Interviews
By Larry Crane
A few years back I was turned onto a book, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. This excellent tome undertook explaining music, how we perceive it, where it comes from and what it means to us. And, maybe not surprisingly, the book's author, Dr. Daniel Levitin, had spent...
Interviews
The audio business is deeply personal for me, as it is for many of us. When I first met Leslie Ann Jones in 1991, I was thrilled to...
Interviews
Going into the studio as an artist, there's nothing I look for more than magic. When producing someone else's music I get...
Interviews
As we wind our way through the crazy world of recording music and learn more, sometimes...
Interviews
Ken Hirsch has had a varied career in live sound, studio recording, product support and...
Akai Professional and Ableton have co-developed a new comprehensive MIDI performance controller for use with Live versions 7 or 8 (Tape Op #72). The APC40 introduces a new breed of USB-MIDI devices (joined now by the just-announced Novation Launchpad) specifically designed with a proprietary...
Over the years, there have been a variety of tried-and-true compressor/limiter circuit types. For example, VCA was used in the classic dbx 160, FET in the UREI 1176, electro-optical in the Teletronix LA-2A, and, less common these days, diode-based, which had been employed in the 1970's by...
TASCAM has a new entry into the increasingly crowded handheld recorder market -the DR-100. This new unit has a number of clear advantages over TASCAM's less expensive (and slightly less bulky) DR-07 and DR-1. First impressions? This is a solid, tough-looking field recorder with metal casing which...
Dana Gumbiner and I both took on Logic Studio for this issue. Dana's opinion follows mine. -AH When Apple unveiled Logic Pro 8 (Tape Op #63), the high-performance audio engine that was the highlight of the previous version was still there, but the application bore the evidence of a major facelift,...
A good pop filter for cutting vocals is one of those easily overlooked tools in the studio. Often an afterthought, a good one makes a great mic even better -and an average mic sound okay. A crappy pop filter makes an amazing mic sound crappy. Why screw up your several-thousand-dollar microphone...
ART's Pro VLA (Tape Op #37) is one of the best compressors ever made at its price point. You can pick one up new for under $400. It's an electro-optical compressor with a 12AX7 tube gain stage. You could call it the poor man's stereo LA-2A, but the funny thing is, lots of engineers who can afford...
I don't think I've ever started a mic review by introducing the accessories first. But given the innovative design of the shockmount included with the sE4400a, I can't help but get that out of the way so I can then move on to telling you what a great buy the mic itself is. Most shockmounts surround...
When people come to me to record, I always have guitars and amps that I know sound great mic'ed up and ready to go. Guitars have to have great tone, playability, solid intonation and -if I can achieve it -noiseless operation. Telecasters are one of my favorite guitars, yet can be torturous when it...
Germany-based Vertigo Sound's first product to market is the VSC-2 Quad Discrete Compressor. The quad part relates to the four VCAs within the VSC-2 and not the number of channels it can process, as this is a dual-mono unit. Having two fully independent channels obviously makes it a candidate for...
One might think that Cakewalk's latest hardware collaboration with Roland is the little brother of the V-Studio 700 (Tape Op #72). After all, it comes with a new, "light" version of Cakewalk's signature DAW -SONAR VS -and instead of the full complement of Cakewalk's top-of-the-line synths and...