Brian Eno Quotes

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.

By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

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

It's not about how loud you turn the amp up. That's not what makes it sound big. What makes it sound big is fooling around with different delays and reverb settings.

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

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

The voices on the record, that was trying to treat my voice like guitar players treat guitar tones.

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

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

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.

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.

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 usually create sounds and have different generators running over it. You know you can open a word-file as a picture or the other way round. I do the same with sounds.

The good thing about Pro Tools is you can actually hear what you're working on, so it doesn't just become this intellectual idea. But Pro Tools can be dangerous, too. It can make things sterile.

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.

Nothing had been attempted like that, to lift Dad's voice, literally, off of that track and put it on a brand-new one, and then line it up, match it up, get the phrasing right. I remember listening - everyone listening at the end, and we were just enthralled. It was really wonderful.

The Police could get away with doing an entire record with really no audible reverb, which I have always admired and thought would be a lot of fun to try to re-create.

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

In school, I did a lot of computer work. I'd take splices from Kurt Weill songs and loop them in bars, in beats of seven, trying all different kinds of things.

Maybe I'm just stubborn about learning new things - I can't stand learning new programs - but any sound I can imagine, I can make with SoundForge. And I'm using the old version, like 4.5 from 1999. I use it for every sound.

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 want recording to be fun.

Every time we go into the studio and use a different engineer or producer I try to look, listen and learn their approach. That has helped with the gear I look for to use live and in the studio.

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