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...
For 25 years, I have owned and run a commercial business, Jackpot! Recording Studio, in Portland, Oregon. During this time, I have developed a set of particular ideas of how to present my studio...
I do a fair amount of one-on-one remote "teaching," many times working with folks running small studios, as well as a wide range of home setups. It's always fun to face this educational challenge, as...
I’ve been fairly obsessed with Promises, an album by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra that came out in 2021. Maybe "obsessed" is a strong word, but I put it on...
My recording career did not begin in a professional studio. It began in high school, with a pile of cassette decks, cables, homemade oscillators, Casio keyboards, and cheap microphones strewn...
I sat down to try and write an End Rant describing how to know when a mix is done, and then I became stuck. Everyone’s experience with this can be different, so I dropped a line to some...
Somewhere along the line, when working on any recording project, there are points where the "real work" needs to be done. Real work, to me, is the time where intense listening skills are brought...
Photo by Roman Sokal, courtesy of Audio Crowbar Dynamics. Having recently spent more time working on the Tape Op Gear Reviews section of this magazine, one thought keeps creeping into my mind and...
In 1975, Brian Eno [Tape Op #85] and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt published their first set of Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas. These cards work as creativity resets,...
"No drum machines were used on this album!" "No synthesizers!" These liner note proclamations were, for a time, a "cool" way to indicate a declaration of purity. But bands like Queen, who made these...
After receiving negative feedback regarding her release, a talented artist I’d worked with dropped me a line. Apparently a random critic of her album had declared that “the song was...
When producing a record one of the main tenets I follow relates to how I get others to use their ears, brains, and – most importantly – their emotions when they listen back to...
The recent sale of Bob Dylan’s one-off recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind” for $1.7 million dollars has left me reflecting on a very different way of evaluating art and...
