Grandmaster Flash Quotes

Our job as producers is to make the music sound as good as possible.

My very first records, I was very interested in how you get the particular quality you want out of it, and I began to learn about the engineering and aspects of production and things very early on. I got hands-on with the process and taught myself how to engineer, as opposed to just being a producer who asked the engineer to make it sound nice.

I try to listen to a lot of music when I'm in the mixing process of a record, when I'm in post-production and trying to get everything to sound a certain way.

I think anyone who knows the audio process knows what mixing and mastering is.

Darrell is really good in the studio. I mean, he has a real working knowledge of how the process works, and what sounds good coming back over tape, and how the stuff works together.

I am a sound freak. I could play around with sound forever.

The tracks on 'Sleep' were recorded live to 2-track. I did a fadeout or two of them, but that's really it.

I don't think we'll ever use the same sound techniques.

I don't believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that's dishonest. For example, I'm not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don't, what you hear is pretty much what I sing.

When I listen to a record, or when I'm making a record, I listen to everything. I listen to the drums, the bass, the voice, the arrangement. I listen to the whole piece as an ensemble.

Producing is getting the performances, tracking it, making sure all the parts are there. Mixing is when you take the finished work, and you make sure all the levels are right. It's putting all the parts together.

I'm not somebody who can tell if the song is good enough to be pushed until I hear what it sounds like after all the bells and whistles are put on it.

I think I make good beats, but when it's not mastered correctly, it can definitely make it sound like it's not a good beat, and that has been an issue sometimes with me in the past.

A lot of times you'll hear bands and it's a different sound coming out than what's on stage. Because you can clean it up through a PA and make it sound completely different than what they really sound like.

No compression or as little as possible - that's how you get a good recording.

I am such a gearhead. In my recording studio, I personally engineer and edit everything on computers.

It's harder to make real audio than special effects audio.

It's big production. It's huge. It's using studio technology to your benefit. You don't go in and play live and then just take the tapes and get them mastered. You have to create.

The actual producing, mixing, and mastering is hard work, harder than what I do.

Bobby is really the one who did all the editing on that stuff. And he did all the mixing. I particularly like the record we did with Logic because Scott Harding did a great job mixing it. He's really a killing engineer.

We're so used to everything being properly manicured, like you can hear every footstep in a movie, you can hear every bit of dialogue, and everything is in its place.

I'm not really a knob-twiddler. I always work with an engineer; I'm not super hands-on when it comes to mixing boards and computers. I'm much more about what I'm hearing and what it needs to be like. I deal with songs and ideas and instruments.

The studio that we mix in is still in Chicago.

I think I have a basic sound aesthetic that is in most of what I do.

But really important, perhaps most important is the craft; how you make your record, the creation of these sonic worlds you want your listener to hear.