interviews
Unwound: Their Haunted Home Studio
By Dewey Mahood
On an unusually cold and rainy Pacific Northwest winter day I found myself driving up I-5...
Interviews
Plaid: Beyond Techno?
By The FezGuys
Plaid might be most well-known for their many remixes, especially those for Bjork and...
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
AUGUST 8, 2025 INTERVIEWS
Phill Brown: Are We Still Rolling?
We interviewed Phill Brown in issue number [#12] of Tape Op. Over the years he's worked with some of the greatest artists ever, like Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Traffic, Spooky Tooth, Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin, Robert Palmer, Bob Marley, Steve Winwood, Harry Nilsson, Roxy Music, Stomu Yamash'ta, John Martyn, Little Feat, Atomic Rooster, and Talk Talk. This is another excerpt from his (still!) unpublished book, Are We Still Rolling?URL Last issue: Phill worked on Robert Palmer's Pressure Drop. –LC
AUGUST 8, 2025 INTERVIEWS
Universal Audio
When Bill Putnam, Jr. mentioned to me that his brother Jim was in the Radar Brothers, it didn't really sink in 'till a few minutes later. When it finally did, I rudely interrupted him and Eric with a loud, "Oh, that Radar Brothers!!" and screwed up the interview for a few minutes over my enthusiasm for the band. Their last CD, The Singing Hatchet, was one of my favorite discs the year it was released. When I heard it was done in a home studio, I was impressed yet not surprised, as it made perfect sense that the laid-back vibe of the CD could only come from a home studio or a humungous recording budget, which didn't seem likely. Think of the best, more melodic moments of early Pink Floyd and you're not too far from the Radar Bros. sound. Later, I had a chance to talk to Jim about his band, studio and Universal Audio.
AUGUST 8, 2025 INTERVIEWS
Universal Audio
After a pretty damm good surf session one fine sunny day in Santa Cruz, California, my friend and fellow recording engineer, Eric Broyhill and I stopped by the Universal Audio offices to talk with Bill Putnam Jr., who along with his brother Jim, revived their father's legendary company. Eric wrote the interview and I took photos. All I have to say is that Bill's a very gracious and inspiring guy, but if he thinks he's gonna sit in his office next time we come through town he's mistaken. We're gonna drag him into the ocean and make him surf.
COLUMNS
GEAR REVIEWS
Gear Reviews
ADP-1 Professional Active/Passive Direct Box
How do you review a DI box? Here's what we did. We set up a passive DOD 265 DI ($20), the Raven Labs ADP-1 ($349) and Avalon Designs Ultra 5 Direct ($1450) in a row, all patched into the same mic pres and coming up on the mixer at the same volume (the Avalon's tone controls were off). Then we could...
Gear Reviews
Cubase VST 32 Version 5
There are quite a few different recording programs available now, and they're all really pretty amazing. It would be hard to say that one is drastically better, or even different, from another. I think it comes down to personal preference and learning the details of each package enough to decide...
Gear Reviews
D2424 Hard Drive Recorder
Last year saw the introduction of several competing 24 channel, 24 bit stand alone hard drive recorders from Tascam, iZ Technology (Radar), Alesis and Mackie. As all of these units sound good and perform a similar range of functions, it's difficult to choose between them. The first question you...
Gear Reviews
E-A-R Earmuff
Quicker than inserting earplugs (and waiting for them to expand). Bright red and big - they're hard to lose. Put them on like headphones and walk into any tracking session without fear of blowing your ears. Great when you're setting up mics, and the band is warming up. Peltor even makes a belt clip...
Gear Reviews
Evil Twin model 90 tube direct box
I've been a fan of the Evil Twin for several years. This is a great, warm tube direct box. You might wonder about the questionable extravagance of an $850 direct box. Well if you think of it as merely a DI you might be right, but you'd also be limiting your purview. You can use the Evil Twin to...
Gear Reviews
FATSO Jr model EL-7
FATSO is an acronym for Full Analog Tape Simulator and Optimizer. When digital multitracking first became affordable, it took only one session using 16 tracks of ADAT to convince me that I didn't want a digital multitrack in my own studio. Last year, I found myself returning to the world of digital...
Gear Reviews
MK 219
Russian microphone manufacturer Oktava has been around since the 1950s. The MK 219 (a.k.a. MC 219) has been one of their most known and respected models for quite some time now, and is considered a staple in many studios, especially in England. The MK 219 is a solid state large-diaphragm condenser...
Gear Reviews
MoogerFooger-102 Ring Modulator
I gotta say I LOVE Bob Moog's MF102. I got one when they were first released and I have used it on something on every project since. I've had the best luck using it as a mix effect on shakers, hi-hat, piano and on the repeats of an echo. Set at the lower frequencies, it does an amazing tremolo...
Gear Reviews
MPX-500 Effects Processor
We recently installed a MOTU/Macintosh hard-drive recording system into our studio. While some of the plug-ins sound pretty good, the reverbs generally leave something to be desired. Or, if they sound good, like Unversal Audio's RealVerb, they use a lot of the computer's CPU and processing power....
Gear Reviews
MX-60 Front End One
I've had this in my studio for a few months now but didn't have much chance to use it until recently. To be honest, one of the reasons I didn't use it much is because I have several other mic pres/compressors that cost quite a bit more than this one and that sound really great. But once I finally...
Gear Reviews
Opal DPR-944 2+2 compressor/gate
Many of us don't have the means to afford a rack full of processors to do all the things we need to do as practitioners of our field. So instead, we end up making compromises, oftentimes buying gear that is capable of performing more than one task, but not necessarily with the fidelity or control...
Gear Reviews
Platinum MixMaster
In my living room studio, I mix on a Sony DMX-R100 digital console feeding my 24-bit Alesis Masterlink via a digital link. Therefore, I don't have much of a need for an analog mixdown processor. Occasionally, I have clients that want to mix to analog tape to "warm up" the sound. That's when I fire...
Gear Reviews
Radar 24 digital hard disk recorder
Twenty-four bit recording is here, and now it nearly approaches the beauty of analog! I recently had the pleasure of test-driving the newly improved Radar 24 System by iZ Technology. The basic system (24-track, 24- bit hard disc recorder) lists at $4,995, and features a Celeron 667 with 132 Megs of...
Gear Reviews
Refillable Duster
Instead of paying big bucks for prepackaged air check out the ReAir refillable air sprayer. With about ten strokes of a standard bicycle pump, you've got a canister full of compressed air to blow crap out of crevices, patchbays, tape head assemblies, disk drives, etc. When it runs out, just re-pump...
Gear Reviews
Seek Wah effect pedal
All right, this thing is really cool. Sadly, it's also very expensive and is an extreme example of a "one trick pony." But what a trick, man! The Seek Wah sends your signal through a series of envelope filters. There are eight tiny pots so you can control the sensitivity of each filter. There's a...
Gear Reviews
Vortex effects processor
In 1993 Lexicon came out with a couple of effects processors, the JamMan and the Vortex, that seemed to be here one moment and gone the next. The former is an incredible looping delay, possibly one of the first of its kind, and the latter was a stereo "audio morphing" effects processor. I first...