Woodland is the name of Gillian Welch and David Rawling’s studio in Nashville, and it’s also the name of their new album. On Woodland, the duo continue to show their deep connection as collaborators. The album has a wide open sound that features their seemlessly blended and intimately recorded vocals, and the light touch of a backing band that includes drums, bass, pedal steel, banjo, and airy strings on tunes like "What We Had" and "Hashtag". "Lawman" and "The Bells and the Birds" have a lovely somberness, and the album as a whole has a "live off the floor" feeling to it that we hear less and less of these days. Woodland will stay in our "recently played" column for the forseeable future.
We interviewed Gillian and Dave back in 2001 for Tape Op #85.
Tape Op is a bi-monthly magazine devoted to the art of record making.
Check out Ross Healy's VICMODBLOG on analog modular synths. He interviews "people who build and sell modular gear and forgotten electronic musicians." Cool stuff.
Here’s a fun and upbeat track from an unlikely collaboration between John Legend and Sufjan Stevens. Check out the first single “L-O-V-E” that features Legend’s wife Chrissy Teigen and their children along with Sufjan...
I don't want to explore this concept with as many words as I might for a Tape Op "End Rant", but I had to dump this shit out of my mind immediately. Someone dropped me a line recently; "I'd like you to hear this record I worked on. We didn't use EQ,...
by John Baccigaluppi
We recently did an interview with producer Larry Klein that will run in an issue of Tape Op in 2020, but here's an excerpt about a recently-released project he worked on called Beyond Music.
A couple of years ago, these...
Dear Tape Op Readers,
As you know many of our family, friends and colleagues on the East Coast have been hit hard by Hurricane Sandy last week.
Led by Ken Bogdanowicz of Sound Toys, several of our advertisers have joined together to help raise...
I dropped by Powell’s City of Books last night to say hello to Daniel Levitin and hear him talk about his new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine. I interviewed him in Tape Op #74 way back in 2009. There’s a lot of...
Here is a list of some of the books on recording and music that we have added to the reading (or re-reading!) queue recently.
Are We Still Rolling?by Phill BrownGreat studio session stories about The Rolling Stones, Talk Talk, Hendrix, Led...
Tape Op Magazine’s founder and editor, Larry Crane, has been mixing songs and albums for people from all over the United States and the world for over 20 years. Many of these sessions are unattended, and here’s a glimpse into his...
This past September, I attended the inaugural A3Exchange in Boston and had one of the most enjoyable conference experiences in years. A small team of forward thinkers, under the leadership of Paul Sitar, is putting together an "exchange" for...