Mike Gordon Quotes

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 really like iZotope Trash, which is a great plug-in for distortion, as is Ohmicide, which I love. It's an absolutely crazy multiband distortion, compression, EQ and filter, which pretty much lets you do anything.

I really love the EMS Vocoder 2000, which is a pretty nice little box. You put one thing in one end and another in the other end, and you're able to change vocals by the sound and do a lot - it's just got a great sound. But the thing is, it's a bit clunky, so it's kind of hard to use it.

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.

Well I think effects are tools.

When the Grateful Dead needed a quality sound system to deliver our sonic payload, I learned electronics and speaker design.

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

I don't believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that's dishonest. For example, I'm not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don't, what you hear is pretty much what I sing.

What is auto-tune? I don't even know what auto-tune is.

We are always fortunate to have our own sound folks with us that do a great job in ensuring that everybody can hear and the sound is good.

Different boards do different things to the sound that's coming through them. An old Neve desk does embellish it in a way that makes it sound sort of bigger or warmer. It doesn't change the performance but it does enhance the way that it sounds.

The human voice sounds thicker with a chorus and reverb than a dry signal.

All you have to know is mathematically how many times to scratch it and when to let it go - when certain things will enhance the record you're listening to.

I'm pretty much fully digital. I've basically spent a few painstaking days putting sounds into my laptop, just banking them, because I love playing, and I love visually seeing it on my screen and being able to change the sounds more, with different plug-ins. I've created my own synth sounds.

When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily manipulate that in different ways. It is what it is.

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.

I like to use effects, but a lot of the time I just can't deal with these tracks with all these artificial sounds.

The Auto-Tune makes everybody sound the same and takes away all of the emotion because you're singing through this machine, and of course your taking all of this emotion out of your voice for the most part.

I don't see anything wrong in using auto-tune.

It doesn't matter if one is live on-air or sitting through a commercial break. There aren't any on or off switches on a lapel pin microphone; it is always 'hot.'

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

Well, I don't really use MIDI that much. But I do record audio around me a lot, and just layer it up and see what effect it has, without any aforethought.

I'm not the most technical producer, so the weird mixes and blown-out sound happen naturally.

I bought an audio technician mic and Pro Tools SE, the demo version and was recording in the basement.

Time has changed and artists release more songs in a short span of time and that's where the auto-tune steps-in. One doesn't have to record a song multiple times to make it better.