Born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and the musical force of Staten Island’s Wu-Tang Clan, RZA (Robert Fitzgerald Diggs) is easily one of the most revered and gifted producers of his generation....
Allan Taylor, John Wood, Dave Mattacks, and Pat Donaldson at Sound Techniques, recording Cajum Moon's self-titled LP, Fall 1975. If I look at my record collection, there are so many favorites...
Having produced classic albums for Nick Drake, Richard & Linda Thompson, R.E.M., and Toots and the Maytals, amongst others, Joe Boyd [Tape Op #60] is arguably the most renowned, living, roots...
Linda Smith is a pioneering figure in the bedroom pop genre. With her introspective lyrics and DIY approach to recording, Smith's lo-fi sound was first captured in cassette releases in the '80s and...
@ Scovil Productions, Norwalk, CT Jeff “The Jedi Master” Jones has been an engineer and producer for music and films in New York City for over 40 years. Starting out as a teenager in...
While I only casually follow British music magazines like The Quietus and Uncut, their frequent championing of the band Lankum caught my eye, and upon hearing the 2023 album, False Lankum, they...
What happens when you combine the rhythmic backbone of Fugazi veterans Joe Lally (bass) and Brendan Canty (drums, Tape Op #12) with the soaring heights of James Brandon Lewis’ sax, and douse...
After the internet came along and made sharing of information easier, I noticed an interesting trend. Maybe it's because of that misguided impulse of "doing it the right way" that beginners attempt to...
Pulsar Modular never seems to disappoint when it comes to unique and colorful designs. I’ve always kept it pretty simple when it comes to EQs. I have one main software plug-in that is surgical...
"Wow, I don't feel like I'm listening to headphones. They sound so open" were the universal reactions from mastering engineers at Infrasonic Sound and students at The Blackbird Academy that I...
I’ve been a longtime user of Applied Research and Technology (ART) hardware, as have most of my engineer friends with home, project, and professional studios. I remember many of my early-2000s...
There are so many choices when it comes to studio monitors these days that I often forget that one of the original names in that space is JBL. For years, JBL was the monitor found in many of the best...
Maybe it was my childhood fascination with The Ventures, but I've always been a fan of spring reverb devices in the studio. I have four rack-mount spring units (Demeter [Tape Op #21, #109], Benson...
I’ve loved everything Soyuz has made so far and own many of their mics, but ambisonics seemed like an odd direction for them. When Soyuz announced the 013A Ambisonic Mic, I began doing more...
Here's another new plug-in that comes included with McDSP's APB ("analog processing box") units (APB-8, APB-16 [Tape Op #134]). In case you don't know what APB processors are, they're 8 and 16-channel...
If you’re of a certain age (mid-40s/50s), you probably remember sifting through and being raised on the records of your parents and/or siblings. Such listening sessions probably included the...
half light is Mitchell Schneider and David Riddle. Taped Spaces is their first full plug-in (they’ve also made some Kontakt instruments), but they’ve been playing music together for over a...
I recently discovered that my mixes sounded a bit thinner than I wanted because of a buildup in presence frequencies (4 to 6 kHz). Looking for a cure, I turned to Baby Audio’s Smooth Operator...
I’m nearing the end of a search for a new monitoring setup in my small home studio (aka spare bedroom). I fell in love with the ADAM Audio A7Vs [Tape Op #153] and a matching subwoofer Sub10 MK2...
The boxy, rectangular shapes, light grayish-white painted bodies, and contrasting black windscreens of the new dynamic microphones in Universal Audio Standard Series – SD-3, SD-5, and SD-7 with...
A pocket DAW app for your iPhone? Sure! Songzap is built for creating and capturing song ideas. Professor Rob Toulson and Dr. Mike Exarchos developed this app, and Rob wrote the excellent book Drum...
In the fall of 2023, Baby Audio acquired Denise Audio, a company with an awesome line of deceptively-simplified plug-ins. Motion Filter is their reworking of Denise's The Sweeper, a digital motion...
Touted as “a new kind of psycho-acoustic compressor,” PSP Flare can apply a huge amount of compression to a stereo or mono source, and do so without immediately veering into nasty...
Billed as a "Spectral Dynamic Stereo Width Maximizer," the SideMinder Max plug-in works on stereo tracks to adjust the width of a signal at different frequency ranges. I reviewed the original...
In Tape Op #143, Dawn Landes interviewed Linda Perry, one of the most successful producers and songwriters of the last 30 years. In this documentary, Don Hardy captures Linda in action, writing and...
Drum-specific mics have been around for some time, but innovative companies such as Lauten Audio are still finding ways to improve them. Recently unveiling the Snare Mic [Tape Op #159] to bring out...
ARC Studio is an easy-to-use acoustic room correction tool, and one of my favorite recent studio upgrades. Set up is relatively simple; while it does require a computer for the calibration, once...
Subtitled "Vintage Electronic Musical Instruments," this is a treat of a book. From 1977 to 1981, Dr. Tom Rhea wrote 52 columns for Keyboard magazine called "Electronic Perspectives." In an era...
I was extremely excited to see Audient – the British audio manufacturer that makes everything from budget-conscious USB interfaces to large format recording consoles – debut the ORIA...
Well hell, let’s face it – who doesn’t love a good sounding 1176? It’s one of my favorite compressors! Everything – vocals, guitars, bass, drums, percussion, and sax...
