Jim Root Quotes

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.

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

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've always been interested in what happens in the studio.

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.

I realized I liked being in the studio and working on translating the ideas into recordings.

Now, you can just get a laptop, get some software, put a microphone on it and make a record. You have to know how to do it. It does help if you've had 35 or 40 years of experience in the studio. But, it still levels the playing field so artists can record their own stuff.

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've been in the studio environment since I was young, so I know what to expect.

Sometimes when it comes to music, effects or sound engineering, it is difficult to achieve what you want within a fixed time frame.

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 went to school for audio engineering, and I was around a lot of sound engineers over the summers in New York, so I'm pretty comfortable in engineering my own stuff.

I like being in a recording studio. I like watching a song go from the simplicity of the original music.

I knew absolutely nothing about recording. I had this four-track recorder, and I'd plug my electric guitar right into it, which sounded real bad. I moved any fader that made a drastic change in sound. I thought that was cool - that it was communicating something. I didn't have the skills to do anything subtle. It was just like screaming.

I've got the recording process down, and I can knock it out very quickly.

Well, I've been recording myself on a computer since I was about 13 or 14. So it's completely entwined with my creative process. Essentially, it allows you to make music that's better and smarter than you are, by using your ears to lead the way.

One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music.

The studio part, to me, can be pretty laborious. You're inside for hours on end and can be pretty frustrating to get the sound you hear in your head to come out of those speakers.

I had this fascination with four-track recorders when I was in high school.

If you're working on a computer and you're editing bass, it looks like a warm curvy, sort of feminine object.

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

I love the magic of the studio.

Pro Tools was invented to quicken the recording process.

For my second record I had gotten ProTools (program) and started to familiar myself with hard disc recording.

Writing in the electronic world, you imagine a sound, and then you have to go and find it. It's not like imagining a flute and then making that sound materialize. That's easy!