M. Ward Quotes

My dad used to do a lot of music when he was young, so he had an 8-track MiniDisc recorder, and when he realized that I was getting on with it, he brought it upstairs to my room and showed me how to record and how, once you finished eight tracks, you can cut it down to two and have another six tracks to play with.

'Brace the Wave' is an acoustic-electric record recorded with electricity on analog-digital and digitally-analog equipment.

I'm from the pre-Pro Tools era where you had to meet up with the artist and go over things if you wanted to record a track.

To me, finding sounds, or even recording, is a compositional process. The studio is kind of an instrument.

I got a new 4-track cassette recorder a year or so after high school. For a while I would just stare at it thinking, how am I going to do this if I don't play guitar or keyboards? How am I going to write and record a song if I don't know how to play any instruments? I mean, I played the violin, but I didn't know anything about how to work a 4-track.

I'm always most comfortable in the studio. It's my comfort zone. I love being there, and I love making records.

We spent a lot of time on that record with the sound and recorded it on the Paramount sound stage which is this huge room where the sound is reflected but the reflection is so late and comes from so far away that it doesn't blur the music but gives you a room nonetheless.

I think a lot of musicians play for the playback. I mean, that's the joy of recording - you want to hear what you've done and what you've contributed - but never listening to that playback kind of removes the intellectual part of making music, and it removes the tendency to be revisionist.

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 learned so much about recording and about singing on records from Ken Nelson.

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

I had an apartment on Long Beach Blvd and San Vicente in Long Beach, California. That was the apartment I done 'Regulate' in. I had all my equipment set up in the bedroom, a vocal booth in the bathroom and in the closet, and that's where we created it. I had an MPC 60, a Numark mixer, and a Technics 1200, and a ton of records.

You can do a lot to shape the feeling of a song by the way you record it.

I think that songwriting changed when groups started spending more time in the studio.

In those days I don't' think they were even demos.

I have a recording that I did of instrumental songs.

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.

Another thing to do with the blues is how they were recorded. They were done on the quick, and some of that stuff was made on wire, not even tape, let alone digital.

I still love making records, and I'm able to do it because I own my own studio, and I try to do it as much as possible.

We recorded 'Chopper City in the Ghetto' in a house that we was living in.

A lot of times, when you record something, the album becomes less about the music and more technical.

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

I think probably the first time I recorded anything was mid-2010.

I like tweaking the studio and wiring things up almost as much as making music, so that's kind of a hobby of mine, in and of itself. I don't like to collect gear that I know I'm not going to use, though.

I'm very aware of what, say, electric guitar recordings in the '60s sounded like.