Bill Callahan Quotes

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

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.

What really excites me is the production. I get in there and change a lot of stuff.

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

What producers did was mostly recording in the studio, so it never changed our sound just that much.

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.

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 take sounds and change them into words.

With our producer, Greg Fidelman, it was really a joy to work with him and to try different things and experiment.

It is easy to get an interesting loop to happen, but it becomes a collage when the song and loop are constantly changing.

All day long you write little ideas on the piano and the guitar, but sometimes all you have to do is come in, set up the mic, press record and start the process.

The rush of creating sounds and mixing sounds is always an interesting challenge, especially for someone like me, who doesn't know about sound.

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.

Music turned to digital, and suddenly you had the possibility to make things louder than loudest, which boggles the mind but it's true, and what you have are all kinds of different ways of distorting your music.

I do most of my vocals - aside from a couple of little one-shot vocal samples. I record everything into the Saffire with an SM58 then scratch it with loads of plug-ins. I don't do much vocoding to be honest. All my vocals are usually done with Melodyne and a ton of other plug-ins to make it sound weird.

I love recording music.

Pro Tools was invented to quicken the recording process.

To me, there is nothing better than me going into the studio with a live band and hearing those violins and that echo and that sound. I mean I loved it.

I like home recordings and studio recordings just as much as each other - I don't think one is better - but for this record I wanted to see what I could do in a real studio with real producers.

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 had the luxury of owning my own studio, 24 analogue, 48 digital, endless effects, endless hardcore gear, that I don't have to rent, I don't get stuck with the bills, it's all mine.

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool.

I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.

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.

Most of our stuff was trial and error. You live with a tape recorder, you turn it on, you play the song and you listen to it.