Mike D Quotes

Being in a recording studio is a very different feel from performing onstage. I mean, obviously, you can't just go in and do what you would do onstage. It reads differently.

The late '70's and early '80s is the zenith of a certain craftsmanship in sound recording.

I loved the idea of recording. The idea of sound-on-sound-recording captured me as a young kid, and once I realized what it was I had an epiphany. Before I was even playing the guitar, I would create these lists of how I would record things and overdub them, like Led Zeppelin song, 'I could put this guitar on this track...' and so on.

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.

Sometimes when I do an overdub solo, they'll keep four or five of my attempts and then mix the bits that they like to make a solo up out of them. It's not against the rules, really - I can learn my own solos, then. But that's the whole beauty of multi-track recording, isn't it?

I always say that when I was recording with Phil Spector, he would not let me really sing, you know? And even to make me sound younger, he would speed the track up. He still wanted that real nice, little, quiet, sweet little sound.

I certainly considered DJing. I bought four vinyls, and I bought some turntables, and I was like, 'Um. Yeah. I'm not gonna do this. This is not my thing.'

I got on a bit of a rollercoaster looking into how Herbie Hancock used to make his tunes, and I remember a picture of Jean-Michel Jarre at one of his concerts and seeing the Memorymoog. When I heard the sound it I was like, 'Arrrgh, I really need that.'

I've got a studio at home, and I'm always recording.

We record a lot of our shows, we record our soundchecks.

When we was making a song called 'Bring Da Ruckus,' we took the snare, and we put it in an elevator shaft and recorded it.

I use Logic or Reason and a midi keyboard for beats. If it's gonna have all live instruments in it, I'll probably use Pro Tools and have the band lay stuff down.

You can call me a beat-maker, but I'm a record producer.

We rarely write in the studio. Everything's already completely arranged before we go in. That way, we can really focus on getting the recording right.

When synthesizers appeared everyone was a composer suddenly.

When I first started recording music, I was actually singing about microphones, equipment, recording.

A lot of bands, they take a lot of planning to do a live record. They have to hire a crew, and they have to have a recording truck and all this equipment, and they record every single show.

The sound system influence is undeniable in hip-hop, in jungle, drum and bass, now EDM.

It's amazing how well real strings blend with metal, like that whole sound.

I'm doing bass trap; I'm doing EDM songs.

I think it goes back to me being a recording mixer and engineer. Because of all the technology now you can make music yourself and a lot of people are doing that now. I started out doing that a long time ago and I found when I did that I came up with a unique sound.

I don't really look at dubbing from a singer's shoes.

I got FL studios; I looked up how to make beats and how to record myself, and then I just started making music from there.

I had a boom box with a dual cassette deck and a mic, so I used to make pause tapes. I think a lot of people started like that because it was all I had. I would just take rap records that I liked and just loop the beat by pressing pause and record and make, like, five minutes of these beats.

I write on the acoustic guitar, I write some on the piano, but I've been messing around with these guitar pedals and drum machines, educating myself in that world.