Interviews
By Alex Kostelnik
Bob Moog, inventor of the legendary Moog synthesizers, is a friendly, down-to-earth man with a sharp wit and a sense of humor. He's practical, too — while interviewing him I moved his plate to make room for my mic stand on our table and he looked alarmed and said, "Wait! I'm going back...
Interviews
Pauline Oliveros ranks among the most innovative composers of the last 40 years. Her creative exploration of improvisation and acous...
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Recording music is often a challenge of doing the most amount of work within the shortest...
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Engineers are good at spreading information about recording techniques. In fact, most love...
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Equalization is a powerful weapon — something that can easily be abused and overused. We...
David Minehan played guitar, sang and wrote songs for the Boston punk band The Neighborhoods from 1979-1992. After the 'Hoods he played guitar with Paul Westerberg on the 14 Songs tour and even filled in for Brad Whitford of Aerosmith. At his Wooly Mammoth Sound Studio in Boston, which he shares with musician/producer Dave Westner, he has recorded many great New England artists including Scruffy the Cat, Salem 66, Gang Green, The Freeze, Mark Cutler, The Figgs, The Shelley Winters Project, The Gentlemen, Lucky 57, Jabe, The Kickovers, Asa Brebner, Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, Natalie Flanagan and Willie "Loco" Alexander and the Boom Boom Band.
While listening to mixes at his new Chicago studio, Jay Bennett rolls his own cigarettes, then smokes them with a Hunter S. Thompson-style filter. "It's a good prop," he says. "I have a certain mad scientist reputation that I have to uphold." Bennett earned that reputation largely during his six years as a member of Wilco. Not only is Bennett talented at playing guitar, keyboards and virtually any other instrument he touches, he is also an engineer and producer, with a knack for fixing electronic gadgets. Bennett took on some heavy recording duties in 2001, during the making of Wilco's album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, documented in the film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. He co-wrote eight of the eleven songs with lead singer Jeff Tweedy, played various instruments and co-engineered the record with Chris Buckley. Bennett says he was wearing "too many hats," causing tensions that culminated in Tweedy asking Bennett to leave. Out of Wilco, Bennett wasted no time teaming up with Edward Burch to record The Palace at 4am (Part I), taping much of it (120 tracks at times) in the basement of Bennett's home in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights. Over the past year, Bennett has recorded music by the Sun, Staggered Crossing, West of Rome, Brie Stoner, Mark Eitzel, Oh, the Stories We Hold by Anna Fermin's Trigger Gospel and others, while releasing an acoustic version of the Bennett-Burch album, Palace 1919. This spring, Bennett moved his Pieholden Suite Sound studio into an industrial loft on Chicago's northwest side, where he shares space with producer Alex Moore. Bennett is in the midst of several musical projects: a new solo album is out (Bigger Than Blue), a limited-edition Bennett-Burch tribute to the music of Rockpile, and an album with Michigan singer-songwriter Dave Vandervelde.
In issue #28 we interviewed Jimmy LaValle, the man behind The Album Leaf, about his home recorded instrumental albums that we really enjoyed. Now Jimmy has had the opportunity to record his new album, In a Safe Place, in Iceland at Sigur Rós' studio with input from the band themselves. What a lucky guy. We sat and listened to the record as I picked his brain.
While Tape Op has covered countless recordists with low-budget, grass-roots backgrounds in rock recording, we've talked to very few grass-roots engineers in the avant-garde music world. Russell Frehling, who now runs the house studio at Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Space, is one of the most experienced. He's done everything from recording punk bands to the Jim Carroll Band to developing underwater sound fences for dolphins with Greenpeace in Japan, and his own creative pursuits involve large-scale sound installations. He's best known for his avant-garde recordings, and it's this experience that's led to his role in Oliveros' nonprofit foundation and its studio.
E-MU's last product entry for the PC audio-interface market was five years ago. I don't know why they stayed away so long, but they've returned with a line of well- integrated, all-in-one desktop audio production systems with professional-grade specs and functionality. The 1820M is the flagship of...
One of the joys of doing this mag is checking out recording gear from small companies that are just starting out... and doing so before anyone else! Bob Starr is connected with our friends at Zero Return Studio in Atlanta, and he's building some hot new equipment, with much brainstorming with...
This is such an ingenious, useful, and simple product that I'm surprised nobody came up with it earlier. But Auralex continues to figure out new ways to make acoustic foam useful in the studio, so it's no surprise that they were the ones to bring this to market. The Xpanders kit is made up of two...
Back in early 2002, while I was reviewing another acoustic drum instrument plug-in, I had what I thought was an epiphany. Why not design the instrument's interface so that it resembles a fully-mic'ed drum kit; with which one could not only fine-tune each piece, but control how each mic is used in...
