Jerry Harrison Quotes

Now with Pro Tools, you can play with layers and 100s and 100s of tracks. When we used to do it back in the day, you had one shot, or you would have to wipe it and carry on over that track.

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.

When you use some of the more modern recording devices and Pro Tools, when you get into the technology, you are aching to get into some territory.

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.

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.

Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop.

Pro Tools was invented to quicken the recording process.

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.

At some stage in the process, most mainstream pop records are being manipulated and possibly completely rebuilt on a computer, with a visual program.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

I could wake up six in the morning, go downstairs and record. I learned how to use ProTools and everything. Whenever I felt it, I could record.

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.

Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.

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?

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

There's a lot of trickery that can go on in the studio, and there's a lot that one can do - none of which I am interested in even slightly. I mean, you can actually tune vocals and stuff like that, but it's so hideous, I can't believe it.

Pretty much all the programming on our CDs is done by me personally, so I've kind of been able to have complete control of what sounds I'm looking for to complete a song.

I think everyone uses Auto-Tune.

I like to work with a combination of analog and Pro Tools. I love the sound of analog tape, but there's so many things you can do with Pro Tools that would be incredibly difficult and very time-consuming with analog.

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.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

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.

You don't have to be a good musician if you've got certain computer skills.

I love, love, love just being hands on at all times in the studio.

I'm actually pretty good with computers. I use computers when I'm working on making and producing music, so I do know a thing or two!