J. J. Cale Quotes

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.

I started recording in my sophomore year in high school. I recorded things on my cell phone in my basement.

Nowadays you can record on your laptop with Pro Tools, which I do quite often.

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 intrigued on how music is made, that's how I started getting into it. Of course I've been in the booth before, just joking around to see how it is, and I'll make a couple of beats here or there and help my artists out. But other that, I'll stick to listening.

At the beginning of this album I discovered the computer and had great fun playing with the thing. And I realized that, not being a good keyboard player, I could write things in very small sections, give them a certain feel and mess about with bends on the keyboard.

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.

With technology now, you can go in and sing a song, and for $100,000, you will sound flawless.

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

Today, computers help us making the music. It's really a tool.

Pro Tools was invented to quicken the recording process.

I was a sound engineer. That was my day job when I started writing.

When I started working on my own music, I didn't have the chance to record in a big music studio, so I had to record everything myself.

Today, it's very tempting to create songs by cutting and pasting in the studio.

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've been so entwined with technology since I was about 15, recording myself and multitracking and producing things on my own.

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?

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.

I'm sure I'll go back again and record in the digital process.

I write the songs, go in and record them, then I listen to everything and decide how it all fits together.

Having the facility to have this multitrack at home, I could try experiments with sort of all of the instruments, giving them different treatments so they didn't actually sound, necessarily, like the instrument itself.

It's a very interesting thing because I can start mixing a song and leave the room and come back and maybe just slide one lever to a certain point, and it just - it's a certain feeling that it gives you when you know it's right.

Once a song is done, for me, personally, it's usually two or three days to get the mixdown.

I've been more and more into production lately, and I really, really love that. I love recording.