Not too long ago, Samson Audio decided to enter the realm of low cost/good performance audio equipment with the introduction of their line of C Class processors. Amongst these stackable, half rack sized units are the C-Valve mic pre and C-Com-opti compressor. The C-Valve is a tube mic pre that...
Seasoned readers of Tape Op will recall that I purchased one of the first Sony DMX-R100 mixers four years ago and felt that it was the first digital console I'd used that didn't compromise "the sound." (See the review in Tape Op #25.) Before that, I owned a Panasonic DA7. I've also had extensive...
The DPS-R7 is part of the single-rackspace series that Sony manufactured in the early 90s. It has 100 factory presets and room to store 256 user-created settings. The front panel has a scroll knob, several buttons for programming, a green backlit LCD, a stereo input-level meter (nice!), a...
The DPS-V55 was released in the U.S. around 1996 and came in two flavors: the DPS-V55 and the DPS-V55M, which included a front panel mic/line jack. Both models are 2U-rackmount, quad-DSP boxes that can function as a four independent mono processors, two independent stereo processors, or as a...
Over the last five years, quite a few DAW controllers have come onto the market that offer up such features as motorized faders, shortcut and transport buttons that give direct access to commonly used production functions, rotary virtual pots for pan, EQ and the lot... but, I've yet to see a...
Hey kids, a convolution reverb is a big word that means this is a reverb that has actual sampled (IR Short for impulse response) spaces in it. That's right, instead of suffering with digitally-modeled reverbs like we have for years (though a few are kinda cool!), we can now use the sound of actual...
After reading John's review of various software samplers in the last issue, I thought I'd give my opinion as to what's happening in the soft-sampler scene. NI touts Kontakt as the most advanced software sampler ever, and I am inclined to believe them. Here's why. Having used most of the competition...
I recently updated my Logic Platinum installation to Logic Pro 6 and wanted to mention some of the additions and improvements (besides the slicker-looking graphics). One major new feature is the Project Manager, a way to keep all of your sound files and samples organized. Project Manager makes life...
Recording drums has always seemed to be more of a hassle than recording other instruments. A lot of this can be attributed to multiple microphones, phasing, etc. One area of recording drums that has always been the biggest pain to me is keeping the drums in tune. This problem is even worse if...
With music production moving to DAW-centric recording and mixing, the monitor controller is one of the fastest-growing hardware categories in Pro Audio. Providing monitor volume and switching along with talkback and much needed utility functions like dim, mute and mono, the monitor controller...
Sometimes I get sent a piece of gear to review that I think I don't really need, and then once it's in use at my studio, I don't know how I lived without it. Apogee dropped me a line asking if I'd like to review their Mini-DAC after I found myself in love with (and keeping) their Rosetta 800 (see...
These two virtual instrument plug-ins are the two best simulations of a real instrument that I've seen and heard to date. Although Walter Sear might disagree with me, both of these simulations do a very credible job of recreating the classic sounds of the original instruments. They're even endorsed...
The PEQ1 is a Class-A, discrete mic-preamp and equalizer that can be used as a replacement module in vintage Neve 80-series consoles. For those who don't have an 80-series, a 19'' rackmount version of the PEQ1 is available (with controls rotated 90 degrees). Despite the inevitable comparisons, the...
Gary Garritan, owner of Garritan Orchestral Libraries, has just released Garritan Personal Orchestra (GPO), a full orchestral software-sampler program for $249 plus $15 shipping. Now that's news, especially when you consider Garritan Orchestral Strings sells for $694, Vienna Symphonic Orchestra's...
I recently got to try out M-Audio's new large- diaphragm condenser mics. The two are well constructed and moderately priced (though not as dirt cheap as the many bargain-basement Chinese condensers out there). The Luna mic is the simplest of the two. It has a fixed cardioid pattern and lacks the...
I seem to recall Steve Albini saying something at one of the TapeOpCons about how he wished there was a box that could turn the hi-hat down on a drummer's kit. Well, since he doesn't use Pro Tools, he won't be able to use Transmod, which, among many capabilities, will do exactly that. The Transmod...
Over the years there have been many devices that have claimed to recreate room ambiences artificially, which is not entirely untrue. Yet it is to be noted that most of these devices have more pages to go through than an encyclopedia, and by the time you have dialed your parameters in, you have...
The UAD-1 card is a PCI card that uses an onboard DSP engine to run high-quality plug-ins on various DAW systems without taking a big hit to your host computer. When I first saw the card demo'ed a few years ago, I was extremely impressed, and I couldn't wait to get one. I ended up buying one of the...