The name Jim Scott has graced many excellent albums since he made his debut as first engineer on Sting's The Dream of the Blue Turtles. Artists as varied as the Dixie Chicks, Wilco, John Fogerty, the...
On a beautiful day in early March, Oz Fritz showed up at the door of New, Improved Recording — a studio I co-own in Oakland, California. He had been hired by multi- instrumentalist/singer...
Though he's the first to tell you that he's still finding his voice, Mike Odmark's sonic signature had arguably begun to rear its head by the time he made his first attempt at recording an album....
From the first moment another engineer raved about a Little Labs DI to me, I knew that this company was onto something special. It turns out Little Labs is Jonathan Little, a man who lives and works...
Oz has also made his own record, entitled All Around the World. It is an audio document of sacred spaces, capturing their acoustic and consciousness-altering properties. It is also the creation of new...
In the fall of 2008 I was hired to help build a temporary home studio in the California coastal town of Bolinas, where Devendra Banhart was planning to start tracking a new album. I was excited...
I was sitting in my studio working on a mix session recently when it hit me — there were certain pieces of recording equipment that I tended to avoid. Over the years we've tried to weed out gear...
Back in 2003, I reviewed the VersiPanel roll-out wall (Tape Op #36), a freestanding partition made of LDPE (life- preserver) foam-core "runners" covered in heavy-duty fabric. I purchased two of them...
Even though I finished a review of more than 80 small-diaphragm mics last summer (Tape Op #72), I'm still discovering and testing SD mics and expect to do so on an ongoing basis -probably for the rest...
Before you read F. Reid Shippen's review below, let me first explain to you why I chose a Monitor ST/SR system for the client theatre at The Station, a NYC-based video production facility that I...
Steinberg Nuendo has been my main DAW for a couple years now, and during that time, both Nuendo and its sibling application Cubase took two minor steps in version number, but with each update, I was...
For me, "perfect rooms" are boring. I like to hear the walls bounce and the floor shake. Spaces with character change the way we perceive both the music we love and the music we make. Unfortunately,...
The last chapter in the "Jitter Saga" has yet to be written. But the penultimate chapter has just been written by Grimm Audio, who have challenged the most sacred concept -the commonly-held notion...
Stylus RMX has been on the music scene since 2004 and has been and continues to be a "go to" tool for good reason. There simply hadn't been anything before it that could manipulate real audio files on...
feature offers huge flexibility for tailoring dynamic rhythms or accents to really fit the mood of the composition; and using the grooves as a MIDI template, it's easy to substitute the triggered...
In my composition work, I have spent countless hours assembling a virtual orchestra using a variety of libraries and numerous MIDI channels for each of the individual instruments that make up each...
Strings are notorious for being the least life-like patch in any sample library, and as of a couple years ago, I believed that I would never work with a realistic string sample without taking out a...
